Time: The Hunt Brothers
The Million Dollar Question: Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt did the same trade, lost it in the same week of March 1980, were found liable by the same jury in 1988, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on the same day that September, and settled the regulator’s manipulation case in 1989. One of them later returned to the Forbes 400. How much was he worth on the last Forbes 400 he appeared on?
A) Nothing — neither one returned B) $250 million C) $1.4 billion D) $4.9 billionRead on for the answer.
On 1 January 1980 two brothers from Dallas and a company they half-owned with two Saudi investors controlled about 195 million ounces of silver between them. Sixteen days later, at the price peak, the position had an apparent value of more than $9.8 billion. Eight weeks after that, it could not produce $44 million.
Both numbers come from the same document — the staff report the Securities and Exchange Commission published on the episode in October 1982 — and the second is the only reason anyone still talks about the first.
This series asks about the past the questions the rest of the site asks about the present. Here the question is narrow and unromantic: what does it actually take to lose a top-ten American fortune, and does it stay lost?
What the Hunt brothers did with silver
Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt were sons of H.L. Hunt, whose East Texas oil leases built one of the largest private fortunes in the United States. They began buying silver futures in 1973. The SEC’s account of their reasoning is plain: they became convinced that silver, then around $2 an ounce, was underpriced and a good investment. The inflation-hedge framing that attaches to the story in retrospect is the family’s and the press’s, not the regulator’s.
The accumulation that matters is the last six months of 1979. Per the SEC staff report, The Silver Crisis of 1980 (October 1982), the silver held by the two brothers and International Metals Investment Company — the vehicle formed in 1979 and owned 50% by Hunt interests and 50% by two Saudi investors — “increased from approximately 123 million ounces at July 31, 1979, to 195 million ounces at January 1, 1980” (p. 32). Over the same stretch the price went from about $9.00 to about $35.00 an ounce, and the apparent value of the position rose “from approximately $1.1 billion to $6.8 billion.”
Two details from the same report decide everything that follows.
The first: roughly half of the year-end position was long futures contracts, not metal (pp. 4–5). Futures are bought on a deposit. A position bought on a deposit is marked to market every day, and when it moves against you, you pay the difference that day, in cash.
The second: of the roughly 69 million ounce net increase over those six months, about 46 million ounces were physical silver (p. 33). They were not merely betting on the price. They were removing metal from the market the contracts settled against.
| Date | Hunt + IMIC holdings | Spot silver | Apparent value |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31 July 1979 | ~123 million oz | ~$9 | ~$1.1 billion |
| 31 December 1979 | ~195 million oz | $34.45 | ~$6.6–6.8 billion |
| 17 January 1980 (peak) | ~195 million oz | more than $50 | more than $9.8 billion |
| 27 March 1980 | position being liquidated | $10.80 | — |
Figures from the SEC staff report, pp. 4, 7, 31–33, and cover the Hunts and IMIC together, not the two brothers alone. The report gives $6.6 billion on p. 4 and $6.8 billion on p. 33 for the same year-end position and does not reconcile the two.
The position, in the regulators’ own numbers
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission measured the same thing differently, and its figures are the ones that explain why the exchanges intervened.
In testimony delivered on 25 March 2010, the CFTC’s general counsel summarised the agency’s May 1980 report on the episode. As of 27 December 1979, “the bulk amount of silver controlled by the Hunts was 90.3 million ounces,” with a second group of traders known as the Conti Group holding 28.6 million more. Together those traders “owned in excess of 50 percent of deliverable silver stocks in COMEX-licensed depositories” and in excess of 65% of the stocks in depositories licensed by the Chicago Board of Trade.
Then the figure that matters, and it needs reading carefully. At that same end-December 1979 date, those two groups held long positions in the March 1980 silver futures contract that “amount[ed] to 122 percent of the total silver stocks in licensed depositories,” and that came to roughly 57% of that contract’s total open interest. The 122% is a measure taken in December, on one delivery month — not a snapshot of March.
