David H. Murdock, who rose from hardscrabble beginnings to become a billionaire investor, real estate mogul, corporate raider and philanthropist, and whose late-in-life devotion to healthy nutrition once led him to announce that he planned to live to 125, died on Monday at his ranch in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He was 102.
His death was confirmed by Tracy Murdock, his ex-wife.
Mr. Murdock, who dropped out of school at 14 and was briefly a homeless World War II Army veteran, made his first fortune in real estate and then acquired controlling stakes in a variety of public companies, including Dole as well as the textile manufacturer Cannon Mills.
He gained a reputation as a relentless and often ruthless turnaround specialist who didn’t hesitate to lay off thousands of workers, slash benefits and make deep cuts in order to reshape and sell a company. He would look for companies with what he deemed “undervalued assets,” swoop in, make necessary if painful changes and then sell the entity at a significant profit.
In his oft-stated quest to build the largest private financial empire in the United States, Mr. Murdock took on powerful unions and dominant corporate chieftains, among them Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum, and emerged as one of the richest, most successful corporate investors in the nation. In April, Forbes estimated his fortune at $3.7 billion.
Mr. Murdock’s lack of formal education and humble beginnings fueled his determined rise to wealth and power. In a 1983 interview with The Wall Street Journal, he said: “Nobody is satisfied with what he has. We were brought on earth to achieve. As long as we want to achieve, we’re alive. If we’re satisfied, we’re already half dead.”
Well into his 90s, he continued to achieve, serving as chairman and chief executive of Dole and its parent company, Castle & Cooke, for several decades.
“I never had a boss in my whole life,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 2011. “I’ve totally destroyed anybody’s ability to tell me what to do.”
It was his purchase in 1985 of Castle & Cooke, a venerable and nearly bankrupt Hawaiian agricultural concern, that fueled Mr. Murdock’s ascent as a corporate takeover artist. Castle & Cooke, which had introduced Hawaiian pineapples to the American mainland, provided Mr. Murdock with significant land holdings in Hawaii, including Lanai, the sparsely populated and sixth-largest Hawaiian island, home to a vast pineapple plantation.
Over time, he turned Castle & Cooke into a successful real estate developer, separating it from its Dole subsidiary. In 2012, he took in hundreds of millions of dollars by selling Lanai to the Oracle chief Larry Ellison.
But it was Dole, which Mr. Murdock rebuilt into one of the world’s largest sellers of fruit and vegetables, that exemplified his business prowess. He ran Dole for more than 30 years, piling up enormous profits year after year through its global reach, with world headquarters in Dublin and U.S. headquarters in Charlotte, N.C.
His only major setback came in 2015, when a Delaware judge ruled that in taking the company private in 2013, Mr. Murdock and its chief operating officer had fraudulently driven down Dole’s stock price so that he could buy the business at a cheaper price. The two men were ordered to reimburse shareholders $148 million.
Mr. Murdock used Dole’s profits in the late 2000s to build a $500 million food research center in Kannapolis, N.C., northeast of Charlotte. Its central mission was to study how plant-based diets might lead to longer lives.
Married five times, Mr. Murdock was especially devoted to his German-born third wife, Gabriele Murdock, whom he married in 1967. The couple had two sons, and Mr. Murdock adopted a son from his wife’s previous marriage. Nearly 20 years her senior, he was devastated when she received a diagnosis of advanced ovarian cancer in 1983. When she died in 1985 at 43, Mr. Murdock had become convinced that lifestyle and diet had contributed to her cancer, and he became obsessed with finding a healthy and sustainable nutrition regimen for himself and for the world.
“If I had known what I know today, I could have saved my wife’s life,” he said in the Times Magazine profile, by Frank Bruni.
Beginning in his 60s, Mr. Murdock began a quest to change his diet, eating only fruits and vegetables and occasionally fish, eliminating sugar and dairy.
“He wants to reach 125,” Mr. Bruni wrote, “and sees no reason he can’t, provided that he continues eating the way he has for the last quarter-century: with a methodical, messianic correctness that he believes can, and will, ward off major disease and minor ailment alike.”
