W. Herbert Hunt is an American oil businessman who has a net worth of $2.5 billion. Born William Herbert Hunt in 1929, he has re-acquired his billionaire status thanks to the shale oil boom. Back in 1970, he and his brother, Nelson Bunker, got 195 million ounces of silver, worth almost $10 billion at the peak.
But after the price of silver collapsed 80% in 1980, the two lost a billion dollars in the silver trading scandal called Silver Thursday. Herbert Hunt went bankrupt in 1990 and it took him almost a decade to get back to riches. It was in October 2012 that his Petro-Hunt sold a vast portion of its acreage in the Bakken oilfields of North Dakota to Halcon Resources for $1.5 billion in both cash and stock. Today, he also owns 25% of Halcon and controls Placid Refining, which processes some 80,000 barrels per day of oil near Baton Rouge. In addition, he is the host of other oil and gas fields across the country, as well as invests in PacRim Coal, which wants to build a strip mine on the Cook Inlet near Anchorage, Ak.
| Net Worth: | $2.5 Billion |
| Date of Birth: | 1929 |
| Gender: | Male |