West Virginia’s Richest Billionaire Plans To Level The Educational Playing Field In Appalachia

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Forbes

Business News, News, Entrepreneurship, Business

4.8 • 6 Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2023

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Brad D. Smith was six years old when a plane carrying the 1970 Marshall University football team crashed a mile from his home near campus in southern West Virginia, killing all 75 people on board. His cousins rushed to aid their dying neighbors as volunteer firefighters. “I watched the flames burn outside my window,” Smith remembers. “And then I watched this community rise from the ashes.” Half a century later, the recently retired Intuit CEO’s community is waging new battles, with an opioid epidemic raging and the coal economy that once made Governor Jim Justice a billionaire on the verge of extinction. So, after 36 years away, Smith decided to take the country roads back home to West Virginia, the place he belongs—and into the President’s House at Marshall, his alma mater, which he took over in January 2022. He brought back with him a sizable fortune, accumulated over nearly four decades in business. According to Forbes’ ranking of the richest person in each state, released Thursday for the first time since 2019, he’s West Virginia’s wealthiest resident, worth $700 million. Forbes estimates that roughly half of his fortune is comprised of 943,000 Intuit shares and options he still holds. That’s after selling 2.4 million shares during his tenure as CEO from 2008 to 2018 (and as chairman until January 2022), netting him about $300 million (after taxes and the cost of option exercises). He takes the mantle as the state’s richest from Jim Justice, whose wealth has been weighed down by debt. Smith is worth some $250 million more than the governor, who dropped from the ranks of the world’s billionaires in 2021, when it was revealed that he’d personally guaranteed $850 million of loans to his coal businesses by Credit Suisse via a now insolvent intermediary, Greensill Capital. (Justice also owns the iconic Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and other real estate assets in Appalachia; he disputes Forbes’ estimate of his fortune.) Smith declined to comment on Forbes’ estimate of his net worth. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The I was six years old when the plane crashed in 1970.
0:23.0	I was sitting at home with my brothers watching television with my mom and dad.
0:26.5	We heard the sirens blaring.
0:28.0	My mother's nephews were actually first responders
0:31.0	so we were always very attentive when we heard a
0:33.1	siren. So the phone calls began to be made. There were CB scanners which were
0:37.4	basically radio scanners to see where the police or the fire trucks were
0:41.1	being dispatched. All the neighbors were talking about there had been a plane
0:44.4	crash. And so I ran to the back window and I looked out and I could see the haze and the sky glowing red and you could
0:51.1	see that that fire basically was happening and at that moment in time
0:54.8	I started to see the beginning of a life lesson which is that we're all born angels
0:59.2	with one wing and the way we flies beholden under one. So I'll never forget how that community came together
1:05.1	and helped each other rise from the ashes. Brad Smith is the former CEO of Intuit, which is the company behind Quick Books and TurboTax, and since January of 2022 he's been the president of his alma mater, which is Marshall University in West Virginia.
1:24.0	Smith grew up in a small town of about 3,000 people called Canova, West Virginia, which is right
1:28.0	next to Marshall, and back in 1970 there was a plane crash near campus that killed 75 people, including the school's whole football team.
1:35.0	Viewers probably know these events were later picked it in the Matthew McConaughey movie, We Are Marshall.
1:41.0	He and his brothers were the first in their family to go to college and he initially went to West Point, but he ultimately decided to go back home to Marshall after a semester and he still wears the Marshall Class ring that his dad gave him right before he had a heart attack a few days later.
1:54.8	After receiving his master's degree in management from Aquinas College of Michigan, Brad took a sales
1:59.4	job at PepsiCo initially, and despite an early boss's insistence that he attend corporate communications
2:05.2	courses to rid himself of his West Virginia twang, Smith quickly climbed the corporate ladder
2:10.6	at 7-Up and direct-mail marketer Advil with the inherent flaw of his
2:15.2	accent proudly intact.
	...

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