Richard E. Rainwater (born 1943) is an American investor and billionaire fund manager. With an estimated current[update] net worth of around $2.5 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the 163rd richest person in the United States, and the 368th richest person in the world[1]. He has been profiled by John Train in the book Money Masters of Our Time.
Rainwater is a financial dealmaker from Fort Worth, Texas. The son of a wholesale grocer, he graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in mathematics and earned his MBA from Stanford Business School.
After business school, he landed a job as an investment banker, but soon accepted an invitation from former Stanford classmate Sid Bass to manage and diversify the Bass family portfolio. Rainwater became the chief financial architect for the Bass family investments. He was given $5 million to invest during his first year and managed to lose it all. He then sought a more methodical investment strategy by speaking to investors like Warren Buffett and Charles Allen, Jr., while also studying the work of Benjamin Graham and David Dodd.[2] After that debacle, Rainwater sought advice on more qualitative investing and his investments began to take off, according to "Wall Street's Best-kept Secret," a cover story that appeared in the October 20, 1986 issue of Business Week. Rainwater eventually transformed the Bass family fortune into $5 billion. He is reported to have amassed $100 million for himself during that period, which he later used as seed money for his own fund.
Rainwater has been an independent investor since 1986, investing in more than 30 companies and purchasing 15,000,000 square feet (1,400,000 m2) of office space in Texas. Fortune magazine described his investing style as "analytically rigorous but opportunistic and Texas-sized in its audacity."
He founded or co-founded firms including ENSCO International Incorporated, an oil field service and offshore drilling company in 1986; Columbia Hospital Corporation in 1988; Mid Ocean Limited, a provider of casualty re-insurance in 1992; and Crescent Real Estate Equities, Inc., in 1994. He has been called a "capitalist cowboy for the '90s, leading the way into new frontiers of finance."
Rainwater is married to financier Darla Moore.
Betting on peak oil
Beginning in the late 1990s, when petroleum prices were near historic inflation-adjusted lows, Rainwater began taking long positions on petroleum futures. He was influenced by reading Beyond the Limits, the sequel to Limits to Growth.[3] Over the following years, he read further about peak oil, including books such as The Long Emergency by James Kunstler, and online discussions.[3] Rainwater took positions in financial markets that effectively amounted to betting with peakniks and malthusians against cornucopians, somewhat like a reprise of the famous Simon-Ehrlich wager, except on a much larger scale. The oil price increases since 2003 have made these bets pay off handsomely for Rainwater.[3]
While remaining guardedly optimistic against the worst-case scenario predictions of doomers, Rainwater sees the peak oil phenomenon as a grave threat, and seeks to call attention to it.[3]
References
- ^ Forbes.com
- ^ Bancroft, Bill (1989-06-11). "A Texas Power Play". http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DEEDF163FF932A25755C0A96F948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all. Retrieved 2008.
- ^ a b c d Ryan, Oliver (2005-12-26). "The Rainwater Prophecy". Fortune (magazine). http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/12/26/8364646/. Retrieved 2008-04-01.
External links
- Forbes 2006 ranking
- "The Rainwater Prophecy," Fortune, December 26, 2005 - extensive profile of Rainwater
- "Sitting Pretty," Fortune, June 11, 2001
- "Midas Touch Was Billionaire's Gift to Bush," The New York Times, October 30, 1999
- Stanford University - prominent alumni page
- "Will the Oil Bubble Burst?" Time, June 5, 2008
- "Rainwater's Oil Bet," Time magazine, 2008
- "Time to bet on an oil crunch," Fortune, October 1, 2008
- "Rainwater's Single Worst Investment," BusinessWeek, March 14, 2008
- "Richard Rainwater: The invisible man behind one of the year’s biggest deals," Texas Monthly, September 1996
- "A Texas Power Play," The New York Times, June 11, 1989
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