Part One: H.L. Hunt: The First Elon Musk

terms of modern money. And he was kind of the first of the right wing, like these ultra rich right wing guys to make pushing his own opinion in politics by taking control of like or building media organs deliberately to force his own opinion on public He was the first of these super rich guys to really do that, or he was part of the first wave of rich

guys that did that. And he was the biggest, like of this first wave of generally like post New Deal super rich you know, multimillionaire billionaire oil guys who are are funding right wing politics. He was the guy who was kind of best at it. But he was also the guy who was only interested in forcing his own politics on people. Like he didn't want to talk to any other people on the right, He didn't want to make friends. He just wanted to create media organizations that

would push his politics on other people. He's a very weird dude. And his name was H. L. Hunt. Also some people think he killed jfk hmm. So have you heard of this guy?

farming family. His early years were marked by a lack of formal education, as he was homeschooled and never attended public or private schools. So we're off to a good start already, right, Like, this is a dude who and that's not a weird upbringing for the time, really, but it is kind of weird for him because his other like brothers and sisters aren't all private schooled. So Hunt was a pretty prolific writer of letters to the editor

and of ads in the Yellow Pages. So we do get other bits of his history if you're willing to dig deeper, that go a little further than that. In the nineteen sixties, he wrote this in an ad published by the Tennessee And so this is him trying to connect with other members of his family. My grandfather was Waddie Thorpe Hunt, freeing his slaves long before the war began. Waddy Thorpe Punt migrated to Serchie County, Arkansas, stopping en

route to make a crop near Lookout Mountain. He formed a company of Confederates in eighteen sixty which included his son. He was killed in eighteen sixty four by Cantrill's guerrillas. So that's him talking about like his grandfather, right, Like, that's the family patron. And I'll tell let you know right now, he's the only one who says this guy freed his slaves long before the war began.

about his confederate at grandpa. Is that right after being like, hey, does anyone know you know my grandpa wants anyone else related to whom I want to connect, he goes on to like say, I want to exchange you know, family history with relatives quote and present them with three of the HLH alo Vera Cosmetics that's his private cosmetic company, and a list of stores in the area carrying HLH Cosmetics.

And the remainder of the ad is a plug for his cosmetics business and his right wing radio show, which I find I just found very funny that he's like, I want to connect with my family, but I also want to use this space in the newspaper to get people to buy my cosmetics right wing skincare company.

there probably means there's something else interesting there. And I can only find one biography that was written about him, which was the book Kingdom, and it's actually it was published after he died, and it's actually a biography of his whole family written by this hardcore libertarian author named Jerome to Sill, and I think to Sill was a fan of Hunt. He certainly wrote a history that I would argue portrayed Hunt pretty close to how Hunt saw

himself a lot of the time. Although he does he does include more of the warts than I think would have, but he clearly like has this degree of like awe in this man for being such a great businessman. It's hard for me to tell how like real this biography is because to Sill, again, he's like a guy with an ideological bent that he's trying to get across in

his books. And his biography of Hunt includes all of these verbatim conversations about conversations that would have happened in like the eighteen hundreds, and this book was written in the like one hundred years later. And I'm like, who did you talk to to get the transcripts of these conversations? You must have just made that up or you listen to something that like these people's grandchildren said is how the conversation went. So you have to take a lot

of this book with a grain of salt. Right, it's getting like.

kind of a very funny guy. You should know in terms of evaluating how much can we trust this biography that he was an early hardcore libertarian activist, although not entirely the bad kind. He got like politically activated for the first time in his life because he was disgusted by the draft in the Vietnam War, and he staged a walkout protesting the war at the Young Americans for Freedom Convention in nineteen sixty nine, which is like good, yeah, yeah.

In nineteen seventy one, he published his first book. It usually begins with iron Rand, A Libertarian Odyssey, which is a book about how he went from an angry, lapsed Catholic looking for a new religion to an objectivist libertarian. Although he also kind of makes fun of iron Rand in the book too, because she believed a lot of crazy shit about sex that he does not on board with. Right, so he's like some about her, but like makes fun

of her too. He wrote of his feelings in the time for the moment, I considered myself uniq alone and courageous individual who had found the holy grail after years of floundering. That's how he reacts to reading iron Rand for the first time. A lot of guys like that, Unfortunately, like.