A hundred and twenty-two percent is not a statement about the world’s silver. The Hunts never owned most of the metal on earth, and the CFTC never said they did. It is a statement about the delivery mechanism: they held contracts calling for more silver than sat in the warehouses those contracts were written against. Anyone short had to buy it from the people who already had it.
The exchanges responded in two steps. On 7 January 1980 the COMEX used emergency authority to impose speculative position limits on silver, citing “the concentration of very large long positions in the silver market in the hands of several entities.” The CFTC made those limits permanent that April at 500 contracts in the spot and next month and 2,000 across all months combined, describing them as the levels the exchanges had already adopted on an emergency basis. Secondary accounts call this package Silver Rule 7 and describe it variously as a margin restriction, a cap on deliveries, or both; the CFTC’s own description is of position limits, and that is the one followed here. On Monday 21 January the COMEX went further, imposing an emergency rule limiting silver futures trading to liquidation only; the Chicago Board of Trade followed the next morning (SEC report, p. 34). On 22 January the spot price fell about $10 in a day, settling at $34.00 on the COMEX (SEC report, p. 35).
The Hunts’ complaint ever after was that the rules were changed while they were in the trade. That is true as a matter of sequence. It is also true that the rules were changed because of the position, and that the position was financed with borrowed money — silver-related borrowing reached $522 million by 17 January, and net borrowing grew by roughly $896 million over the episode (SEC report, pp. 34, 38).
Silver Thursday: fourteen trading days
The collapse was not a single day. Per the SEC report (p. 7), silver fell “from $29.75 to $10.80 in the 14 business days ending Thursday, March 27.”
What killed the position was the daily settlement, not the eventual price. The record of that fortnight reads as a sequence of unmet cash calls (pp. 40–41):
- 13 March. IMIC cannot meet a $44 million variation margin call at Merrill Lynch on a 3,808-contract position, and does not pay about $12 million due on 600,000 ounces in London.
- 17 March. The Hunts tell Bache Halsey Stuart Shields they cannot cover a $44 million margin call in the family accounts.
- 26 March. They tell Bache, Merrill Lynch and ACLI that they are stopping margin payments. The night before the default they meet those three firms at the Drake Hotel (p. 180). Bache asks the COMEX board not to open the silver market the following morning (p. 164 n.160).
- 27 March. The market opens. Silver closes at $10.80.
- 28 March. They fail to meet $78.9 million in margin on forward commitments with Swiss Bank Corporation. As at that date, Herbert Hunt, Bunker Hunt and IMIC have “approximately $1.75 billion in silver related obligations,” excluding margin calls.
In January the Hunt-and-IMIC position had been worth, on paper, more than $9.8 billion. In March it could not produce $44 million on the day the money was due. That gap is the entire mechanism of the story: a fortune held in an asset that settles daily, against cash that does not.
On the Sunday night of that weekend, Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker and senior bank officials at the Reserve City Bankers Association convention in Boca Raton were, in the report’s words, “discussing the potential for a financial disaster the next day” as news of the impending Engelhard default became public (p. 41). Nearly four weeks earlier, on 4 March, Barclays had refused a $100 million loan request, citing among its reasons the Fed’s October 1979 credit restraint programme (p. 38).
The $1.1 billion rescue, and what it cost
The resolution was a loan, and the loan is where the fortune actually went.
A consortium of 13 banks extended $1.1 billion to Placid Oil, the family company, in a transaction completed by 31 May 1980 (SEC report, p. 43). It was secured on Placid’s oil and gas properties, refineries and pipeline systems. Bunker and Herbert guaranteed it personally, and the guarantee was secured by a first lien on personal assets the report values at $2.84 billion, of which about $2.3 billion was their interest in the Beaufort Sea. Interest ran at a premium over prime, payable quarterly, under cash-flow covenants.
In September 2026 dollars that $1.1 billion is about $4.5 billion — this piece’s arithmetic, using the BLS CPI-U for May 1980, the month the loan was completed.
