THE PAST INFORMS THE FUTURE

When Nelson Bunker Hunt died in October 2014, the New York Times obituary speculated that he was still a multimillionaire from trusts established by his father that had escaped the personal bankruptcy proceedings of the 1990s.¹ The Times was probably right about Bunker but would have been on firmer ground discussing his brother Herbert, who had returned to the ranks of billionaires in 2013 by selling oil-rich property for $1.45 billion that he had bought a few years earlier in North Dakota.² Bloomberg News reported Herbert Hunt’s total net worth at $4.2 billion. The Hunts survived their infatuation with the