I was recently studying the various Kinder Morgan energy companies as potential investments, and I got sidetracked into studying the life of Richard Kinder himself. He’s a pretty interesting dude—he was supposed to take over at Enron in 1996, but he got jilted by Kenneth Lay and went and started his own energy firm with Bill Morgan instead. The energy assets that Richard Kinder used to build his empire came out of Enron itself—when the Enron Board decided to get out of the old pipeline business and focus instead on the trading of energy assets, they sold $40 million worth of pipeline assets to Richard Kinder. He was able to use these assets to build a billion-dollar empire, as Kinder now owns more than $7 billion worth of KMI and owns token positions in the other publicly traded members of the Kinder Morgan family.
But what caught my attention is … Read the rest of this article!