Time mags influential people issue is out and it lists Koch as one of them. It has recruited Karl Rove to write the fawning piece.
By grit persistence and hard work they built a 100 billion -a-year business that employs thousands.
Nary a mention of the inheritance with which they started. I tried to find out exactly what how much they inherited and when.
The wiki piece just says they have grown their inheritance by 2000%, an annual compounding rate of 18%. So they must be some super duper managers, right?
I looked up S&P 500 in finance.yahoo.com, it went from 55 in 1960 to 1526 in 2006. A growth of 2774%. Found historical data on Dow Jones too. It went from 615 in 1960 to 12463 in 2006. Growth of 2026%.
So basically for all that "management" these guys did, they might as well put the whole thing in an index fund and realized better gains. Basic truth is, they got where they are due to their inheritance, not because of grit, determination or hard work. Nor are they above average in performance.
Rove will do his best to mythologize about the Kochs. His pay check depends on it. We need to counter this.