This is back when the libertarian movement was a little more complicated than it's going to become in the Trump years, So that's positive. In nineteen seventy four, to Sell ran for governor of New York on the Free Libertarian Party ticket. He only got like thirty thousand votes, and he needed fifty thousand to get the party a permanent place on

the ballot. The Times notes of his election campaign. On the campaign trail, he's distributed to sell bills, fake dollar bills that he assured voters would be soon worth more than the real thing, given the country's ruinous economic policies. He arranged for a woman in a beige body stalking to ride through Central Park like Lady Godiva, on a horse named Taxpayer. So he would have loved creating. You would have loved like Jerome to Sill. You would have loved bitcoin to.

so I suspect his grandson made all that up. But he does talk about the fact that Watty created a volunteer cavalry militia to support the Confederate cause, which should tell you all you need to know about the man's politics. However, there is an interesting discrepancy between what hl Hunt came

to believe and what to Sill Rights. In his biography, to Still claims that Captain Hunt was quote shot to death near his farm by Northern Raiders, but in his letter, Hunt says he was killed by Cantrell's guerrilla fighters, and Cantrell's Raiders were a pro Confederate partisan group of bushwhackers that actually this is where Frank and Jesse James get their start, and Cantrell's Raiders, now it would they definitely killed a lot of Confederate farmers too, because kind of

by the end of the war they were just raiding, you know, like they're.

more like rooted in potatoes than marijuana. He's a fascinating figure because his life and his son's life kind of perfectly embody the evolution of American conservatism from the Civil War up to like the modern era, through like the political realignment of the mid twentieth century. Because you have like the Republican Party, which is this like radical progressive force in the country that then becomes like the Conservative Party over a period of time. Right and his family

really embodies that very well. In eighteen sixty four, before the war was over, Hash took like, after his dad gets killed, he moves up north and he takes an oath of allegiance to the Union. Per the book Kingdom, up North was where the money was. Hash told his family the South as they had known at all their lives was finished. It would not rise again for fifty years at least. So you see, this is a family the number one never gives up on like the racist

things that led them to support the Confederacy. But Hash is a very pragmatic guy. He's like, the Confederacy's not winning the and I want to be where the money is. Like, I'm not going down with the ship. Fuck that my dad did.

is going to be ahell hunt. Our Hunt's mom. Tusill's book claims that she quote was descended from an old Huguenot line, and she deported herself with a certain aristocratic air, not unworthy of her birth line. Now that's an interesting, weird use of the word deported by too soil there I've never heard. I think he meant to write comported, because I don't think deported actually works that way. But it made its way into the final copy of the book. So they're like, we're just.

Haroldson la Fayette. Given that he has the same name as his father, Hash, he was nicknamed Junior and the family soon took to calling him June or Juni. So as a boy, he goes by June or Juni because he's got the same name as his dad, who goes by Hash. Now, the Hunt's five hundred acre farm was productive and supports the family well, but how well it supports them is kind of hard for me to say to sell rights that they quote just managed to scrub

out a meager living. But we also know that by the time Hash dies, he gives his all eight of his kids pretty significant inheritances. That suggests they're actually doing very well. Now, maybe I don't know how long it takes them to be doing very well, but certainly by later in his life they're like upper middle class, right, if not rich. It's a little hard for me to tell that.

of Fayette County. He ran as a Republican, which is a major shift for the son of a Confederate volunteer who'd fought against the Union himself. Hash becomes the first Republican sheriff of Fayette, although not the last. He settled into a pattern of spending a week or so in Vandalia, the county seat, and then heading home for a few days to tend his farm, which was now primarily maintained by his wife and older sons. If Tusill's book gives an accurate account, hl Hunt or Hash was not a

pleasant man to have as your dad. Quote Hash Hunt would storm through the house sipping a bit of his own homemade corn whiskey from a jar and thundering to anyone with an earshot. His views on the world, on the hard times that had spread through the nation like a Pestilen's, on the politicians who had brought these conditions about, and on the bare living he was able to scratch out from his farm and his share of salary. So they've got kind of right wing talk radio in the

form of their dad. He's just like a drunk rush Limbaugh complaining about how hard things are while he makes a lot of money.

