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Daniel Ludwig, Billionaire Businessman, Dies at 95
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By Eric Pace
Aug. 29, 1992
Daniel Ludwig, Billionaire Businessman, Dies at 95
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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August 29, 1992, Section 1, Page 26Buy Reprints
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This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
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Daniel K. Ludwig, the self-made American shipowner and real estate man who was for years one of the world's richest men, died Thursday afternoon at his midtown Manhattan apartment. He was 95 years old.

The cause of his death was heart failure, and he had been in poor health for several years, said R. Palmer Baker Jr., a lawyer who is Mr. Ludwig's executor.

Mr. Baker said Mr. Ludwig had owned about 60 ocean-going vessels years ago, at the height of his shipping career. He said that over the years, Mr. Ludwig was also "a major participant on an international scale in the production of forest products, oil and gas, coal and other minerals, in hotels and other real estate development programs, and in a number of cattle-ranching and agricultural ventures."

The son of a Michigan real-estate man, Mr. Ludwig was best known in his later years for his unsuccessful billion-dollar development project in a Brazilian jungle enclave the size of Connecticut. In 1982 he made arrangements to give it up after problems that included Brazilian nationalism and bureaucracy and his own volatile executive style. Mr. Baker said Mr. Ludwig retained no land holdings in Brazil at the time of his death.

Mr. Ludwig (pronounced LUDD-wig) was secretive and had assets that were difficult to appraise. Forbes magazine estimated his wealth at $1.2 billion late last year, but the current issue of Fortune magazine does not include him on a list of billionaires. In the early 1970's he gave "substantially all" of his foreign assets to the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Zurich, Mr. Baker said.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Mr. Baker said the current endowment of the institute was about $700 million. Asked what Mr. Ludwig's own net worth was, Mr. Baker declined to reply, but he said Mr. Ludwig's holdings in the United States at the time of his death included a substantial amount of real estate. He declined to elaborate, but he said Mr. Ludwig had no posts in any companies or charitable organization. Shipping Empire Built on Credit

New York businessmen familiar with Mr. Ludwig's holdings said that in the summer of 1990 ill health had left him incapacitated. They said parts of his business empire had been sold off, with the proceeds going to the cancer institute.

In earlier decades, Mr. Ludwig built a huge shipping empire mainly on credit, then embarked on a variety of large-scale, long-term undertakings, lavishly investing the cash earned by his ships and using them as collateral for more loans. His interests extended to more than a score of countries.

Mr. Ludwig went into shipping at the age of 19, using a borrowed $5,000. In 1968, when he was 71, Fortune magazine said he was one of eight Americans worth $500 million or more, and in 1976 the magazine said he and the insurance executive John D. MacArthur were the country's only billionaires or near-billionaires.

Mr. Ludwig's epic Brazilian development project, known as Jari, was in an isolated inland enclave in the Amazon region in the north of the country. He bought the jungle-covered land for $3 million in 1967, planning to reforest much of it with fast-growing Burmese melina trees to meet a world fiber shortage that he -- correctly -- thought was coming in the 1970's and 1980's.

The project, whose operations ranged from forestry and agriculture to mining and cattle-ranching, drew criticism from conservationists. .

But Mr. Ludwig and the foreign experts he brought in persevered, bulldozing existing forest, tapping deposits of kaolin and bauxite and building a 26-mile railroad, 3,000 miles of trails and roads and settlements that had 30,000 inhabitants by early 1982. Equipment imported to the enclave included a $200 million pulp mill.

Eventually, after more than a decade, Mr. Ludwig warned a Brazilian Government leader, Gen. Golbery do Couto e Silva, that he would close Jari if the Government did not ease stubborn bureaucratic problems he was facing, and provide him with financial relief.

The Brazilian leadership withheld the aid Mr. Ludwig sought, and he eventually set about abandoning Jari. His failing health was officially given as the reason.

By early 1982 an arrangement had been worked out whereby a Brazilian state commercial bank, the Banco do Brazil, other companies and a Brazilian industrialist, Augusto Azevedo Antunes, were to come up with $280 million by the mid-1980's to take over the project. A new Jari company was to be formed, and its prospectus reported that Mr. Ludwig had invested $863 million in the undertaking since buying the land. The prospectus said his outlay had been the equivalent of $1.15 billion at 1981 prices.

That colossal, unsuccessful gamble by Mr. Ludwig reflected some of the same qualities that made him so extraordinarily successful in other enterprises: his tireless entrepreneurial drive -- he started his first business venture when he was 9 years old -- coupled with an unusual amount of imagination and foresight and with the constant use of what he called his antennae for sensing a potential profit.

"Nearly everyone has those antennae; most people just don't use them," he once told an interviewer. "I spend my time putting projects together."

For decades Mr. Ludwig's main corporate vehicle was a New York-based shipping concern, National Bulk Carriers Inc., which he owned outright and built into one of the world's largest private multinational corporations. The corporation once said in a brochure that it had more than 20,000 employees and "several billion dollars in assets."

But the businessmen familiar with Mr. Ludwig's holdings said in 1990 that the interests and operations of National Bulk Carriers had very greatly diminished. And Forbes magazine reported in October 1990 that his shipping interests had been permitted to dwindle.

