#338 Monty Moncrief Texas Oil Billionaire

**David Senra** (0:00)
In 1978, Monty Moncrief was 84 years old.
He was still very much the patriarch of his clan, the man who made the decisions in his family and in his family's business.
Family and business were in fact the same thing with him. The desire to found the one being inseparably tied to the desire to found the other. When speaking of his business, he never mentioned himself specifically. He would always say, we signed this deal, we figured out what was best. This is a we kind of business, he explained. We don't tolerate any of that I stuff around here. In Texas, in the oil business, one sees as nowhere else that the ideal of capitalism is the ideal of founding a family and conferring the right of inheritance upon it, passing a legacy on.
We're oil men, Monty Moncrief would answer when asked about ranching or about real estate or about anything else. We're oil men meant that anything which extended beyond the realm of oil was not a proper Moncrief concern. We're 100% family owned, unincorporated, and independent, and we intend to stay that way. In the world of oil promoters, one sometimes meets with independents who have bought and sold their way through six or seven businesses, who indeed start those businesses with the aim of going public and selling out as soon as possible. To Monty Moncrief, such a strategy is unimaginable. Moncrief oil is synonymous with himself, his dynasty. Continuity is what his blood demands.
He was, at the age of 84, as big and as strong as a bull. He possessed the directness and the utter simplicity of the old and truly great. He walked without a stoop, and he carried his large frame without a trace of fat. He seemed impervious to age or to changing times.
His unquestioning confidence in the worthiness of his enterprise made him seem impervious as well to the doubts and the questions about motives and meanings that inevitably beset the later generations of his family. He kept his faith in the absolute value of building, of progress, of getting things done. When he spoke of his belief in the enterprise of producing oil in America, one could almost forget that he had made hundreds of millions of dollars doing so. Such benefits sounded almost incidental to the task of settling the land and mining its resources.
Perhaps this confidence is what set free the huge energies of this first generation of giants.
The stories told about Monty Moncrief all reveal him as tough, canny, given to understatement, a man of action who wastes few words, but can, when he wishes, move mountains.
That is an excerpt from the book I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is Wildcatters, A Story of Texans, Oil and Money, and is written all the way back in 1981 by Sally Helgesen. There's a bunch of characters in this book. They talk about other oil families, but once I got to that part, that's when I realized, oh, no, no. What I wanna talk to you about is Monty Moncrief.
And so I think that excerpt gives you and I a good idea on why we should focus on Monty Moncrief and the shadow that, because at the time the book is published, he's still alive, his son is still alive, and his grandson is still alive. And so I'm always curious, well, what are they up to now? So after I read the book, started researching to see what I could find out about them. And there's a line in the book that I think is very fascinating, because it's like, why is this guy so interesting to me? He reminds me, Monty Moncrief, he reminds me of a lot of other people we studied, and there's just this random sentence, and it was talking about the fact that his grandson was essentially measuring his life and his success based on his grandfather, which I think is honestly a bad idea.
But it says, the shadow by which Dick Moncrief measured himself was cast by his grandfather, Monty. And I think that word shadow is really important. In fact, I went back and searched Founders Notes for the word shadow, because it's like, this sounds very familiar to me. There's two things that are fascinating here that I think you and I should spend some time talking about. And it's one, that an institution is the length and shadow of one man. And so that's from Edwin Lans, one of Edwin Lans biographies, right? So it's not only the founder is the shadow of the company that they found, but you'll also know, that's true for Monty for the company he founds, but his shadow also looms over his entire family. And Monty's shadow loomed over his entire family while he's alive, and it still has an effect in present day. I wind up looking up the characters in the book to see what, like if they were still alive. Monty's son winds up living to 101 He passed away relatively recently. Now the whole family is essentially fighting over this fortune, this multiple billion dollar fortune that really stems from the work that the grandfather did 60, 70 years ago.