Julian armand hammer net worth

(b. 21 May 1898 in New York City; d. 10 December 1990 in Los Angeles, California), controversial twentieth-century industrialist, art collector, and philanthropist with business and family ties to Soviet Russia, who, during the 1960s, rescued Occidental Petroleum Company from the brink of financial ruin.

Hammer was one of two sons of the Russian immigrants Julius Hammer, a physician and the owner of a pharmaceutical outlet, and Rose Lipschitz. (Rose Lipschitz also had a son from a previous marriage.) An interesting legend that circulated about Hammer's name is that Hammer's father, leader of the U.S. Communist Party, named him for the Communist Party arm-and-hammer symbol. Hammer operated the family pharmaceutical firm while earning his medical degree from Columbia University Medical School and developed the company into a million-dollar venture.

After graduating in 1921, Hammer went to Soviet Russia, where he developed a unique rapport with Vladimir Lenin, the first premier of the USSR, and secured the rights to export grain to Russia. In 1925 Hammer built a successful pencil factory in the Soviet Union, which he sold back to the Soviet government before returning to the United States in 1928. Over the next few years, Hammer continued to travel back and forth between the two countries, nurturing a variety of business interests. Hammer married Olga van Root, a singer he met in the Soviet Union, in 1927; they had a son, Hammer's only legitimate child, and divorced in 1943. He married his second wife, Angela Carey Zevely, an opera singer, the same year; they divorced in January of 1956. Hammer had a daughter out of wedlock in 1956 with Bettye Murphy, his mistress of many years.

During the Great Depression, Hammer sponsored a series of retail art sales at prominent department stores in New York City and elsewhere. The first of these sales featured pieces of the treasure of the Romanovs, the last Russian royal family, assassinated in 1918 when the Bolsheviks came to power; the treasure had been secured by Hammer while he was in Russia. In 1941 he used a similar method of retailing fine art to liquidate the art treasures of the millionaire American publisher William Randolph Hearst. At that time Hammer was also a breeder of prize Angus cattle and a manufacturer of whisky.

In the late 1950s Hammer acquired Occidental Petroleum, a faltering oil firm dating back to the 1920s. He invested $50,000 to purchase a 50 percent interest in the development of two new wells for the company in 1956, when Occidental stock was valued at $100,000. Hammer anticipated a loss and subsequent tax write-off from the exploration venture; instead he realized a profitable oil find, which launched Occidental stock into a growth pattern. Company shares increased from a low of eighteen cents to $1 per share, inspiring Hammer to speculate on a field of nine existing wells, which he acquired for $1 million. By 1960 Occidental's red ink ledger was reduced to a small loss of only $127,000, and by 1961 Occidental stock had appreciated to $10 million—although some critics maintained that Hammer buoyed stock prices to his advantage by exaggerating unsubstantiated rumors of lucrative geological discoveries on the part of Occidental.

In the wake of this early success, Hammer diversified and embarked on an aggressive acquisition strategy, buying and selling other companies and utilizing Occidental stock like a form of private currency to purchase each new enterprise. In December 1961 Occidental acquired an exploration site in Lathrup, California. One high-volume well discovered in that field was estimated to contain $200 million worth of crude oil and an unprecedented reserve of natural gas. It was the largest petroleum find in the history of California. The rising value of Occidental Petroleum stock reflected Hammer's fortuitous risk taking, and the shares increased in value to $15 per share, up from $4 in a matter of months.

Hammer in 1963 set off a boom in the sulfur market when Occidental purchased Best Fertilizer Company. In need of sulfur to manufacture the fertilizer, Hammer mined sites in northern Florida. The Florida mines realized sufficient product to supply another Occidental acquisition, Jefferson Lake Sulfur Company of Texas, which Hammer had acquired in a deal to purchase 70 percent of Jefferson Lake Petro Chemicals of Canada. The stabilization of Hammer's fertilizer empire generated a spike in the price of sulfur, causing it to quadruple. Hammer then built a concentrating plant in Florida and arranged an $8-billion deal with the USSR for the export of sulfur. After completing a stock-based purchase by Occidental to acquire International Ore and Fertilizer Company (Intercore), Hammer began exportation to fifty-nine nations. The fertilizer export operation by then accounted for 90 percent of Occidental's earnings.

In February 1961 Hammer visited the Soviet Union, marking his first visit to his family's homeland in more than twenty-five years. Before his departure he attempted unsuccessfully to secure an endorsement from President John F. Kennedy in support of any anticipated industrial venture that might transpire. When he failed in this effort, he made an arrangement instead to represent Kennedy's secretary of commerce, Luther Hodges. Traveling as a private citizen, Hammer departed for the Soviet Union on 11 February. Through personal influence with the deputy prime minister, Anastas Mikoyan, Hammer secured a meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to discuss trade. Hammer returned to the Soviet Union in June 1964, and at that time he developed a plan with Khrushchev to build ten sulfur-processing plants in Siberia. The facilities were slated to provide $1 billion of concentrate for use in the production of fifty million tons of fertilizer annually by the Soviet Union.

