How The Koch Family Became One Of The Wealthiest Families On The Planet Koch Pipeline owns pipelines throughout Texas, Minnesota, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois. As documented by The New Yorkers Jane Mayer and others, the Kochs have spent hundreds of millions of dollars advocating their free-market agenda and bankrolling think tanks like the Cato Institute, conservative activist groups and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of state and national legislators all in the service of pushing back against government regulations, especially those dealing with climate change, pollution and energy policy. Paul Siu, an Oxbow executive and one of Bills close friends in the 1970s and 1980s, was canned after being suspected of spying for David and Charles, and he alleged that Bill had him tailed and bugged his phones. The 75-year-old oil tycoon (best known for his marriage, 14 years later, to Anna Nicole Smith) was fiercely loyal to Charles. Koch shares did pay a dividend (about 6 percent of the companys earnings), but Bill considered it stingy. Cloistered in his Dover, Massachusetts, mansion, he spent his days plotting with his lawyers and vegetating in front of the television. He does it by unspooling a series of granular set pieces and micronarratives, telling the stories of dozens of men and women inside and outside the company, from a middle manager struggling to schedule barges in Louisiana to the frazzled, overworked forklift drivers pushed to their limits inside a sprawling Koch paper warehouse in Portland, Ore. Each story illustrates one corner of a vast corporate empire. His only refuge is with his eccentric neighbor, Theodora, who helps Martin sift through responses to his personal ads. To conduct his own analysis, Bill retained Goldman Sachs and the Boston-based consulting firm Bain & Company, where a young Mitt Romney was cutting his teeth. VideoThe secret mine that hid the Nazis' stolen treasure, LGBT troops take love for Eurovision to front line, Why an Indian comedian is challenging fake news rules. He wasnt athletic, displayed no interest in business, and loathed the work-camp-like environment fostered by his father, with whom he shared little beyond a love of opera. Bill, for his part, unleashed his talent for legal warfare on fresh targets, embarking on a crusade against wine counterfeiters such as the scoundrels who sold him four bottles of Bordeaux that were said to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Dozens of other key Koch-affiliated personnel encircle Trump, including Marc Short, the congressional liaison in the Trump White House; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who received backing from the Kochs as a businessman and a congressman from Wichita; Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who was a billionaire donor in the Kochs Seminar Network; and Vice-President Mike Pence, whose financial ties to the Kochs run so deep, the former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon told me, that he worried that if Pence were ever elected hed be a President that the Kochs would own.. Is Hanna Koch Related To The Koch Brothers? He had also convinced David to run as the Libertarian Partys vice presidential candidate in the 1980 election (Bill had declined). A: Charles and David Koch, ages 78 and 74, are billionaire brothers who helped create a broad network of nonprofit groups that control hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into politics . Youre embarking on a program thats going to destroy the company, he seethed. It looks like hes going to be doing this into his nineties.. Needing a moment to himself to mourn, Marys companion of several years, a local artist named Michael Oliver, descended a back staircase to the downstairs trophy room. As was the family custom, Mary was hosting the Christmas dinner. The company and the dissidents needed a divorce.
