The Invisible Billionaire: Daniel Ludwig

**David Senra** (0:00)
I read two books this week, one I hated and one I loved, and neither would make a good episode. So I wanted to republish one of my favorite episodes on one of my favorite books and one of my favorite founders, which is Daniel Ludwig, who at one time was the richest person in the world and no one even knew his name. He started his company when he was 19 and he worked well into his 90s. And Ludwig built this massive conglomerate of 200 companies in 50 different countries. So he had this obsessive focus on efficiency and cost control. He was notorious for eliminating any expense that didn't directly contribute to his profits. And that's how you know that if he was alive today, he'd be running his business on a ramp. Let me give you one example. He designed his ships with thinner decks than the industry standard, so he could reduce weight and fuel costs. And then he famously snapped when someone asked why he didn't put grand pianos on his ships. Like his Greek competitors, he said, you can't carry oil on a grand piano. So one thing is very, very clear from studying hundreds of history's greatest entrepreneurs. Anyone who's committed to being great at building their business is obsessed with watching their costs and building an efficient company. They did that because they understood that by doing so gives you a massive competitive advantage and ramp helps you do so. So using ramp becomes a competitive advantage. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting and cost control all on a single platform. As you're about to hear, Daniel Ludwig was constantly innovating in his industry. Ramp is doing the same in their industry. 54% of their payroll goes to new product development and R&D. The longer you use ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. This is very, very important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, you can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. I read a ramp customer review that sums this up perfectly. It said, ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check in on because they have it handled. Ramp's website is incredible. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. One more thing I want to tell you about, there's now a monthly option for Founders Notes. And I brought back the lifetime option by popular request. So Founders Notes, if you access Founders Notes, if you subscribe to Founders Notes, it means you get access to all of my notes and highlights. That's over 20,000 notes and highlights on history's greatest founders that have been accumulating, collecting and distilling for the last eight years. You can search through them by keyword, or you can actually have the AI assistant that I built for Founders Notes, which I call Sage, read everything and summarize it for you. I use Sage almost every day. It's actually a tool I built for myself that you can now use too. This is the way I think about it. Jensen Wong, the founder of NVIDIA, said that in the future, everyone will have a virtual assistant, almost like a brilliant intern, with near perfect memory, capable of instantly recalling any piece of knowledge. Sage is that now, the future is already here, except Sage is hyper focused on the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs. So if you have access to Sage, you can now access all of that collective knowledge on demand. I really believe that you should be using it to supplement the decisions that you make in your work, and you can do that by going to foundersnotes.com. The link will also be down below, and it's also available at founderspodcast.com.
The photographer from New York Magazine was excited and more than a little nervous. In a matter of moments, he would enjoy a unique opportunity. The chance to snap the first un-posed picture ever taken of the richest man in the world. The strange thing was that most Americans had never even heard of Daniel Keith Ludwig. It was hard to figure. How could a man, any man, in these days of mass media coverage and public obsession with world records, manage to accumulate a $3 billion fortune with hardly anyone becoming aware of it? If it takes a 43-inch stack of $100 bills to make a million dollars, then a stack equaling a billion would tower over the Empire State Building. Ludwig's riches would be three times as tall. Obsessed with privacy, Ludwig reportedly pays a major public relations firm fat fees to keep his name out of the papers. The New York Magazine photographer had learned that the world's richest man was living almost anonymously right in the middle of Manhattan, and that he was in the habit of walking to work every day. The photographer waited for the billionaire to walk the few blocks from his penthouse apartment. Just as the photographer was starting to think something had gone wrong and Ludwig wasn't coming, he spied a gray-haired figure in a black overcoat walking briskly. As the old man drew close, the photographer raised his camera and aimed. Ludwig, surprised, turned his head and looked up. The shutter clicked. The next instant, the world's richest man, 80 years old but still fit and trim, charged the photographer and grabbed him in a half Nelson. He tried to wrestle into the sidewalk and take the camera. But the photographer twisted out of Ludwig's grasp and ran down the street. New York Magazine ran the photo with an accompanying article, The Richest Man in America Walks to Work. That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is The Invisible Billionaire, Daniel Ludwig, and is written by Jerry Shields. So this is the second time that I read this book. The first time was four years ago, all the way back on episode number 68 It's one of my favorite books that I've read for the podcast because Daniel Ludwig is not only a mysterious character, but the sheer size and scale of what he was able to accomplish is unbelievable. And I'm going to give you a description of why it's so unbelievable in a few pages. I want to jump into the introduction real quick. At the beginning, there's an overview of the one time that Ludwig consented to be interviewed. It happened in 1957 when he was 60 years old. And this interview happens about 25 years before Forbes puts Ludwig as the richest person in the world. When the book was published in 1986, Ludwig was estimated to be worth about $3 billion. And so let's go into this description of Ludwig. With Ludwig, work is almost an obsession. A non-smoker, only a moderate drinker, Spartan in personal habits, business gets 100% of his attention. On a project, his greatest gift is seeing the big picture. Once a project begins, Ludwig does not rest easy until completion date. There's no lack of projects. An associate speaks of his unlimited ingenuity in dreaming up new ways of doing things. Remember that sentence for when I get to a description of how large his business is at this point. He willingly gambles on an idea that looks good, but his formula is to add a large dose of hard work to that gamble. The description of Ludwig continues, Ludwig's most notable characteristics, besides his imagination and pertinacity, is a lifelong pension for keeping his mouth shut. Saunders, that's the name of the interviewer. Saunders attributed this to the shipbuilder's single-minded absorption with getting things done. He is interested in achievement, not fame. I'm in this business because I like it, Ludwig said. I have no hobbies. DK, so his nickname for people who knew him was his initials, DK. DK was strictly a solo act. His zest for these operations is that of a lone wolf. He shares neither the rewards nor the risks with anyone else. Before moving on, let's go back to what the interviewer said, that his most notable characteristics were his imagination and pertinacity. Let's define that word. I love the Webster definition of pertinacity. It says, holding strong, because it's a perfect description of Ludwig if you read this book. Holding strongly to an opinion, purpose, or course of action. Stubbornly or annoyingly persistent.