Kirk Kerkorian: the Ultimate Chatteler?

Kirk Kerkorian is very rich. Forbes currently lists him as America's 20th richest person, with a fortune of $7 billion.

He's probably best known for his deals where he buys or sells billions of dollars worth of shares in large companies -- such as in MGM or Chrysler.

But did you know that Kirk Kerkorian essentially started by trading chattel? And that is -- in a sense -- what he is still doing now.

I thought it would be fun to point out how far you might be able to go if you took some of Gordon's advice on chattel to the limit....

He used to work cleaning engines for used car dealers, and then he started to do some chatteling on the side. He'd buy five used cars from the dealers for $100, then he'd repair them, and sell the refurbished cars for a profit of around $5 or $10 per car. (These are 1930s prices.) This is exactly the sort of thing Gordon talks about in the chattel report.

In World War II, Kirk Kerkorian became a civilian pilot for the British Royal Air Force, flying bombers from Canada to the UK. After the war was over, he used his savings to start buying and selling surplus military planes. Kerkorian discovered that the profits were much better in buying and selling surplus planes than with used cars. He could buy a surplus military plane for $7,000 to $10,000, and then sell it for as much as $60,000.

When you think about it, this is still just trading chattel -- but on a much larger scale.

He also started a plane charter service on the side, so he still had another way of making money if he couldn't sell the plane. The fact that his planes were being used in his charter service also gave people confidence that his planes were "airworthy" and made them easier to sell.

Kerkorian kept buying and selling, and building up his money -- just as Gordon teaches.

He made a real breakthrough in his profits when he bought the still-good parts of two Lockheed Constellation transport planes that had crashed, and used the parts to construct a working airplane. He sank $480,000 into buying the parts and the repair work, then he leased the plane for a couple years netting him $350,000. After that, he sold it for $600,000 -- for a total *profit* of $470,000. He almost doubled his money -- not a bad return on investment!

Eventually, Kirk Kerkorian grew his charter airline service into a fully-fledged regional airline -- TransInternational Airlines. While running an airline is not really chattel-related, remember that his airline business really started as a *spin-off* of his chattel trading in surplus airplanes. He took the company public in 1965, and sold all his shares a few years later, netting him $104 million.

Now, I'll skip ahead a few years. I'm going to skip over Kerkorian's role in building hotels in Las Vegas, and jump to Kerkorian's deals with companies -- and how, in reality, here he did the same thing that he did with chattel.

Kerkorian has bought and sold huge shares in companies over the years. Some he has held multiple times -- for example he has bought and sold huge stakes in MGM three times. But let's examine what he does more precisely.

When he's bought into a company, Kerkorian has bought a huge stake, enough so that he could have control. This is beyond the means of the vast majority of people -- but remember, his wealth all started with chattel.

Then, he treated the company, in a sense, just like he did his used cars or surplus airplanes. He would "fix" the company up. He's worked with -- and sometimes against -- the management in order to improve company profits. Once the company profits improved, the share price would go up. Then Kerkorian would sell his shares, and make a good profit on the deal.

He's done this many times over the past few decades -- and he's still doing it now. And when you think about it, it's precisely what he did with chattel. The principles of buying chattel, improving it, then selling it served Kerkorian well, all the way up to his current multi-billionaire status. What changed was what he bought and sold.

You could be a "small potatoes" type, and that's the beauty of chattel -- you can do it even if you only have a small amount of money. But as this story shows, you are not limited there.

As your cash reserves grow, you can still continue to buy and sell chattel for larger and larger things -- whether they are cars, airplanes, or large chunks of companies. And this is just what Gordon teaches, for those of you who have the Chattel Report.

You can start with small potatoes, and work your way up. :)

Best wishes,

Dien Rice