The $150B dollar business hiding in plain sight

When I googled this family, the words came up were silent dominance, middlemen at planetary scale.

[laughing]

[laughing]

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. Uh. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road less traveled, never looking back.

All right, Sam, I have a, uh, I have a Billy of the Week for you, an MFM classic. This is not just any Billy of the Week, this is one of the biggest Billys in America, one that I wasn't really that aware of. I think you will know more than me about this, but I would say-

Okay

... most people don't.

Wait, can I guess?

Let me read you... Let me tell you three things about it, then you can take a guess.

Okay.

Okay? All right. It is the largest private company in America for the last forty years.

Mm-hmm.

It is owned eighty-eight percent by the family and has produced more fam- more billionaires in one family than any other company ever. They do more revenue than Goldman Sachs, Nike, and Starbucks combined.

Ooh, is it Mars or Coke?

You're in the right neighborhood.

Estee Lauder?

[laughing] Okay, you left the neighborhood briefly.

Okay.

Come back to the other neighborhood of, like-

[laughing]

... sort of r- rich redneck f- families of America. It is Cargill.

Oh, yes.

So the Cargill family. So I didn't really know anything about this family. Can I just tell you a little bit about their story and, and what they do? Because this is a dominant business story of all time.

Wait. First, tell me, why did this interest you? Why'd this catch your attention?

Remember when you... when I was at your house and you were like, "There's this closet here, by the way, that we found. There's this extra storage room-

This-

... that we didn't even know-"

That's true.

"... till we lived here for two months." That's how I felt finding out that one of, uh, the most wealthy of r- families in America, and I don't know their story. That's how I felt. As the-

Okay

... as the host of My First Million, I just felt like I needed to right a wrong.

Okay, I understand.

And, a-and the re... By the way, how did I find it? There was a Reddit thread that was, "Tell me about billion-dollar industries that I probably don't know about." And it was like the first one was sand, and the second one was this, and the third one is this. Reinsurance. It's like, well, there's insurance companies, and then they buy insurance. That's called reinsurance. And then the reinsurance, guess what? They have reinsurance companies behind them. It's just insurance all the way down, baby. And so I was reading through this thread, and then one was Cargill, and I was like, "Oh, Cargill." So what they did, so the story is, um, back in the day, as America was, was sort of getting its feet and railroads had been, had been, uh, started to get built, farmers needed to offload their crops, their grain, um, and they needed to sell them. So they could either sell it individually, so the farm could try to sell individually to a buyer and figure out how to transport it there, or they could work with a middleman. And so Cargill became the biggest middleman on the planet for basically just initially storing grain. So they would go right next to where the railroad is. They would