Kinder is the executive chairman and largest shareholder of Kinder Morgan, a publicly traded energy storage and pipeline company. It operates 147 terminals and 83,000 miles of pipeline that transport natural gas, crude oil, ethanol and other petroleum products. He served as chief executive officer from its founding in 1997 until 2015.
Richard Kinder's net worth of $6.34B can buy ...
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The majority of Kinder's fortune comes from an 11% stake in Kinder Morgan, a publicly traded pipeline and energy storage company he co-founded in 1997. He owns more than 256 million shares in his own name, his wife's name and through a limited partnership he controls, according to a July 2020 Form 4 filing. Kinder Morgan operates 147 terminals and 83,000 miles of pipeline, according to its website.
The billionaire has collected more than $1.6 billion worth of dividends from Kinder Morgan, based on company filings and an analysis of Bloomberg data.
He also has diversified investments consisting of dividend-bearing stocks that were valued at about $1 billion in mid-2013, according to Larry Pierce, a spokesman for the billionaire. Dividends, share sales, cash from the consolidation of the Kinder Morgan companies in November 2014 and market performance since that date are added to his net worth, after adjusting for taxes.
Raised in a small town on the bank of the Mississippi River, the Missouri native befriended the two men who would influence his business career while at the University of Missouri: Kenneth Lay and William Morgan. With Lay, he would help build Enron into a leading energy company in the 1990s. The decision to start unloading physical assets made Kinder uneasy, leading him to leave the company in 1996. With Morgan, he bought some of the assets Enron was selling, forming the basis of Kinder Morgan, a collection of four publicly traded companies that is now the largest pipeline owner and operator in the U.S.
After receiving his law degree at Missouri, Kinder served as a military attorney. He then took a job as a lawyer at a Missouri law firm run by talk show host Rush Limbaugh's father. He started investing in local real estate in the 1970s, until a multi-million-dollar note he guaranteed on a Howard Johnson's motel was called, forcing Kinder into personal bankruptcy. He later repaid the note in full. Morgan helped Kinder get a job in the energy industry as an attorney for Florida Gas. By 1984, Lay's company acquired Florida Gas, uniting the two to create Enron.
After leaving Enron, Kinder focused on acquiring assets -- such as pipelines and storage terminals -- rather than engaging in the energy trading on which Enron's business was built. He later exercised an option to buy out a portion of Morgan's stake, and is now the largest shareholder of Kinder Morgan.
Since creating Kinder Morgan in 1997, the company has increased distributions to shareholders at a 40 percent compounded annual growth rate. Kinder consolidated the four publicly traded entities that are controlled by Kinder Morgan into one company in 2014. From 2011 through early 2015, the business spent $73 billion on acquisitions, including $38 billion for El Paso LLC, a pipeline system.