#63 The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

**David Senra** (0:00)
The spot market for oil was surely one of the most lucrative ideas of the 20th century. Back when Marc Rich first began to snatch away a part of the global oil trade from the mighty oil corporations, crude oil cost $2 per barrel. In the summer of 2008, a barrel went for a record $140. Marc Rich's undertaking was revolutionary and highly successful. In the 1970s, Rich and a handful of trusted partners single-handedly managed to break the cartel of big oil, a cartel that dominated every aspect of the oil trade, from the well to the gas pump. They created the first fully functioning competitive market. They invented the spot market. Thanks to the oil trade, Rich, who came to the United States as a poor Jewish refugee boy, became one of the world's richest and most powerful commodity traders. He advanced to become the undisputed King of Oil.
The high point of Rich's power was soon followed by his fall from grace, a fall that cost the billionaire his reputation, his wife, and his company. Marc Rich is not known the world over as a result of his amazing entrepreneurial achievements, which were many. His name does not ring a bell because he was a unique pioneer of globalization, which he was.
His name is not bound to the realization of the American dream, even though he rose from a penniless European Holocaust survivor to become one of the richest men in America by the strength of his own will. Despite his fabulous wealth, Rich lost control over his own name. Today, the name Marc Rich means the billionaire trader who fled the United States in 1983 to avoid charges of tax evasion and making illegal oil deals with Iran during the hostage crisis.
Who is this man who led a life of high stakes and high risks? Who is this man who saw wars and revolutions, not as curses, but as business opportunities?
Who is the real Marc Rich, the man who managed to elude the agents of the most powerful nation on earth for nearly 20 years?
Okay, so that was an excerpt for the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is The King of Oil, The Secret Lives of Marc Rich.
And before I do that, welcome to Founders. My name is David, and the idea behind this podcast is very simple. Every week, I read a biography of an entrepreneur, and I try to find and pull out ideas from their life experiences that we can all use in our lives. So I have a lot of notes for this book, so we gotta get started, but before I jump into the rest of the book and the ideas I want to share with you, as a reminder, this podcast is ad-free and independent. So if you give value for my work, please consider investing in the ongoing production of this content by subscribing to Founders Notes, which is now not only is it all my podcast notes on entrepreneurs, which by themselves are extremely valuable because it's the key ideas of hours and hours of audio, but I've turned that into a daily podcast. So if you want to support this podcast and allow me the time that I dedicate to it, please subscribe to Founders Notes every weekday, Monday through Friday, you'll get an email from me at 6 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Each day, I cover the main ideas from a different entrepreneur. So just like this podcast is all about my notes and highlights of biographies of entrepreneurs, my daily podcast is the notes and key ideas from a specific podcast with an entrepreneur. You get access to all my notes plus my commentary. Just like this podcast is commentary about books, it's my commentary on their ideas. So you can read it if you want to, or you could also listen to it and read it at the same time. So that comes out every Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. And then you also have access to the entire back catalog, which I think I have notes from like 200 different founders by now. So please, if you do give value from my work, please subscribe and support it financially. I would appreciate that. Okay, so let me just, I have to get into the body of the main part of this podcast because this story is insane. And I have way more notes than I normally do. So I don't, let's not waste any more time. Let's just go ahead and get right into The Secret Lives of Marc Rich. So this is what the book hopes to answer. How did he and a handful of business partners seem to appear out of nowhere and go on to dominate global trade in oil and other commodities? What were the crucial decisions, the milestones in his unlikely career, and how far did he have to go in order to reach them? What were his limits? What were his greatest successes and his worst defeats? What drives him? And what can be learned for his entrepreneurial skills?