The other large obligation was settled in metal and acreage. In January the Hunts had agreed to buy about 28.5 million ounces at roughly $36 an ounce, around $1.04 billion, posting 8.5 million ounces as collateral (pp. 36–37). On 31 March they settled the remaining balance of roughly $635 million by forgoing delivery, surrendering the 8.5 million ounces, and transferring 20% of their Beaufort Sea interest (p. 41).
Note what the rescue did and did not do. It kept the brokers standing and it kept the Hunts out of immediate default. It did not preserve the fortune. It converted a paper fortune into a secured, covenanted, personally guaranteed debt against the family’s oil assets — which is to say it put the thing that had made the money behind the thing that had lost it. Oil prices halved in 1986, which cannot have helped the value of what had been pledged — though the loan documents are not public and the report predates that fall.
The bill: eight years, three forums
The civil case. Minpeco, S.A., the Peruvian state minerals marketing company, had been short silver, and sued. The trial began in February 1988 and the verdict came that August. According to UPI’s contemporaneous report, a jury of three men and three women, deliberating six days, found Nelson Bunker Hunt, William Herbert Hunt and Lamar Hunt liable under fraud, commodities and antitrust law; Bunker and Herbert were also found liable on racketeering claims, and Lamar was not. Damages exceeded $130 million — Minpeco calculated $134 million, the Hunts $132.6 million. Six of the 23 original defendants had settled before trial, and UPI names four of them — E.F. Hutton, Merrill Lynch, Prudential-Bache and AML Futures — as having paid Minpeco $64.7 million. Time’s account of the same verdict describes the $134 million as what remained after trebling the jury’s damages and deducting those earlier settlements; the two reports are not quite reconcilable and both are given here. Roughly $379 million in September 2026 dollars, by this piece’s arithmetic on the $134 million figure.
The bankruptcy. Per the bankruptcy court’s own record in Pate v. Hunt, Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt filed Chapter 11 petitions on 21 September 1988, Case Nos. 388-35726 and 388-35725; their spouses filed two days later. In a later adversary proceeding in those cases, the plaintiffs argued that the Internal Revenue Service was “the largest creditor of the Debtors” — not Minpeco, and not the banks. That is a party’s characterisation recorded by the court, not a finding of the court.
The regulator. The CFTC had filed an administrative complaint in February 1985, In the matter of Nelson Bunker Hunt et al., Docket No. 85-12, alleging manipulation and attempted manipulation of silver prices in 1979 and 1980. As a related bankruptcy opinion records, the agency sought to “permanently enjoin the Debtors and the other respondents from all future trading in commodity futures markets,” plus civil penalties “of not more than $100,000 for each alleged violation.” It was resolved by settlement in December 1989. The terms as reported at the time — a $10 million fine on each brother and a bar from the futures markets — come from newspaper accounts rather than from any agency document this piece could retrieve, and at least one secondary summary attributes the $10 million only to Bunker. The fine and the bar are not in doubt; the per-brother amount is less certain than it is usually written.
No criminal charges were brought over the silver episode. (Bunker Hunt had been indicted on unrelated obstruction and wiretapping charges in 1975, and acquitted.)
The answer is D: what the Forbes 400 recorded
The first Forbes 400 was published in 1982, two years after Silver Thursday, which makes it an unusually clean instrument for this question. Our own 1982–2026 panel of the list carries nine H.L. Hunt heirs in 1982, with a combined $5.4 billion among the 436 entries that year. Bunker, Herbert, Lamar and their sister Caroline Rose Hunt were each carried at $1.0 billion.