he was brilliant from a young age. Hunt purportedly learned to read before he was three years old, and as one writer phrased, it, was clever with numbers from a very early age. Now I suspect these claims are a mix of the truth and some myth making. Hunt is, as an adult going to be an almost supernaturally gifted card counter. He is, legitimately, and there's enough evidence that we know this isn't myth making. When he sits down to play poker, he wins. Right, He's got like a superpower,

like he's he's incredible at it. And he's also just His business career shows he's really good with money. He's good at like counting up sort of risk analyzing risk versus like the odds of profit and loss in his head, making snap decisions that wind up being very accurate. So I don't doubt that he's a math genius. I kind of doubt he was full on reading before the age of three, uh, but he probably was precocious. His sisters adored him, and in general, the women and his family

paid close and doting attention to the boy. Hunt would later complain of his family's poverty in those years, but the Hunt family were an objectively better shape than their neighbors. The eighteen eighties played host to one of our nation's many regular back before the Great Depression and then afterwards, when they like changed the way the banking system worked in significant ways. We used to have depressions a lot more regularly. Right.

This creates a miserable situation for Ella, and she tries to distract herself by obsessively caring for her youngest son, Juni. Per the book Kingdom, Juny was her pet, her baby, and he looked to her for refuge against this strange, violent man who filled him with terror every time he entered the house.

a terrible marriage by obsessing over her youngest son. This comes to a head with Junie, who again is the future richest man in the world, was seven years old. Hash came back early from a trip out sheriffing or something, and he stumbles on to what had become something of a secret between Juni, his mother, and the world. Quote. Standing on a milk box in front of her as she worked the dough, the seven year old Juni had

his face upturned as he suckled her naked breast. Now, Hash had heard stories from James, the oldest boy still at home who was working the family farm, that Ella Rose was nursing juny longer than was natural. Hash dis missed those stories at the time, having preferred abolishing the thought to facing something that seems shameful and repugnant to him. So that's a bit odd. Seven's late, it's giving.

And this is where we get one of the first instances of Dusill's book, presenting us with an incredibly detailed conversation from a moment he absolutely could not know about in any real detail.

Let this be the end of it, you hear, I'll listen to no pale excuses. This has to end at once. Hash's word was final. Ella Rose never exposed her bosom to her youngest son again, whether out of fear of her husband or out of her own shame was never explained to young June. The boy came to hate and resent his father all the more for taking from him what was the most important thing he had known so far,

his intimacy with his mother. Hash tried to assume a more active role in family affairs from that day on, but the effort was a hollow one. His heart simply was not in it. So young Ahl is not going to pick up any good lessons about this. Number one, This is kind of like a weird intimacy that's probably bordering on unhealthy, if not has crossed the line into unhealthy.

But the fact that his dad then screams at him and takes it away is even worse and makes like this guy is gonna have so much miny family related issues, and one thing he's going to learn is that families are better off without husbands.

sink cartoon into with this motherfucker. We're gonna get You don't tend to see this story mentioned in most other articles on the Guy, with a notable exception of one of my major sources for this, which was a chapter from Heather Hindershot's great book What's Fair on the Air, which is about Cold War era right wing broadcasting. She devotes a chapter to Hunt, and she writes this that he had nursed at his mother's breast until the age of seven, was a point of pride, further evidence of

his innate specialness. Normal rules didn't apply to him, he reasoned. So that's based on He would talk about this moment like journalists and to his kids, and he was proud of it because again he develops pride in being different from everybody else, right, not subject to the rules. That's also a very important I'm the eldest boy.