Hammer solidified the deal by sending two Angus heifers and two bulls to Khrushchev, but just weeks after finalizing the agreement, Khrushchev was deposed, and the fertilizer project was shelved during the transition to a new administration. The following year Hammer established Occidental International, a government relations firm, which made successful inroads in influencing the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, always with the goal of entrenching Hammer's position as a primary conduit for commerce with the Soviet Union, a function he accomplished admirably throughout his lifetime.

In 1961 Hammer also had established a wholly owned subsidiary of Occidental in Libya. The Arabian oil industry at that time was the bastion of the so-called Seven Sisters cartel, consisting of Standard Oil of New York, Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Rockefeller Holding, Gulf Oil, Texaco, and Anglo-Persian Oil. These companies controlled all of the Arabian oil wealth with the exception of those in Libya, a new state organized by theUnited Nations in December 1951. With only one million people, an impoverished economy, and a vast desert waste-land, Libya was a no-man's-land among petroleum speculators. In 1955 the Libyan government had allotted the first of eighty-five oil-drilling concessions to private developers, but in 1965 the concessions automatically reverted to the Libyan monarchy of King Idris. As the head of the government, Idris reopened the bidding on the newly apportioned concessions, and Hammer returned to Libya in 1966 for the purpose of finalizing the acquisition by Occidental of some of these oil fields once operated by Mobil Oil.

With characteristic persistence and shrewd bartering, and as a result of clandestine deal making, Hammer successfully upstaged the Seven Sisters and secured the drilling rights to two rich inland oil fields. When Occidental made its original bid on 26 July 1965, it offered Libya a water-drilling project, to be located in al-Kufrah, which would provide desert irrigation at no charge to the Libyan government in return for the oil concession. When the oil fields were awarded in February 1967, Occidental received two rich sites. The company struck oil in December, with the strike estimated at three billion barrels in the two fields combined. Oil at that time was selling for $1 per barrel; the discovery caused Occidental stock to jump to $100 per share.

Hammer then contracted with Bechtel Corporation in San Francisco to finance and build a forty-inch-diameter pipeline across the desert to bring oil from the exploration site to the Mediterranean coast. Also contracted was the construction of floating docks at Ez Zueitina, from August 1967 through February 1968. Following a strike in December 1967, Occidental Petroleum started shipping by the spring of 1968. As Occidental stock peaked, Hammer traded company shares in return for new industrial acquisitions, including Island Creek Coal. The Libyan oil fields, meanwhile, were pumped to a capacity of 600,000 barrels per day and increased to 800,000 barrels by 1969.

That same year Colonel Muammar al-Gadhafi (a Libyan revolutionary) accomplished a bloodless coup over the Libyan monarchy, leaving Occidental dramatically disadvantaged in bargaining for oil rights. The new Libyan government coerced Hammer to slow the output from Occidental's wells by threatening to expose the illicit deal making, which had clinched Hammer's oil contract with Libya in 1967. Hammer attempted, but failed, to procure additional oil from the Seven Sisters cartel, a situation that left him with few options but further dealings with the new Libyan government. Before the end of the summer of 1970, Hammer had agreed to a deal that gave Libya virtual control over the output from the national oil fields, regardless of which concessionaire might be mining the sites at any given time. The agreement between Occidental and Libya set a precedent, and it was not long before the Seven Sisters cartel fell prey to similar strategies imposed by other Arab governments. By means of such agreements, Libya and a growing consortium, called the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), took control of Middle Eastern oil and acquired the power to effect future pricing and supply. Hammer was criticized roundly for his dealings with Libya, which were considered to have had a huge impact on the increase in oil prices worldwide due to the strengthening of OPEC.

Hammer entered into an impressive round of philanthropic ventures during the 1960s, influenced by his third wife, the socialite Francis Tolman, whom he had married in 1956. (The couple had no children.) Among these charitable projects was a sizable grant to the Jonas Salk Institute to fund the establishment of the Armand Hammer Cancer Center. The Hammers also donated the twenty-acre family retreat of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Campobello—including the original furnishings—as a joint gift to the U.S. and Canadian governments. The estate was opened to the public officially on 20 August 1964; it is known as the Roosevelt Campobello International Park. Hammer died of bone cancer at the age of ninety-two and is buried at Westwood Village Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Armand Hammer wrote his autobiography, Hammer, with Neil Lyndon (1987). Bob Considine chronicles the life of Hammer in The Remarkable Life of Armand Hammer (1975). Edward Jay Epstein paints a dubious picture of Hammer in Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer (1996). An obituary is in the New York Times (12 Dec. 1990).

Gloria Cooksey