David Howard Murdock (April 11, 1923 – June 9, 2025) was an American

billionaire A billionaire is a person with a net worth of at least 1,000,000,000, one billion units of a given currency, usually of a major currency such as the United States dollar, euro, or pound sterling. It is a sub-category of the concept of the ultr ...

businessman,

plant-based diet A plant-based diet is a diet consisting mostly or entirely of plant-based foods. It encompasses a wide range of dietary patterns that contain low amounts of animal products and high amounts of fiber-rich plant products such as vegetables ...

advocate and philanthropist.

Early career

Murdock was born on April 11, 1923, in Kansas City, Missouri. His father was a traveling salesman; his mother worked as a laundress and housekeeper to make ends meet. He was the middle child of three; he had two sisters. He was close to his mother, who died at 42 of cancer. He grew up in Montgomery Township, Ohio, and dropped out of high school in the 9th grade. He was drafted by the

United States Army The United States Army (USA) is the primary Land warfare, land service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is designated as the Army of the United States in the United States Constitution.Article II, section 2, clause 1 of th ...

in 1943 during

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

. Upon relocating to

Detroit Detroit ( , ) is the List of municipalities in Michigan, most populous city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is situated on the bank of the Detroit River across from Windsor, Ontario. It had a population of 639,111 at the 2020 United State ...

after the war, Murdock was homeless and destitute. Due to a chance encounter with a good samaritan, he obtained a $1,200 loan to buy a closing

diner A diner is a type of restaurant found across the United States and Canada, as well as parts of Western Europe and Australia. Diners offer a wide range of cuisine, mostly American cuisine, a casual atmosphere, and, characteristically, a comb ...

, flipping it for a $700 profit ten months later. He moved to

Phoenix, Arizona Phoenix ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of cities and towns in Arizona#List of cities and towns, most populous city of the U.S. state of Arizona. With over 1.6 million residents at the 2020 census, it is the ...

, and began working there, first in housing and then commercial real estate. When the real estate market collapsed in the 1960s, he moved to

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

where he continued developing real estate opportunities, leading to a string of acquisitions. In 1978, he acquired control of International Mining. He became the largest shareholder in L.A.-based

Occidental Petroleum Occidental Petroleum Corporation (often abbreviated Oxy in reference to its ticker symbol and logo) is an American company engaged in hydrocarbon exploration in the United States and the Middle East as well as petrochemical manufacturing in the ...

, by selling the corporation his 18% share of the Iowa Beef Packers company for $800 million worth of Occidental stock in May 1981 with support from

Armand Hammer Armand Hammer (May 21, 1898 – December 10, 1990) was an American businessman and philanthropist. The son of a Russian Empire-born communist activist, Hammer trained as a physician before beginning his career in trade with the newly estab ...

: after this acquisition, Occidental, through its ownership of IBP and with support from

Leonid Kostandov Leonid Kostandov (; 27 November 1915 – 5 September 1984) was a Soviet engineer and politician who served as the minister of the chemical industry between 1965 and 1980 and as the deputy premier from 1980 to his death. Biography Being a nati ...

, became the largest United States supplier of beef to the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

Businesses

Murdock purchased

Cannon Mills The Cannon Mills Company was an American textile manufacturing company based in Kannapolis, North Carolina, that mainly produced towels and bed sheets. Founded in 1887 by James William Cannon, by 1914 the company was the largest towel and sheet ...

Kannapolis, North Carolina Kannapolis () is a city in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, Cabarrus and Rowan County, North Carolina, Rowan Counties in the U.S. state of North Carolina, northwest of Concord, North Carolina, Concord and northeast of Charlotte, North Carolina, ...

, in 1982. At the time, the company was profitable and had no debts. He used the company's profits to pay back the loans he secured to make the acquisition before terminating 2,000 positions and selling the company-owned homes. He eliminated the company's $100 million pensions plan, taking $36 million to make personal investments and using the remainder to purchase

annuity In investment, an annuity is a series of payments made at equal intervals based on a contract with a lump sum of money. Insurance companies are common annuity providers and are used by clients for things like retirement or death benefits. Examples ...

policies from

Executive Life Insurance Company Executive Life Insurance Company (ELIC) was once the largest life insurance company in California. Its financial problems and subsequent insolvency in April 1991 shocked its policyholders and the financial world. At the time, First Executive was ...

for Cannon employees. Executive Life later failed due to its own poor investments and reduced its payouts to retired employees. Murdock sold the Cannon Mills to Fieldcrest in 1985. In 1985, Murdock took over the nearly bankrupt Hawaiian firm

Castle & Cooke Castle & Cooke, Inc., is a Los Angeles-based company that was once part of the Big Five companies in territorial Hawaii. The company at one time did most of its business in agriculture, including becoming, through mergers with the modern Dole F ...

, which owned pineapple and banana producer

Dole Food Company Dole plc (previously named Dole Food Company and Standard Fruit Company) is an Irish- American agricultural multinational corporation headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. The company is among the world's largest producers of fruit and vegetables ...

. He developed Castle & Cooke's real estate portfolio into residential and commercial properties and turned Dole into the world's largest producer of fruits and vegetables. Acquiring Dole privately in 2003, Murdock completed a $446 million initial public offering in October 2009 and the company traded on the

New York Stock Exchange The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District, Manhattan, Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is the List of stock exchanges, largest stock excha ...

under the ticker DOLE until a private merger agreement was approved October 31, 2013. As a result of his purchase of Castle & Cooke, Murdock acquired ownership of 98% of

Lanai Lānai is the sixth-largest of the Hawaiian Islands and the smallest publicly accessible inhabited island in the chain. It is colloquially known as the Pineapple Island because of its past as an island-wide pineapple plantation. The island's on ...