The write-down took four more years.
| Year | Nelson Bunker | W. Herbert | Lamar |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1982 | $1.0bn | $1.0bn | $1.0bn |
| 1983 | $1.4bn | — | $500m |
| 1984 | $1.4bn | $1.0bn | $500m |
| 1985 | $900m | $800m | $500m |
| 1986 | $400m | $350m | $250m |
| 1987 | off the list | off the list | off the list |
That is the most interesting thing in the panel. The list did not mark the silver loss when it happened. It carried Bunker at $1.0 billion in 1982 and raised him to $1.4 billion in 1983 and 1984 — then cut him by 71% across 1985 and 1986, the years in which the Minpeco litigation, the IRS claims and the oil price collapse all became visible at once. That the markdown tracked those events rather than the 1980 loss is this piece’s reading of the series, not something the list explains. Estimated wealth is estimated when the estimator notices.
By 1987 only two Hunts remained on the list: Ray Lee Hunt at $1.3 billion and Caroline Rose Hunt at $900 million. Neither had traded silver.
Then, in 2013, William Herbert Hunt reappeared at $3.0 billion, ranked 166th — and stayed, at $2.8bn, $2.3bn, $1.9bn and $2.1bn through 2017, the last year our panel covers. He had rebuilt through Petro-Hunt in the Williston Basin. On 6 December 2012, per Halcón Resources’ annual report, Halcón completed the purchase of entities holding about 81,000 net acres from “two affiliated privately held companies, Petro-Hunt, L.L.C. and Pillar Energy, LLC,” for “a total adjusted purchase price of approximately $1.5 billion.” The Forbes 400 of 2023 put him at $4.9 billion, tied for 227th — the last Forbes 400 he appeared on, and the answer to the question above: D. Forbes continued to carry an estimate for him into 2024, the year he died.
Herbert Hunt died on 9 April 2024, aged 95, the last surviving original inductee of the All-American Wildcatters. Bunker Hunt died on 21 October 2014, aged 88, after what the Dallas Morning News described as cancer and dementia; the Boston Globe’s obituary records that he still had millions in trusts his father had set up, and quotes his line from 1980: “A billion dollars ain’t what it used to be.”
The family’s position today sits with the half-brother who stayed out of it. The 2026 Forbes 400 carries Ray Lee Hunt, 83, of Dallas, at $8.3 billion, ranked 199th — the largest figure any H.L. Hunt heir has ever been given on that list.
What people get wrong
That the Hunts cornered the world silver market. They did not own most of the world’s silver and no regulator said so. The CFTC’s measures are of deliverable stocks in licensed warehouses and of open interest in two exchanges’ contracts. Holding 122% of warehouse stocks is a claim on a delivery mechanism, not on a metal.
That Bunker Hunt was ever worth $16 billion. The figure in the obituaries is an estimate of a pre-1973 peak that included eight million acres of Libyan oil concessions later nationalised. It has no contemporaneous published count behind it. The first independent list that counted him at all, two years after the crash, said $1.0 billion — about $3.5 billion in September 2026 money.
That the exchange rules caused the collapse. The liquidation-only order came on 21 January; the price was still above $29 on 10 March. What arrived in between was a daily cash obligation on a position roughly half-funded by borrowing. Both the rule change and the leverage are in the record, and the 1988 jury’s finding was about manipulation, not about the exchanges.
That it was a criminal case. The silver matter never was. The consequences were a civil judgment, a regulatory settlement and a bankruptcy — expensive, and entirely non-custodial.
That the fortune was destroyed. One branch of it was reduced to a trust allowance. The other was off the Forbes 400 for 26 years and then back on it for at least a decade, larger in nominal terms than it had ever been before.
Bottom line
Silver traded at $56.71 an ounce on 15 October 2026 — above its January 1980 nominal peak, and about a quarter of that peak in real terms. The $50.00 high the SEC recorded for 17 January 1980 is about $217 in September 2026 dollars; $10.80 on Silver Thursday is about $47. Forty-six years later, the metal has not come close to recovering what it lost in those fourteen days.
So the usual consolation is not available here. This is not a story about being right too early. In real terms the Hunts have still not been proved right, and a buyer who held their position from January 1980 to this morning would be down roughly three-quarters in real terms.