David Howard Murdock was born on April 11, 1923, in Kansas City, Mo., the middle child and only son of Merte Floyd Murdock, a traveling salesman, and Ruth Gweneth Murdock, who took in laundry and scrubbed floors to help support the family.
When David was very young, his father moved the family to Montgomery Township, Ohio, where the boy, who was dyslexic, struggled in school. His learning disabilities, which in those days had not been identified, made school nightmarish for him. He was taunted and managed only D’s, and at age 14 he quit school, just two months into the 10th grade. He was 17 when his mother died of cancer at 42, a loss that haunted him throughout his life. He began working at a service station pumping gas and changing oil until he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943.
After leaving the military at 22, he landed in Detroit penniless. For a time he lived in a park, sleeping under a bush. With the help of a loan company employee he had met in a Detroit diner, he managed to secure $1,200 in loans to buy the diner. He spruced it up, sold it for a small profit and set out for California.
He got as far as Phoenix, where he encountered a young city exploding with an influx of postwar transplants. He began to buy up cheap land and build affordable houses for the new arrivals.
“I was building as fast as I could break ground,” he said in the Times Magazine article. “Bang, bang, bang: I could hardly get a house finished before it was sold.”
In 1968, after 17 profitable years, he set off for Los Angeles, where he continued to build, but this time he took on much larger projects, like office buildings. He began investing large stakes in public companies and eventually bought whole companies rather than just stock.
In 1974, he acquired Pacific Holding Company after leading a group of dissident shareholders in a takeover. He took the company private in 1978. That same year, he acquired 19 percent of the shares in Iowa Beef Processor, which he then exchanged for 2.8 percent of the shares in Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum, at the time the world’s largest independent oil company.
By 1981, Mr. Murdock had become the largest shareholder of Occidental and began to bang heads with the dynamic Dr. Hammer. There was talk that he was angling to succeed Dr. Hammer when Dr. Hammer retired — rumors that Mr. Murdock denied. He continued to focus on acquiring stakes in a wide range of companies.
He arrived in Kannapolis in 1982. There, for $413 million, he acquired a controlling interest in the ailing Cannon Mills Company, famous for its towels. But rather than remain an activist investor, Mr. Murdock took control of Cannon as chairman. Thus began a tempestuous episode in which he fought off an effort to unionize workers, cut costs and rescinded a long list of perks that employees had enjoyed under the previous ownership.
At one point, he cut out funds for an employee cancer-screening program and announced that employees who were renting Cannon’s 2,600 company-owned houses would have to buy them outright or move within 90 days. Union organizers accused him of running a fear campaign, but their bid to make Cannon a union shop was soundly defeated by workers.
Though he invested $30 million in the gentrification of downtown Kannapolis, Mr. Murdock remained a sometimes polarizing figure there until he sold Cannon in 1986. Nevertheless, he fell in love with the area, built an estate and retained substantial commercial property. In 2006, he acquired one of the now-defunct mills he had sold, and built the North Carolina Research Campus, which houses the David H. Murdock Research Core Laboratory, where nutritional research is conducted in the hope of extending human life spans.
Mr. Murdock was not shy about flaunting his wealth. He owned five homes, including a 2,200-acre ranch in Southern California, where he collected longhorn cattle and horses, along with orchids and works of art. He served as co-chairman of the Joffrey Ballet Company in New York and at one time owned the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington.
At the height of his financial influence, however, Mr. Murdock suffered grievous losses. Less than a year after losing his wife to cancer in 1985, his oldest son, Eugene, 23, drowned in the pool at the family’s estate in Beverly Hills, Calif. Mr. Murdock’s second son, David II, was killed at age 36 in a car crash on the Santa Monica Freeway in 2004.
Mr. Murdock is survived by his youngest son, Justin, and a granddaughter.
Mr. Murdock overcame his learning disabilities to become a devout reader and lover of poetry, which he liked to recite from memory. He often bragged that despite his lack of formal education, he was much smarter than those with advanced degrees. A close friend told The Wall Street Journal in 1983: “I used to think it was a sense of power and prestige he wanted. Now I think maybe all of this is the report card he never got. By doing all these things, he’s showing the world he can make straight A’s.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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