Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Wednesday, January 7th.

Today on Forbes, meet the billionaire behind private company giant TriCon Energy.

Ignacio Torres takes a nap every afternoon.

On days when the founder and CEO of Commodities trader, TriCon Energy, is working out of his high-rise

headquarters in Houston, he snoozes in his white leather Eames recliner in the corner of his

glass-walled office. Torres, who is 61 years old, cares not a wit that the trader is responsible

for much of Tri-Con's $13 billion in annual revenues can watch him sleep. A nap

needn't be long. He says, quote, just enough to clear the mind. It's his key to juggling many

balls. That includes everything from waking up at 4 a.m., checking in on his two Spanish restaurants

in Houston, including Michelin-starred

BCN taste and tradition, to attending Mass with his wife Isabel at least a couple times a week,

to hosting bi-weekly soccer scrimmages on the backyard pitch behind his sprawling Spanish-styled home.

Of course, much of his time is focused on Tricon Energy, his $13 billion in

$24 revenue company that, in December, debuted at number 35 on Forbes's list of the 200 biggest

private companies in America. TriCon moves roughly 24 million tons of chemicals around the world each year.

These are mostly commodities like polypropylene for making plastic sheets, and xylene

and methanol, key ingredients in plastic bottles and polyester fabric.

His biggest seller is pellets of polyethylene resin, little chunks of plastic that Tricon

buys from the world's biggest chemicals producers, like ExxonMobil, Lionel Basel, Shell,

and Dow Chemical, and resells to manufacturers who will melt and reform them into toys,

bottle caps, and car parts.

Unlike hedge funds or paper traders,

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