#378 The Last Oil Baron: Leon Hess

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David Senra

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4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

Your father goes bankrupt. You work for 50 cents a day to try to help your family survive the Great Depression. At 19 you see an opportunity where others see nothing. You start “a little fuel delivery business” with one used truck. Five years later you have 10 trucks. World War II breaks out and you serve as the fuel supply officer for General Patton. You come back to America and apply what the war taught you about logistics and moving fuel efficiently. You expand from fuel delivery to storage, refining, and open gas stations in 16 states. You take your company public. You merge with an oil exploration firm. You build the largest refinery in the Western Hemisphere. You buy the New York Jets. You built your “little fuel delivery business” into a multibillion-dollar, multinational, vertically integrated energy behemoth. You are Leon Hess, founder of the Hess family dynasty. This episode is what I learned from reading Hess: The Last Oil Baron by Tina Davis and Jessica Resnick-Ault.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Leon Hess could recite the margins of every gasoline station on the East Coast. John Mackey,
0:05.7	the founder of Whole Foods, could do the same for every Whole Foods store. I actually spent
0:10.7	a few days with John Mackey, and he told me one of the craziest things that anyone has ever said
0:14.8	about the podcast. He had listened to over 100 episodes before we met, and he told me that if
0:18.9	founders existed when he was younger,
0:21.2	Whole Foods would still be an independent company.
0:23.7	That since the podcast and all of history's greatest entrepreneurs constantly emphasized
0:27.1	the importance of controlling expenses, he would have put more of a priority on it,
0:30.9	especially during good times.
0:33.1	During boom times, it's very natural for a company and for human nature to just not
0:37.1	watch your costs
0:37.8	as closely because everything is going so well. This is something that history's greatest
0:42.2	founders would warn a guess. In fact, Andrew Carnegie would repeat this mantra time and time again.
0:48.2	He would say, profits and prices were cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of
0:53.5	the marketplace. Costs, however,
0:55.8	could be strictly controlled, and any savings achieved in cost were permanent. This is something
1:01.8	that I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is now
1:06.8	the presenting sponsor of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the co-founders of Ramp. I've spent a bunch of time with them over the last year or two. They all listen to the podcast,
1:14.8	and they've all picked up on the fact that the main theme from the podcast is on the importance
1:18.7	of watching your costs and controlling your spend, and how doing so can give you a massive,
1:23.4	competitive advantage. That is a main theme for Ramp. The reason that Ramp exists is to give you
1:28.9	everything you need to control your spend. Ramp gives you everything you need to control your
	...

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