In his astonishing rags-to-riches life, it seemed there was little David Murdock could not do by sheer determination.
The billionaire financier who transformed Dole into the world’s largest producer of fruits and vegetables was a dyslexic high school dropout who made and lost a fortune by the time he was 40. He then moved to California to start again, becoming a mainstay on lists of the richest Americans.
One of the few self-set goals that Murdock failed to meet was his plan to celebrate his 125th birthday.
Murdock, who in his later years became a messianic promoter of exercise and healthful eating for longevity, died Monday at what he no doubt would have considered the premature age of 102, according to William Goldfield, a spokesperson for Dole Food Co., which Murdock led from 1985 to 2021.
Forbes estimated his net worth at $3.7 billion at the time of his death. He was a longtime resident of Lake Sherwood in Ventura County.
Well into his 80s, Murdock lifted weights several times a week, walked on a treadmill daily and drank smoothies made of 20 different kinds of fruit and vegetables including pulverized banana peels. He whipped them up himself in a Jack LaLanne juicer.
His health proselytizing was both public and private. He spent more than $500 million of his fortune on a nutrition research institute in Kannapolis, N.C., as well as founding the California Health and Longevity Institute, a medical spa in Westlake Village (“to teach people to eat because they eat wrong”).
He also wasn’t shy about scolding dining companions who committed such sins as buttering their bread or not eating all their vegetables.
“People are afraid to have dinner with him,” his friend and physician Rolland Dickson told the Wall Street Journal in 2006.
Murdock’s immense wealth and business acumen came about with little formal education or social advantage.
He was born David Howard Murdock on April 10, 1923, in Kansas City, Mo., and grew up in the small town of Wayne, Ohio. His father was a traveling salesman. His mother took in laundry and scrubbed floors. She died from cancer when she was 42 and he was 17.
He was raised in a household where “if it wasn’t cooked in bacon grease, it didn’t taste good,” a by-then vegetarian Murdock told The Times in 2006.
At school his teachers told him he was stupid, and he believed them. He earned poor grades and dropped out after the ninth grade. No one recognized his dyslexia at the time. He went to work pumping gas and changing oil until he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He ranked the highest on an IQ test out of 1,500 men.
During his World War II service, an army buddy shared his love of books and for the rest of his life Murdock never stopped reading. He said that he was lucky to be uneducated because he spent his whole life learning. He consumed everything from “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill to Shakespearean sonnets.
When Murdock took over Dole, the first thing he did was to buy a stack of books on fruits and vegetables.
“There is nothing you can’t learn reading. If you read the three best books on a subject, you’ll know what you need to know,” he said more than once.
At age 22, he was out of the service, living in Detroit, broke and jobless. He did his reading at a diner counter. A friend who worked there would give him free sandwiches. But the place was for sale and his meal ticket was about to run out.
One evening he struck up a conversation with another diner at the counter. He told the man he was looking for a job and the man, who worked for a loan company, told him he should buy the little greasy spoon. With the man’s help, he raised $1,200 and 18 months later, after fixing the place up, sold it for $1,900.
Murdock would go on to develop projects around the world and own a string of corporations, but he always kept the single penny and the one nickel that were in his pocket the night his destiny changed at the diner.
With $75 of the profit from the sale, he bought a car and headed to Phoenix. For 17 years, he built houses and office buildings, creating a multimillion-dollar enterprise. But the city became overbuilt and the housing boom went bust in the mid-1960s.
Murdock had to sell almost everything to pay off his debt. “I had all my eggs in one basket and didn’t even know it,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
At 43, he moved to Los Angeles to start over with what he could salvage of his fallen empire. He built homes and offices, but this time also bought companies. He specialized in undervalued corporations that produced basic goods such as bricks or towels. He could be ruthless in closing divisions and factories while in search of profits. Murdock even described himself as having a “dictatorial streak.”
In the early 1980s, he became the largest shareholder in Occidental Petroleum. He then tried to take over the corporation, famously battling with chairman Armand Hammer, who called Murdock a “barracuda.” In 1984, Occidental paid a 40% premium on Murdock’s stock to get him out — he left with a reported $100 million.
In 1985, Murdock took over the nearly bankrupt Hawaiian real-estate company Castle & Cooke, which owned Dole, then a pineapple and banana producer, and the Hawaiian island of Lanai.
Investors complained Murdock was incommunicative. He seldom gave interviews or detailed reports of his financial plans. “I don’t believe in going back to Wall Street and shooting my mouth off,” he told The Times.
He split Castle & Cooke and Dole into separate publicly listed corporations in 1995, then took both private — Castle & Cooke in 2000 and Dole in 2003.
Murdock returned Dole to public trading in 2009, then in 2013, at age 90, reacquired it as a private company. He later reached two settlements with former Dole shareholders who claimed he had shortchanged them in that deal.
Along the way, he quietly turned Dole into an operation selling food products in countries across the globe.
In 2012, Murdock sold his portion of Lanai, 98% of the island, to fellow billionaire and Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison, saying, “I have learned in life that change is inevitable and can be quite positive when guided in the right direction.”
In 2018, Murdock sold a 45% stake in Dole to Dublin, Ireland-based Total Produce Plc. for $300 million. In 2021, Dole returned to the market for its third run as a public company, and Murdock stepped down from its board.
There were times when the change he experienced was the result of deep personal loss.
In 1983, Murdock’s wife Gabriele, well-known in the Southern California arts community, was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer.
Murdock read everything he could on nutrition, trying to find a way to save her. She died in 1985 at age 43. He believed if he would have known about healthier eating habits earlier, he could have saved her, and his mother as well.
Eleven months later, his oldest son, Eugene, died in a swimming pool accident after hitting his head at 23. Another son, David II, died in a Los Angeles car accident at 36.
The corporate magnate slowly turned into a health guru with a populist bent.
The same man who built the Regency Club, which for 30 years catered to the business elite in Los Angeles, took Oprah Winfrey on his weekly trip to Costco to show her viewers healthy shopping tips.
For, though seeking longevity, Murdock also celebrated change.
“To step outside what you already know is the most exciting thing,” Murdock told the BBC in a 2010 interview.
He credited his triumphs to being able to envision possibilities.
“When I look at something, I look not at what is there. But what could be there,” he said. “In order to do the impossible, you must see the invisible.”
Bloomberg News contributed to this article.
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