Nelson Bunker Hunt, who sprang from the right-wing nut H.L. Hunt, lived a life as large as Texas. He was born with a silver spoon his mouth and nearly lost everything trying to corner the silver market. Hunt would have been considered just another eccentric oilman if it wasn’t for the anti-Semitism, his boner for the John Birch Society and other unsavory politics. From his lively New York Times obituary by Robert D. McFadden:

“Bunker Hunt was a jovial 275-pound eccentric who looked a bit like the actor Burl Ives. In the 1960s and ’70s, he was one of the world’s richest men, worth up to $16 billion by some estimates. With his five siblings, heirs of the oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, who sired 15 children by three women and died in 1974, he controlled a staggering family fortune whose value was not publicly reported.

In his heyday, Bunker Hunt owned five million acres of grazing land in Australia, 1,000 thoroughbreds on farms from Ireland to New Zealand, eight million acres of oil fields in Libya, offshore wells in the Philippines and Mexico, and an empire of skyscrapers, cattle ranches, mining interests and other holdings. Home was a French provincial mansion in a Dallas suburb and his 2,000-acre Circle T Ranch 30 miles out of town.

Often likened to Jett Rink, the antihero of Edna Ferber’s Giant, or the scheming J. R. Ewing of the long-running CBS television drama Dallas, he was a nonsmoking teetotaler who cultivated a devil-may-care Texas mystique by inhabiting cheap suits, a battered seven-year-old Cadillac, economy-class airline seats, burger and chili joints, and dusty barnyards in the raucous company of ranch hands.

He was an evangelical Christian close to the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and supported right-wing politicians and causes, including the John Birch Society. He loathed the federal government, warned of international communist conspiracies, spouted anti-Semitic sentiments, did business with the Saudi royal family and bankrolled expeditions to salvage the Titanic and to find Noah’s Ark.”