Charles Koch grew his father's oil firm two thousandfold
In 1967 Charles Koch took charge of a medium-sized Wichita oil company and renamed it after his father. By 2006 Koch Industries was bringing in 90 billion dollars a year, growth of about 2,000 times, and it is now the largest privately held company in the United States by revenue.
Born in Wichita in 1935, one of four sons of Fred Koch, he studied at MIT, collecting a degree in general engineering and two master's degrees, in nuclear and chemical engineering, while focusing on how to refine oil. After a spell at the consultancy Arthur D. Little he returned home in 1961 to join the family's Rock Island Oil & Refining. His grandfather, a Dutch immigrant, had founded a newspaper in West Texas.
Family relations were far from smooth. Brothers Frederick and Bill also inherited shares, and after a legal and boardroom fight their stakes were bought out in 1983 for 1.1 billion dollars, leaving Charles and David as the main owners with 42 percent each. Litigation dragged on until 2001. Charles was known for 12-hour days at the office followed by more work at home, and he expected executives to work weekends too.
He runs the company on a philosophy he calls market-based management, which tries to apply ideas from Austrian economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to organisations, treating employees' scattered knowledge the way markets treat society's. He wrote it up in The Science of Success partly to explain it to staff arriving after the 2004 purchase of the fibre maker Invista, and has published four books in all.
A self-described classical liberal, he co-founded the Cato Institute in 1977 and has long funded libertarian think tanks and university programmes, and his foundation co-sponsored an anti-war think tank with George Soros's charity in 2019. He argues against corporate subsidies even for ethanol, a product his own company makes in quantity, and supports ending the federal ban on cannabis. Bloomberg ranked him 22nd richest in the world in 2025.
Source: Charles Koch