sneering and resentful taunting. The girls regarded Junie as their own special pet as well as Ella Rose's. Right, so that's probably not bad. You know, your sister's kind of babying the youngest kid. But again, this is all going to sort of feed into his I am a special person complex, which isn't gonna be ideal for everyone. Hunt also enjoyed a close relationship with his older brother Leonard, who he idolized and who loved him back. Tusill is one of the people who will argue that this homes

that his homeschooling education was quite good. Ella Rose teaches her youngest son Greek, Latin, French, and German, and when he starts reading at age three. It said that she gives him issues of the newspaper so that he could learn what was going on in the world. Now, again, some of this has got to be myth making, but to still claims that Hunt quote gained a reputation throughout the region as a child genius, despite the fact that

he never attended the local school. Now what's odd about this to me is the fact that Tusylvin adds his entire education was received from his mother and from his sister's readers, which he devoured when they came home from school. So again, his sisters and brothers get to go to school. Yeah, and it sounds like he doesn't because he's too smart and his mom wants to homeschool him. Is at which is really weird and different and also is going to

make him feel very special. I did look through Hunt's FBI report which claims that and that there's a reason why he's got an FBI report, and it includes claims that Hunt was known in the areas being able to memorize a page of pros in two readings by the time he was in the fifth grade, and that that was the end of his schooling. So that kind of suggests he does go to a public school for a while, but everyone else says he didn't. So I don't know what the truth is.

that he's so smart is not without its downsides. Per the book, Kingdom, hash Hunt was not nearly so impressed with his names mental agility as others were, and right from the beginning, Young June had problems with James. You think you're better than the rest of us, don't you, James badgered him incessantly when they were alone. You think

you're smarter than we are. Now again to still relates like a page long argument between him and his brother that sounds more like a cheesy screenplay dialogue than a real conversation. There's even a part where his big brother says,

you're a mama's pet. That's all you'll ever be. Just like you just write that in you if you're a hack screenwriter, And then you transition immediately to him like as a young adult trying to get his foot in the door at his first business or something right right, It's like he.

skilled outdoorsman. He works with his brother in the family business on the farm, and he proves his worth by using his skill with numbers to benefit everybody and improve the family business. After summarizing all this, too, So gives us another absolutely made up claim. He was growing into a handsome young man, the best looking of all of his brothers. And he's still's gonna say a lot of weird stuff about how sexy this guy is. We'll talk about later. That's kind of a through line in his

other biographies. I don't know why it's a stand. To me, he's a stand. He's the ultimate stan.

constant frustration is alleviated by a miracle. The US declares war on Spain in eighteen ninety eight and Jameson lists, which gets his ass out of the home and gives June some breathing room for the first time in his young life. Well, the future richest man on Earth nears adolescence. His father uses the by now considerable wealth and clout that he'd amassed to start a small local bank, the

People State Bank. Weirdly, his oldest son, Robert, who had moved out of the house by this point, starts a separate bank to compete with his dad's bank, which says a lot about the family dynamics that isn't spelled out in this book. But you don't do that if you have a good relationship with your dad, create a spite bank. A spite bank, a bank just despite your father.

to go out into the world and make something of himself. Previously, he'd been content living at home and being doted on by his sisters, But at age twelve, he runs away from home for the first time, and he doesn't go far, and the way that Tusil describes it, he's motivated less to escape forever than just he wants to get away for a couple of days and see a little bit of the world before he comes back. He just kind

of wants to ramble. And you could kind of do that as a twelve There's not like a CPS going around to make sure everyone's twelve year olds aren't running around right in the rails, like nobody cares in the government at this point in time.

properly at home. On occasion, he had hooked up with a gang of them and slept in teenage hobojungles around open campfires.

like one. He leaves in the spring of nineteen oh five, and he first hit Saint Louis, where he gets a job on a railroad. He takes odd jobs to get from Kansas to Colorado, and then he heads up towards Utah, where he gets a gig watching a car load of sheep on a train ride to California. As soon as he gets to California, he falls in love with it, like all sensible people do. Although being a libertarian, to still has to write this in the grossest way that

he can. He found California much to his liking, especially the lust blonde beauties who appeared as plentiful as the succulent fruit that grew in this golden, sun soaked land. And no, I gotta tell you this is based on what Tusill thought of California in the eighties. In nineteen oh five, California isn't like the center of like a massive, world renowned entertainment industry. It's like a place some people live in are farming and stuff.

