J. Paul Getty was an American-born British petrol-industrialist and the patriarch of the Getty family. He founded the Getty Oil Company, and in 1957 Fortune magazine named him the richest living American. At his death, he was worth more than USD 6 billion. A book published in 1996 ranked him as the 67th richest American who ever lived.
About J. Paul Getty in brief
J. Paul Getty was an American-born British petrol-industrialist and the patriarch of the Getty family. He founded the Getty Oil Company, and in 1957 Fortune magazine named him the richest living American. At his death, he was worth more than USD 6 billion. A book published in 1996 ranked him as the 67th richest American who ever lived. Despite his vast wealth, Getty was infamously frugal, notably negotiating his grandson’s Italian kidnapping ransom in 1973. He was an avid collector of art and antiquities. His collection formed the basis of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, and more thanUSD 661 million of his estate was left to the museum after his death. Getty was born into a Christian Scottish American family in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Sarah Catherine McPherson and George Getty, who was an attorney in the insurance industry. He attended Harvard Military School for a year, followed by Polytechnic High School, where he was given the nickname \”Dictionary Getty\” because of his love of reading. He became fluent in French, German and Italian. In the autumn of 1914, George Getty gave his son USD 10,000 to invest in expanding the family’s oil field holdings in Oklahoma. The first lot he bought, the Nancy Taylor No. 1 Oil Well Site near Haskell, Oklahoma was crucial to his early financial success. The well struck oil in August 1915 and by the next summer the 40 percent net production royalty he accrued from it had made him a millionaire.
In 1919, Getty returned to business in Oklahoma and added about USD 3 million to his already sizable estate. In 1967, Getty merged these holdings into Getty Oil Shrewdly, which he was funneling into the purchase of Tidewater Petroleum stock. In 1936, Getty’s mother convinced him to the establishment of a USD 3million investment trust, called the Sarah C. Getty Trust, to ensure his family’s wealth could be channeled into a tax-free, secure, secure future for future generations of the family. His father was a devout Christian Scientist and both were strict teetotalers. Getty inherited only USD 500,000 of the USD 10 million fortune his father left at the time of his death in 1930. The trust is the world’s wealthiest art institution, and operates the Getty Center, The Getty Villa and the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and theGetty Conservation Institute. He obtained degrees in economics and political science from Oxford in June 1913, then spent months traveling throughout Europe and Egypt before meeting his parents in Paris and returning with them to America in June 1914. He fondly boasted of the friends he made, including Edward VIII, the future King of the United Kingdom. At age 14, Getty attended Harvard military School for an year, and later returned to Oklahoma. In 1930, Getty acquired the Pacific Western Oil Corporation and began the acquisition of the Mission Oil Corporation, which included Tidewater Oil and Skelly Oil Corporation.
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