The $150B dollar business hiding in plain sight

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
When I Googled this family, the words came up were Silent Dominance, middlemen at planetary scale.
All right, Sam, I have a Billy of the Week for you, an MFM classic. This is not just any Billy of the Week, this is one of the biggest Billies in America, one that I wasn't really that aware of. I think you will know more than me about this, but I would say most people don't.

**Sam Parr** (0:33)
Wait, can I guess?

**Shaan Puri** (0:35)
Let me tell you three things about it, then you could take a guess. Okay. All right, it is the largest private company in America for the last 40 years.
It is owned 88% by the family and has produced more billionaires in one family than any other company ever. They do more revenue than Goldman Sachs, Nike and Starbucks combined.

**Sam Parr** (0:59)
Oh, is it Mars or Coke?

**Shaan Puri** (1:02)
You're in the right neighborhood.

**Sam Parr** (1:04)
Estee Lauder?

**Shaan Puri** (1:06)
Okay, you left the neighborhood briefly. Come back to the other neighborhood of like rich, redneck families of America.
It is Cargill.

**Sam Parr** (1:17)
Oh, yes.

**Shaan Puri** (1:18)
So the Cargill family. So I didn't really know anything about this family. Can I just tell you a little bit about their story and what they do? Because this is a dominant business story of all time.

**Sam Parr** (1:28)
Wait, first, tell me, why did this interest you? Why did this catch your attention?

**Shaan Puri** (1:32)
Remember when I was at your house and you were like, there's this closet here, by the way, that we found. There's this extra storage room that we didn't even know until we lived here for two months. That's how I felt, finding out that one of the most wealthy families in America, and I don't know their story. That's how I felt.
As the host of My First Million, I just felt like I needed to right a wrong.

**Sam Parr** (1:51)
Okay, I understand.

**Shaan Puri** (1:53)
And by the way, how did I find it? There was a Reddit thread that was, tell me about billion dollar industries that I probably don't know about. And it was like, the first one was sand, and the second one was this, and the third one is this, reinsurance. It's like, well, there's insurance companies, and then they buy insurance. That's called reinsurance. And then the reinsurance, guess what? They have reinsurance companies behind them. It's just insurance all the way down, baby. And so I was reading through this thread, and then one was Cargill, and I was like, oh, Cargill. So what they did, so the story is, back in the day, as America was sort of getting its feet, and railroads had been started to get built, farmers needed to offload their crops, their grain, and they needed to sell them. So they could either sell it individually, so the farm could try to sell individually to a buyer and figure out how to transport it there, or they could work with a middleman. And so Cargill became the biggest middleman on the planet for basically just initially storing grain. So they would go right next to where the railroad is, they would build what's called a grain elevator, which is basically a giant storage facility for grain so that it wouldn't spoil very quickly.
And the farmers could come drop it off, they would get like coat check, they'd get an IOU that says I will pay you when your grain sells, or they would just buy it at a flat rate, like wholesale and be able to flip it. So you could choose as the farmer which one you wanted to do.

**Sam Parr** (3:07)
This is what my father does for a living, by the way.

**Shaan Puri** (3:10)
Oh, so maybe you should have known.

**Sam Parr** (3:13)
He does it with onions, onions, but yes, my father's a broker, that's what he does.

**Shaan Puri** (3:18)
Does he store or he just calls one size, hey, I got 75 bushels of kilograms?

**Sam Parr** (3:23)
Well, it's fresh produce. So the storage is like a day, but yes, there is a place where they sit for like 24 hours before a truck comes and gets it. Yeah, but yes.

**Shaan Puri** (3:33)
And what's interesting to me is probably this for me from a business perspective is you always hear this idea of like, you don't want to be the middle man. Oh, you can always cut out the middle man. And in this case, the middle man became worth more than everybody else. And actually, if you look at many businesses, there's many businesses where the middle man becomes quite a valuable business. And so there's an interesting question of why. In this case, it's because the middle man was physically in the middle. They literally built the grain elevators that would store the shit right next to the railroad. And so you needed to transport it, you needed to get to the railroad. Who else had it? Like nobody else was going to build that. So anyways, they start doing that. They then go further and further and further. So at one point they're like, hey, these shipping barges are so inefficient where we're shipping the grain when it's not traveling by rail. So we'll build our own shipyard, our own ships. They end up producing ships for the US. Navy.