, the sixth-largest island in

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; ) is an island U.S. state, state of the United States, in the Pacific Ocean about southwest of the U.S. mainland. One of the two Non-contiguous United States, non-contiguous U.S. states (along with Alaska), it is the only sta ...

. In June 2012 Murdock sold his interest in Lanai to

Larry Ellison Lawrence Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American businessman and entrepreneur who co-founded software company Oracle Corporation. He was Oracle's chief executive officer from 1977 to 2014 and is now its chief technology officer a ...

. He owned other companies, including

Pacific Clay Pacific Clay Products, founded 1892, was created by the merger of several California Pottery#Southern California, Southern California potteries in the US. The company began producing utilitarian pottery in the 1920s, and introduced solid color ea ...

Philanthropy

Murdock helped contribute to the redevelopment of a complex in

Kannapolis Kannapolis () is a city in Cabarrus and Rowan Counties in the U.S. state of North Carolina, northwest of Concord and northeast of Charlotte, and is a suburb in the Charlotte metropolitan area. The city of Kannapolis was incorporated in 1984. ...

North Carolina North Carolina ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, South Carolina to the south, Georgia (U.S. stat ...

, of a

biotechnology Biotechnology is a multidisciplinary field that involves the integration of natural sciences and Engineering Science, engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms and parts thereof for products and services. Specialists ...

research center, the

North Carolina Research Campus The North Carolina Research Campus (NCRC) is a public-private research center in Kannapolis, North Carolina, Kannapolis, North Carolina, United States. The Campus was envisioned by David H. Murdock, owner of Dole Food Company and Castle and Cook ...

. The research center is a joint public-private venture, involving major North Carolina universities and private investment. The site of the research center in the middle of Kannapolis was formerly occupied by Plant #1 of

(which became Pillowtex after a series of mergers and acquisitions). Pillowtex filed for bankruptcy in 2003, and closed the mill. This resulted in the largest mass layoff of workers in North Carolina history. Murdock acquired the site and demolished the mill in 2006. After the death of his third wife, Gabriele, he was involved to finding a cure for cancer, advancing nutrition, and

life extension Life extension is the concept of extending the human lifespan, either modestly through improvements in medicine or dramatically by increasing the maximum lifespan beyond its generally-settled biological limit of around 125 years. Several resea ...

. He established the Dole Nutrition Institute to advocate the benefits of a

to promote health and prevent disease. With the help of

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...

, he oversaw the writing of the ''Encyclopedia of Foods, A Guide to Healthy Nutrition''. In 2006, he opened the California Health and Longevity Institute (CHLI). Murdock contributed more than $500 million toward the creation of the

and David H. Murdock Research Institute.

Personal life and death

At age 87, Murdock was tall, and weighed . He was married six times. In 1967, he married his third wife, Gabriele; they had two children together and he also adopted her son from a previous marriage, Eugene. Gabriele was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1983 and died in 1985. A year later, Eugene died after hitting his head while swimming in the family estate's swimming pool. In 2004, his son David Jr. died in a traffic collision on the Santa Monica Freeway. His son Justin is CEO and executive chairman of NovaRx and is senior vice president of investments for

. Previously, Justin Murdock was a director of the

as well as its audit and finance committee until his retirement on May 17, 2013. In 2011, ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...

'' magazine ranked David Murdock as the 190th-richest person in the "Forbes 400" list and 613th in the "World's Billionaires" list. He had a net worth of

US$ The United States dollar (Currency symbol, symbol: Dollar sign, $; ISO 4217, currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and International use of the U.S. dollar, several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introdu ...

2.4 billion as of March 2013. From 1985, Murdock was a

pescetarian Pescetarianism ( ; sometimes spelled pescatarianism) is a dietary practice in which seafood is the only source of meat in an otherwise vegetarian diet. The inclusion of other animal products, such as eggs and dairy, is optional. According to res ...

and promoted a plant-based diet that is high in fruits and vegetables. He drank smoothies two or three times a day with as many as twenty fruits and vegetables, including pulverized banana and orange peels. He ate fish, seafood, egg whites, legumes and nuts, while avoiding dairy, poultry and red meat. He also shunned the use of alcohol, processed sugar and salt. Murdock did not take

vitamin supplements Vitamins are organic molecules (or a set of closely related molecules called vitamers) that are essential to an organism in small quantities for proper metabolic function. Essential nutrients cannot be synthesized in the organism in suff ...

and claimed he could live to 125 years on his plant-based diet. Murdock died at his ranch in Hidden Valley, California, which is unincorporated

Thousand Oaks Thousand Oaks is the second-largest city in Ventura County, California, located in the northwestern part of Greater Los Angeles. Approximately from the city of Los Angeles and from Downtown Los Angeles, it is named after the many oak trees pr ...

, on June 9, 2025, at the age of 102.

Selected publications

* ''The Dole Nutrition Handbook: What to Eat and How to Live for a Longer, Healthier Life'' (2010)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Murdock, David H. 1923 births 2025 deaths 20th-century American businesspeople 21st-century American businesspeople American billionaires American business executives American food industry business executives American food writers American men centenarians American businesspeople in real estate Businesspeople from Kansas City, Missouri Businesspeople from Los Angeles Businesspeople from North Carolina Dole plc HuffPost writers and columnists Life extensionists People from Kannapolis, North Carolina People from Wood County, Ohio Plant-based diet advocates United States Army personnel of World War II