eventually a financial writer. In the nineteen eighties he started writing books on investing, and then he launched a series of biographies. Kingdom is one of them. Another, written in nineteen eighty five, was Trump, The Saga of America's most

powerful real estate baron. This is the first published biography of our current president that track I didn't know that that makes sense heard of the New York I'm going to quote from the New York Times here denied access to his subject, members of his family, and most of

his associates. Mister Tussill relied heavily on newspaper and magazine accounts to produce what Michael Stern, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called a g whizzard of a biography that points a key to mister Trump's career his ability to turn political friendships, tax abatements, and government loans into opportunities for profit, Which does sound like an accurate descriptive kind of how he made his money. But also it shows like that's kind of his sources. He found

some newspapers and magazine accounts. Maybe he talked to a couple guys about Hunt who knew him. But a lot of this is just him kind of filling into blanks to make this exciting. And I know I'm spending way longer in these episodes about Hunt talking about his biographer than I should. But everything I find out about Jerome Tussol kind of drives me crazy. His other I look to do his bibliography and his other books. His most famous book, one of them is he wrote a history

of black soldiers in the Spanish American War. That's like super anti Teddy Roosevelt, and it's apparently a pretty good book. He's not like a crypto fascist or anything. But when I saw that he made a Trump biography, I got this, like I decided to look into that a little bit, and I just started doing some word surges because I was like, does he is this weird? Him calling a Hunt hod a lot? Is that like a pattern in his books. I'm going to read you, yes, Yes, Princess,

it is. Here's a paragraph from his book on Trump. Fred Trump was still tall, and that's our president's dad. Fred Trump was still tall and slim at sixty seven, with a full head of dark, graying hair, handsome in a nineteen forties movie star way, sporting a swept back pompadour and a dark, pencil thin mustache. Indeed, he looked as though he might have stepped out of an old movie starring Barbara Stanwicker Joan Crawford, the mysterious charmer, faintly dangerous.

Donald as tall as Fred, both men standing a couple of inches over six feet, handsome, clean shaven, with only a hint of a poudy sneer crossing his lips.

I didn't read through the book, so maybe he just used different words to talk about murder being hot anyway, This is a pointless diversion, but I had to do it. Sorry you.

to Sill chalks U up to his photographic memory. In essence, Hunt is someone whose brain just automatically starts card counting, like he doesn't even know what he's doing, right, but that's just how he his head works, and so he just always wins when he's playing poker. Hunt is able to live comfortably in a fleabag motel. Is a card shark.

And you know, after some period of months of this, to Sill treats us to another deeply uncomfortable paragraph about Hunt, like he invites this prostitute into his room and he's so good at sex that she falls in love with him, Like he wins the heart of a prostitute for being really good at fucking.

so we have to flee town. And he winds up like leaving fucking San Francisco for Reno, and he tries out for a minor league baseball team but that doesn't pan out. But while he's away, there's a horrible quake in San Francisco and the hotel that he'd been staying and collapses. So June becomes convinced as a result of this that he's someone special and that the universe has

marked him out for a purpose. All of this is just really reinforced that he is the special boy of history, right, That's how this man grows up feeling.

it's sold for. It was a crazy amount. So anyway, I don't know how much credence to give the whole I was so good at sex that like a magical prostitute saved my life by helping me escape an earthquake. Thing that's not I can believe that, Like he left a hotel in San Francisco and not long after there was an earthquake, because that earthquake did happen, and a lot of stuff was destroyed by it, and a lot of people had the experience of a week or two earlier,

I was in the hotel that collapsed. Tons of people would have had a story like that. So it's very possible. And it's just a thing that happened to hundreds and hundreds of people because that's how hotels work. And he takes from this, I am special and marked out for greatness. Right, So one of the other things that we see in Hunt, you know, in the early days, he has this growing belief that he's special, and he also has a fundamental

distrust of his fellow man. Not long after all of this Brujaja with San Francisco and trying out for baseball and Reno, he's like, Gozies, I think he's in Arizona. He's in the Southwest. He's working like with a bunch of day laborers, and there's like white day laborers, and there's a group of Mexican day laborers and they have separate camps because it's the nineteen it's like nineteen o

