The secretive Cargill family has 14 billionaires thanks to an agricultural empire - more than any other clan on earth
Denis Balibouse / Getty
The Minnesota-based agriculture giant has 75 businesses employing 143,000 people in 67 countries. In 2013, yearly revenue topped $134 billion.
That money has made the Cargill clan very, very rich.
As Forbes reports in their annual billionaire list, the Cargill family now has 14 billionaires, more than any other family in the world.
To put this in perspective, if the Cargills were a country, they'd have as many billionaires as Sweden or Israel. That's enough to make them the 31st-most billionaire-filled nation around.
It all started back in 1865.
"W.W. Cargill founded the business on the Iowa frontier at the end of the Civil War, and his descendants still own 88% of the agricultural conglomerate 150 years later," Forbes reports.
Heirs to the family fortune include James Cargill II, Austen Cargill II, and Marianne Liebmann.
While huge, Cargill is famously quiet as a company and a family.
"The Cargills live extremely private lives, many of them on ranches and farms in Montana," Forbes reports.
A 2011 Fortune profile helped to put the reach of the company in perspective:
You don't have to love Egg McMuffins (McDonald's buys many of its eggs in liquid form from Cargill) or hamburgers (Cargill's facilities can slaughter more cattle than anyone else's in the U.S.) or sub sandwiches (No. 8 in pork, No. 3 in turkey) to ingest Cargill products on a regular basis.
Whatever you ate or drank today - a candy bar, pretzels, soup from a can, ice cream, yogurt, chewing gum, beer - chances are it included a little something from Cargill's menu of food additives.
Its $50 billion "ingredients" business touches pretty much anything salted, sweetened, preserved, fortified, emulsified, or texturized, or anything whose raw taste or smell had to be masked in order to make it palatable.
Sounds like a dynasty, huh?
- I spent $2,000 for 7 nights in a 179-square-foot room on one of the world's largest cruise ships. Take a look inside my cabin.
- Colon cancer rates are rising in young people. If you have two symptoms you should get a colonoscopy, a GI oncologist says.
- Saudi Arabia wants China to help fund its struggling $500 billion Neom megaproject. Investors may not be too excited.
- Catan adds climate change to the latest edition of the world-famous board game
- Tired of blatant misinformation in the media? This video game can help you and your family fight fake news!
- Tired of blatant misinformation in the media? This video game can help you and your family fight fake news!
- JNK India IPO allotment – How to check allotment, GMP, listing date and more
- Indian Army unveils selfie point at Hombotingla Pass ahead of 25th anniversary of Kargil Vijay Diwas
- JNK India IPO allotment date
- JioCinema New Plans
- Realme Narzo 70 Launched
- Apple Let Loose event
- Elon Musk Apology
- RIL cash flows
- Charlie Munger
- Feedbank IPO allotment
- Tata IPO allotment
- Most generous retirement plans
- Broadcom lays off
- Cibil Score vs Cibil Report
- Birla and Bajaj in top Richest
- Nestle Sept 2023 report
- India Equity Market