The inventor of the supertankers who competed with Onassis

In the 1950s and 60s, the competition among shipowners to possess the largest tanker in the world's oil fleet intensely shook the oil market. The main protagonists of this battle were the Greeks Stavros Niarchos and Aristotle Onassis, and the American Daniel Keith Ludwig, who would eventually become one of the richest men in the world.

Ludwig's birth in a Great Lakes port town, where his grandfather had built a small dock, shaped his destiny as a maritime professional. He explained in a 1957 interview that he made his first maritime business at the astonishing age of nine. He recounted how, at such a young age, he managed to save $75, which he used to buy a sunken boat. His parents' separation as he entered adolescence was a major upheaval in his life, with a change of residence and having to drop out of school being the main obstacles. On the other side of the country, in Texas, he began working as a boat parts salesman while studying mathematics at night with the goal of one day enrolling in naval engineering. As soon as he could, he returned to Michigan and started working for a boat manufacturer, but working for someone else wasn't in his plans, so he went into business for himself at a very young age. To take the plunge, he took out a loan guaranteed by his father, which he used to acquire a secondhand steamship that was eventually converted into a cargo barge. The remarkable aspect of the operation was selling all the steam engine parts to pay off a significant portion of the debt. He then bought a tugboat and began providing cargo services in the port of New York. The years following World War I were a period of strong growth for his business, and as proof of this, by the 1930s he already owned a substantial fleet, all made up of secondhand ships that he had personally refurbished. One of the key tools he used to grow was systematically offering future shipping contracts as collateral for the purchase or construction of ships (this method would eventually become the industry standard). By the end of the 1930s, National Bulk Carriers—the company he had founded in 1936—was already one of the leading shipping companies in the United States, with a fleet of sixty vessels. By then, Ludwig had already focused on transporting oil, a highly profitable commodity. He also thought it would be a useful move to have his own shipyards, a strategy that allowed him to ensure the quality of his ships, as well as control production costs.

Leap into oil

And so we arrive at the 1950s, when the manufacture of super transport ships was launched, the supertankersThis initiative was soon followed by the aforementioned Niarchos and Onassis, as well as their father-in-law, Stavros Livanos. Having secured global leadership in crude oil transport—or at least membership among the leading group—he began to diversify his investments. He created an insurance company to insure his own ships, bought oil refineries where his vessels were refueled, and also invested in orange groves, mining, luxury hotels, cattle ranching, and even the world's largest salt production plant, Exportadora de Sal SA (ESSA).

One of his largest projects was Monte Dourado in Brazil, where in 1967 he purchased over 1.5 million hectares to build a gigantic paper mill, after deforesting a vast area of rainforest. The total investment reached $1.4 billion, of which he recovered little more than a third when, in 1982, he had to sell the operation to a group of local banks after a very tense and conflict-ridden relationship with the Brazilian government. His philanthropic efforts focused on the fight against cancer, and to this end, in 1971 he created the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, an organization that since its founding has invested over $1.8 billion in scientific research on the disease.