Money and Finance
Link to article: How To Blow $9 Billion: The Fallen Stroh Family
[H/T Remmelt]
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Money and Finance
How To Blow $9 Billion: The Fallen Stroh Family
Link to article: How To Blow $9 Billion: The Fallen Stroh Family
AS WITH MANY OF AMERICA’S GREAT FORTUNES, the Stroh family’s story starts with an immigrant: Bernhard Stroh, who arrived in Detroit from Germany in 1850 with $150 and a coveted family recipe for beer. He sold his brews door-to-door in a wheelbarrow. By 1890 his sons, Julius and Bernhard Jr., were shipping beer around the Great Lakes. Julius got the family through Prohibition by switching the brewery to ice cream and malt syrup production. And in the 1980s Stroh’s surged, emerging as one of America’s fastest-growing companies and the country’s third-largest brewing empire, behind only public behemoths Anheuser-Busch and Miller. The Stroh family owned it all, a fortune that FORBES then calculated was worth at least $700 million. Just by matching the S&P 500, the family would currently be worth about $9 billion.
Yet today the Strohs, as a family business or even a collective financial entity, have essentially ceased to exist. The company has been sold for parts. The trust funds have doled out their last pennies to shareholders. The last remaining family entity owns a half-empty office building in Detroit. While there was enough cash flowing for enough years that the fifth generation Strohs still seem pretty comfortable, the family looks destined to go shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves in six.
[H/T Remmelt]
- Charlie Munger On Salomon And The Importance Of A Good Reputation
Via Whitney Tilson’s notes from the 2007 Wesco Annual Meeting:Comments on the Salomon crisis What was interesting about that day was that it would have had reverberations that would have made the Long Term Capital Management blow-up look like nothing...
- The Upside Of Family Ties: The Link Between Dna And Roi
Found via @jasonzweigwsj. I haven’t bought and read this case study yet, but it looks similar to a lot of the points that Tom Russo makes about the types of family-run businesses in which he prefers to invest. Family-owned businesses perform poorly...
- Breaking Bad - By Michael Lewitt
The AMC television series Breaking Badtells the story of Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who has a son with cerebral palsy, an unwanted daughter on the way, a lousy second job at a car wash, and then learns that he is going to die of cancer...
- Is Family Dollar Stores, Inc. A Bargain?
I'm always on the lookout for new to me dividend growth companies and recently received a request to do a full analysis on Family Dollar Stores, Inc. (FDO). What was really surprising is that Family Dollar Stores has a 38 year history of increasing...
- Something To Do In Your First Year Of Early Retirement That Will Continue To Pay "dividends"
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