What the episode is about is the distance between a price and a cash obligation. Roughly half the position settled every day, in money, against borrowings that grew by nearly $900 million over the run. The SEC counted $1.1 billion of equity in the brothers’ broker accounts — a real cushion, enough to absorb a 31% fall. Silver fell 78% from the January peak to the close on Silver Thursday. The margin was not missing. It was sized for a different market than the one the position had itself created.
The series keeps finding the same shape in different centuries. A fortune that vanishes rarely does so because the owner was stupid about the asset. It does so because the asset was held in a structure that required cash on a day nobody had chosen.
Methods and sources. Holdings, prices, borrowings, margin calls and the rescue loan are from the staff report The Silver Crisis of 1980, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, October 1982, at the pages cited in the text; the document is a scanned OCR text and a small number of figures in it are internally inconsistent, including the $6.6 billion (p. 4) and $6.8 billion (p. 33) valuations of the same year-end 1979 position, which is why both are given. A second gap is left as the report leaves it: the holdings move from approximately 123 million to 195 million ounces, an increase of 72 million, while the report describes the net increase over the period as approximately 69 million ounces (p. 33). The 90.3 million and 28.6 million ounce holdings as of 27 December 1979, the “in excess of 50 percent” of COMEX-licensed deliverable stocks, the 65% CBOT figure, and the 122% of licensed depository stocks and approximately 57% of open interest are from the testimony of CFTC general counsel Dan Berkovitz of 25 March 2010. The 122% and 57% figures are measured at the same end-December 1979 date as the rest and describe the two groups’ long position in the March 1980 futures contract specifically, not a position held in March 1980; the testimony, attributes them to the Commission’s own Report on Recent Developments in the Silver Futures Markets (May 1980). The same testimony is the source for the COMEX emergency position limits of 7 January 1980; the contract levels of 500 and 2,000 appear in its account of the CFTC’s April 1980 approval, described there as the limits the exchanges had already adopted on an emergency basis, which is how they are presented here. The CFTC and SEC measure different things — controlled bullion versus total owned-or-controlled position including futures and forwards — and the 90.3 million and 195 million ounce figures are therefore not alternatives to one another. “Silver Rule 7” is a name used in secondary accounts rather than in either agency document, and those accounts disagree about whether it raised margins, capped deliveries, or both; the text follows the CFTC’s description. The COMEX liquidation-only rule of Monday 21 January and the Chicago Board of Trade’s adoption of the same restriction the following morning are from the SEC report at p. 34; the $10 single-day fall to a $34.00 COMEX settlement on 22 January is from p. 35. The $1.1 billion of equity in the Hunts’ accounts at six broker-dealers, described in the report as a “cushion” sufficient to absorb an $11-an-ounce or 31% decline, is from pp. 4–5; the 78% fall cited against it is this piece’s arithmetic from the $50.00 peak to the $10.80 close of 27 March, and is a peak-to-trough comparison rather than the decline from the price level the report was analysing. IMIC’s ownership, 50% Hunt interests and 50% two Saudi investors, is from p. 27. The 1988 verdict, the jury composition, the six days of deliberation, the finding that Lamar Hunt was liable on fraud, commodities and antitrust claims but not on racketeering, the $134 million and $132.6 million calculations and the $64.7 million paid by four named settling defendants are from UPI, 20 August 1988; that report also states the Hunts had already filed for bankruptcy, which the court record contradicts, and the court record is followed here. The Chapter 11 filing date of 21 September 1988, the case numbers, the spouses’ filings of 23 September and the description of the IRS as the largest creditor are from the bankruptcy court’s memorandum opinion in Pate v. Hunt. The CFTC administrative complaint of February 1985, Docket No. 85-12, the relief sought and the quoted penalty provision are from a related bankruptcy opinion; that opinion predates