Mr. Ludwig emphasized patience, discernment and creativity in his business affairs. "We may look at 20 possible ventures before we find one that suits our thinking," he once told an interviewer. "The raw materials of a deal, before it is assembled, look very different from the final arrangement."

In the 1940's a process for welding rather than riveting tankers was developed at a Virginia shipyard that Mr. Ludwig ran, and in the 1950's he went into shipbuilding in Japan to take advantage of low labor costs and other favorable conditions. There he turned out a succession of bulk carriers and ever-larger tankers, pioneering the development of what came to be known as the supertanker. Hard Businessman, Casual Stroller

Mr. Ludwig concentrated on his business and was casual and unpretentious about much of the rest his life.

A tall, lean man with a pronounced stoop, he used to be seen strolling in midtown Manhattan. He wore the same plastic raincoat for years. He liked to lunch in midtown restaurants, often alone. He used to make and receive many telephone calls himself. He often flew economy class. And for recreation he liked to watch television reruns of old movies starring his friend Clark Gable.

"Clark was all man," he once recalled crustily. "He stood head and shoulders above all those two-bit phonies in Hollywood today."

Mr. Ludwig was often profane and short-tempered in his business dealings. In 1938, after he made indirect use of one of his ships as security for a loan, the vessel went astray in a hurricane. When a worried banker called and asked, "How's my collateral?" Mr. Ludwig said, "When we find the goddamn thing I'll let you know."

And in the 1950's, cables used to arrive at the Ludwig shipyard offices in Japan with such blunt messages as: "Mr. Ludwig wants to know what the hell is holding you up."

Despite his crustiness, Mr. Ludwig was firmly loyal to some old associates. "I like to do business with friends," he told an interviewer in 1957. "Why the hell should I deal with somebody who isn't my friend?"

Mr. Ludwig was an economic conservative, and some of his famous friends and acquaintances were on the conservative side. They included Richard M. Nixon, whom Mr. Ludwig and his second wife, Gertrude Virginia Ludwig, had to dinner before he became President, and Ronald Reagan, whose photograph was said to be displayed in Mr. Ludwig's apartment. Early Investment In a Sunken Boat

Boating and shipping were in Daniel Keith Ludwig's blood. Four uncles were captains of vessels plying the Great Lakes, and he was born, on June 24, 1897, on the shore of Lake Michigan, in the little port of South Haven, Mich., near the site of a local landmark, Ludwig's Pier. It had been built by his grandfather.

As a 9-year-old boy, the story goes, Daniel Ludwig earned money by selling popcorn and shining shoes, and he paid $75 for a sunken small boat that he then repaired and rented out for more than $150.

He left school after the eighth grade, became a salesman for a ship supplies firm, went to night school and worked for a time at a marine engine manufacturing company.

It was then, at the age of 19, that Mr. Ludwig went into business on his own, using the $5,000, which had been borrowed mainly on his father's signature. He spent the money on an old paddle steamer, converted it into a barge and used it as the nucleus for a fleet of freight vessels, which he used for hauling molasses and wood. But business was slow and he looked around for ways to improve it.

"I had to hit on something or I was busted," he later recalled.

He went into the tanker business, starting by chartering a single tanker. In 1926, he hurt his back badly in an explosion on board a tanker. Undaunted by the years of pain that followed, he persisted in the shipping business.

During the 1930's, despite the Depression, Mr. Ludwig managed to expand his operations. A watershed in his career was a 1936 Chemical Bank loan. He used it to buy several freight vessels that he made over into tankers, substantially expanding his operations. Extended Holdings Beyond Shipping

By the end of World War II, Mr. Ludwig was the owner of the United States' fifth-largest tanker fleet. He set about building more and bigger tankers at the shipyard he leased in 1951 in the naval base city of Kure in southwestern Japan.

In the 1960's, having become one of the richest shipowners, he began branching out into many other fields, and by the mid-1970's, his interests included the United Pocahontas Coal Company in West Virginia, with an annual output of a million tons of low-sulfur, high-grade coal; mining in Australia (in 1976 he sold half a coal mine there to British Petroleum for $200 million); savings and loan associations; half-interest in an Australian insurance company, and a private merchant banking firm, European-American Securities Inc.

In October 1990, Forbes magazine reported that Mr. Ludwig's investments had included several savings and loan associations that it said were then operated by Resolution Trust. Forbes also said a large-scale development undertaking by Mr. Ludwig in New Jersey had become "stalled."

Mr. Ludwig was divorced in 1937 from his first wife, Gladys Madeline Ludwig, after 9 years of marriage, a biographer of Mr. Ludwig, Jerry Shields, wrote in a 1986 book, "The Invisible Billionaire: Daniel Ludwig." Mr. Ludwig married his second wife later in 1937.

Mr. Ludwig's executor, Mr. Baker, said the businessman's only survivor was his wife.

Mr. Baker said a daughter, Patricia Ludwig, was born to Mr. Ludwig's first wife during the marriage and survives, but that Mr. Ludwig did not acknowledge her as his child.

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 29, 1992, Section 1, Page 26 of the National edition with the headline: Daniel Ludwig, Billionaire Businessman, Dies at 95. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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