six or something that's a little seven. And he he goes over along with some of the other white workers to play cards with the Mexican laborers one night, and Hunt just wins everything. He takes all of these Mexican guys money, which winds up to like four grand everything they have in the world. And so the other white dudes. The longer he wins, they start leaving to go back to their camp because they're like, hey, hey man, or hey Hunt, maybe you want to go. You probably don't

want to take all these guys' money. This seems like it could get dangerous, so they leave, but Hunt does it. He can't stop playing cards when he's playing cards, so he doesn't stop until he's taken all of their money, at which point he realizes all of his friends are gone and he gets like scared, and he basically takes the money and runs off into the bushes because he feels like he has to hide from the Mexicans, even though as far as we know, they never go after

him or try to hurt him. All of the evidence suggests they took their loss fine and they didn't like threaten him. He just is sure that because they're Mexicans, they're going to try to kill him to get their money back, So he like hides in the bushes, and then he tries to, like, in the middle of the night hike back to the camp with his friends. But when he gets back there, he's like, wait a second, how well do I really know these guys. They're definitely

going to rob me. They know I have all this money, they might kill me. So he has a panic attack and he like hides and camps out in the woods that night, and then like goes just leaves quits the job and hikes off into another town, basically because he doesn't want to be near where anyone knows that he's won this money. Quote from Tusill's book, how could he trust these brawny strangers who knew he had made a

killing that night? What was to stop two or three of them from jumping him in his bunk, leaving him with a knife between his ribs, and slipping off with his winnings. So you've heard of being the most special boy, right, there's this deep distrust of other people that again, at no point, and he so just writes this like, of course he was reasonable to fear that these Mexicans were going to kill him, But at no point is there

any evidence that they threaten his life at all. I do want to emphasize that this is all entirely something he decides. So he makes his way to South Dakota, where he meets who, to Sill's book, describes this as the best friend he's going to have in his entire life, A dude named Steve, no last name provided now to still insists that this is the best, the c closest.

know otherwise why t still would insist it. But they only know each other for like a few days, maybe a few weeks, and the main thing, the only story we get about their marvelous friendship is that one night Hunt beats Steve at cards and takes all of his money, which is like two hundred and sixty bucks, and he feels bad about it, so he's like, hey, man, you don't have to pay me back, and Steve is like, no, you know, I made a promise. You know, this is a this is a bond I owe you, and I'm

gonna pay you. You know, don't think anything about it. And then Steve sits down and has like the fucking ben Affleck conversation with his friend where he's like, you need to leave here. You got to go to college. You're too smart to keep you know, working like this, right, And so Hunt is like, you know what, You're right, Steve, and he leaves off to go to college. And they never see each other again. And that is the greatest friendship of his entire life.

He goes home. He's around eighteen now when he finally makes his way back home for the first time since he'd left, and he stays at home for a while, but then he sets out again with his brother Leonard. This time they go out to like work in the Northwest together and make money. But Lynyard gets sick with tuberculosis, you know, and pretty soon he can't friend of the pod tuberculosis and he can't keep up with his brother, and he has another. He still has another, like heartfelt car,

you know, Leonard is liked his brother. Look, you got to go on without me. I'm too slow. Don't let me stop you from achieving greatness, basically, And so Hunt goes up to Canada, right, And he's working in Canada in nineteen ten when he gets a telegram that his brother is has just died. Lenyard has died, you know, of his tuberculosis. So Hunt heads home for the funeral, and he stays at home for a few months. And

while he's there, his dad dies too. Right, So point hl Hunt is like eighteen nineteen, you know, he's no longer going by junior. And after his dad dies, he inherits five thousand dollars. He doesn't get the land. Someone else gets the land because he's not living at home. But he gets like a nest egg of money and he takes this and he adds it to the money that he's saved up it from working as a card shark, and he decides, I'm gonna stop wandering. I'm gonna make

real money. And in order to do that, I need to like invest in something, and I want to start a farm. Right, His Dad had always talked about how much better the soil was down in the South, and how oh, if only we lived in Arkansas then we'd

really be doing well, you know as farmers. So Hunt moves down south to Arkansas near the end of nineteen eleven, and he's gonna buy a farm and he's going to invest in, you know, the set next part of his life, and we will get to that and what happens later and how he becomes the richest man on earth in part two, Princess, how you feeling?