the settlement and does not record its terms. The December 1989 settlement, the $10 million fine on each brother and the trading ban are as reported by The New York Times on 21 December 1989 under the headline “2 Hunts Fined and Banned From Trades”; that article could not be retrieved directly for this piece and the terms are taken from secondary summaries that cite it, so they are reported as such rather than as a primary record. Forbes 400 person-level figures for 1982–2017 come from our own panel, built on the deposit by Enrico Moretti and Daniel J. Wilson for “Taxing Billionaires: Estate Taxes and the Geographical Location of the Ultra-Wealthy,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 15(2), 2023 (openICPSR project 157481); 2025 and 2026 figures are the Forbes 400 as published by Forbes. The panel has no data for 2018–2024 and nothing is interpolated, which is why the 2023 figure is taken from press reporting of that year’s list rather than from the panel. The nine 1982 heirs and the $5.4 billion total exclude Johnnie Bryan Hunt and Johnelle Hunt, who share the surname and the panel’s family identifier but are the Arkansas trucking family and not related to H.L. Hunt; no 1983 family total is given because the panel’s 1983 rows contain an evident source artifact, a $5.0 billion entry for Swanee Hunt at age 17 against $200 million at age 32 the year before. William Herbert Hunt is absent from the 1983 panel year and present in 1982 and 1984; the gap is in the source rather than a withdrawal from the list, and no inference is drawn from it. Forbes 400 estimates are estimates, and the 1982–1986 series is used here to show when the list recorded the loss, not to date the loss itself. The 2023 ranks and figures for W. Herbert Hunt ($4.9 billion, tied 227th) and Ray Lee Hunt ($7.2 billion, tied 140th) are from CultureMap Dallas’s report on that year’s list. The December 2012 Williston Basin sale, the 81,000 net acres, the named sellers and the approximately $1.5 billion adjusted purchase price (approximately $756.1 million in cash and $695.2 million in newly issued preferred stock) are from Halcón Resources’ Form 10-K for fiscal 2012; the filing does not disclose how the proceeds were divided between the two sellers, so no figure is attributed to W. Herbert Hunt personally. Herbert Hunt’s death on 9 April 2024 at 95 and his career details are from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists; Bunker Hunt’s death, the “$16 billion by some estimates” figure, the Libyan concessions, the surviving trusts and the quoted line are from the Boston Globe obituary of 22 October 2014. The silver price of $56.71 an ounce is as reported by Fortune at 7:15 a.m. ET on 15 October 2026; that article contains an internal inconsistency between its text and its own table on the one-year change, and only the spot level is used here; the characterisation of $56.71 as above the January 1980 nominal peak is a comparison with the SEC’s $50.00 figure and is not a claim about the highest intraday print of 2026. Time’s report of the Minpeco verdict is at “Big Bill for a Bullion Binge,” 29 August 1988. Real-dollar conversions are this piece’s arithmetic using the BLS CPI-U, U.S. city average, all items, not seasonally adjusted: September 2026 = 336.940, from the BLS news release of 14 October 2026; January 1980 = 77.8; May 1980 = 81.8; August 1988 = 119.0; 1982 annual average = 96.5. The rescue loan is converted from May 1980, the month the SEC report says the transaction was completed, rather than from the January base used for the price figures. Forbes 400 figures are estimates by Forbes, including the 2026 figure for Ray Lee Hunt, who is living; none of them is a measured balance sheet. The SEC report enumerates the Hunt family members and entities that held or traded silver in 1979–80, and neither Ray Lee Hunt nor Caroline Rose Hunt is among them, which is the basis for the statement that neither traded silver; a “Carolyn Hunt” who does appear in that enumeration is Nelson Bunker Hunt’s wife, not his sister. Nothing here is investment advice.
Related reading: Falls From Grace: Bankruptcies, Frauds, and Reversed Fortunes · Gold: Wealth Preservation, Fear, and Status · Borrowing Against Wealth: Why the Rich Often Use Debt · Generational Wealth: How Long Fortunes Actually Last · Dynasties: Families That Turn Wealth Into Power · The Forbes 400: The 1982 List, 44 Years Later · The Forbes 400: Churn · Time: Millionaires of 1955
