Marty Lagina: Smart Rich Guy

Yesterday, I twlked about s really dumb multibillionaire, Jack Dorsey. Today I want to talk about Marty Lagina, who so far doesn't seem to be a multibillionaire, but he's a much smarter rich guy nevertheless. Lagina, who is the senior figure on the Curse of Oak Island show, is in effect a star, but it's pretty well implied that he also approves the project plans and signs the checks. The publicly available estimate of his net worth is $100 million, altough he didn't make this money off TV appearances.

It looks like he got rich on fracking in the 1990s, which was smart, . But according to the link,

His company Terra Energy was a pioneer in extracting natural gas from shale around the mid-west in the 1990s. Marty eventually sold Terra Energy to a company called CMS Energy for $58 million. He then launched a new company called Heritage Sustainable to focus on wind power. Heritage is currently planning to build 60 wind turbines in Missaukee, Michigan. That will make Marty the largest wind-energy producer in the entire state of Michigan and one of the largest overall producers in the mid-west. He believes he can eventually power 25% of Michigan's power by wind and wants to replicate that process around the country.

So, let's parse this out. He made a bundle in fracking when it was hot and new, but I would guess that he could see a downside coming from the anti-fossil fuel lobby, so he sold the franchise while it was still relatively uncontroversial. And what did he get into? Why, wind power, of course.

I've got to assume he's politically very savvy, since wind power is the creature of government policy, and utilities are tightly wired into state politics. Most people who get rich leverage it off some version of government licensing or other favor, and it looks as if Lagina's main assets are in green energy -- and I assume he's doing well in it.

If his objective in life was to get rich, he's behaving consistently/ On top of that, he's acting the way the rich have mostly learned to act since the early 20th century -- use your public relations people to keep you out of the news, not in it. He's a public figure on the Oak Island show, which gives him a brand that he can use to his advantage, but he's otherwise low key, and his family is even lower.

What piques my curiosity more than anything else is how Oak Island fits into the picture. Lagina is clearly a savvy operator. He recently said he thinks there's a 40% chance that there was ever a "treasure" in the Oak Island money pit, and only a 20% chance that any of it is still there -- and he said that means he's more optimistic than he was when he started out.

Yet he bought the whole island, and it looks like he's a major player now in the Nova Scotia economy -- Irving Equipment, which does many of his big excavation projects, gives him lots of freebie hats and jackets. It looks like the province gives him whatever permits and waivers he needs.

He's a businessman. There's got to be something in it for him. Off the top of my head, I've got to assume he has a piece of Prometheus Entertainment. The green energy thing likely dovetails with other ambitions in media -- but we'll have to see.

He's a smarter guy than either Zuckerberg or Dorsey.