Turning Hay Fields Into A $50 Million Private Golf Course: Billionaire David Dean Halbert's Big Bet
Forbes Talks
Forbes Media LLC
5 • 4 Ratings
🗓️ 8 October 2025
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David Halbert, the billionaire founder of Caris Life Sciences, opens up about his high-stakes career and his ultimate passion project: Halbert National Golf Course. Halbert, who believes his AI genomics company will be a "multi-trillion dollar company" focused on extending life, discusses how he convinced himself to spend "$50 million plus" to transform hay fields into a private course. Learn why he gave legendary course designer Tom Fazio a "no budget" mandate and why the goal is to make Halbert National the number one Fazio course and the number one course in Texas
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Entrepreneurs don't need education. They just need opportunity and capital. |
| 0:12.0 | Hi, I'm Chris Hellman. I'm a senior editor at Forbes Magazine. I'm here today with David Halpert. |
| 0:17.0 | We're visiting his golf course, Halpert National, here at Granbury, Texas. |
| 0:22.6 | We're about how many miles southwest of Fort Worth, would you say we are, David? |
| 0:27.6 | Oh, we're 60 from DFW Airport. |
| 0:29.6 | Okay, so we're in North Texas. |
| 0:32.6 | It's green right now. We got lots of rain on the course this year, so we're looking |
| 0:38.9 | forward to seeing your brand new course. Why did you want to build your own golf course, David? |
| 0:45.9 | You know, it was not something that I really spent that much time thinking about. We built |
| 0:52.1 | this lake house in 2004, three and four. |
| 0:55.0 | And my wife wanted to buy the property across the lake. |
| 1:00.0 | We bought it. |
| 1:01.0 | And she said, it would it be great if I had a course there |
| 1:05.0 | so I could play without anybody watching me. |
| 1:08.0 | Okay. |
| 1:09.0 | Because she always feels pressure to pick up and move on. And so it |
| 1:12.7 | was kind of been in our mind for a while. And some of my friends started naming it, you know, |
| 1:17.4 | Halbert National and they called it our lake house Camp David as we used to have a big |
| 1:23.0 | Fourth of July party here. And so it was in in our mind as maybe a par three course okay so you've had uh you're |
| 1:30.8 | not an overnight success in business about 20 years ago now you sold your first public company |
| 1:37.0 | and that made you some money and then just recently you've had the IPO of caris life sciences |
| 1:43.7 | which has been i, one of the most |
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