In 1994, you told the Chicago Tribune: “I remember too vividly going into meat markets with my mother after they closed to ask for the leftovers because we couldn’t afford to buy meat.” Are you a role model for poor kids today?

My situation was rather unique. I went to high school near Stanford [University]. I didn’t go there because my father was a professor at Stanford, but because he was a graduate student at Stanford at the ripe old age of 40, so we lived in student housing. I was elected president of the student body. When a recruiter from Wharton visited, the principal called me. I’d never heard of Wharton before. They were kind enough to give me two scholarships since our family was of fairly modest means. I couldn’t afford to travel back and forth, so I hitchhiked eight times across the United States.

What did you have against selling eggs?

There was no differentiation of products, so no excitement. At Huntsman Corp., 70 to 75 percent of our products are very high-tech chemical products. They have patents and, in some cases, we are the only ones in the world making them. In the egg business, an egg is an egg. That’s why I helped create the first plastic egg carton, just to show some ingenuity.

Where is all the ingenuity now?

China has about 40 engineers for every lawyer we have here. We are losing our industrial base rather dramatically. The basic industrial products that gave America its might in the 19th and 20th centuries have suffered from the environmental issues that have captured the day. There has been so much over-regulation of industries, and litigation and problems for investors with respect to return on capital. But we do see chemical engineers and mechanical engineers supplanted by molecular biologists and those studying genetics and cures for cancer. We’re building a remarkable workforce at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah. Our cancer research and many of the higher tech areas of biochemistry are exploding in the United States.

You may be better known as a cancer survivor who founded the Huntsman Cancer Institute than for the company that has made your philanthropy possible.

As a general rule for life, it would be nice to see those people who are blessed make charitable contributions. There are many families, including yours truly, who can do more. Saying that taxes are our contribution is absolutely wrong. Our taxes are the license we pay to become wealthy. That’s simply the tax we pay to enter the game, and it’s an honor to pay taxes. When they say lower the capital gains rate, I say why? Most of the people paying capital gains are not going to miss the money.

An IPO can change everything, especially for a company in which most of the board has been comprised of family members.

We have absolutely changed the composition of the board of directors. Our board is now very independent. They’ve all been CEOs, chairmen of major companies—except for one who is a trial lawyer who has beaten the chemical industry to death, so I wanted him on our side of the family. But their values are in line—we are looking for leadership, ethics, efficiency and productivity, and we will find management teams that are capable of producing it. I don’t think there’s anything inconsistent. Our family met and decided we are entering a new era and everyone is very sensitive to the fact: delivery under ethical and honorable conditions.

How have environmental regulations affected your business?

The chemical industry is a sitting target for plaintiff’s lawyers and for people who want to sue you for nothing or for minor infractions. When we had a flare at our petrochemical plant in Odessa, Texas, in 1998, we set up a clinic for people who might have been injured or suffered health problems as a result. No one ever showed up to be examined there or in the local hospitals. [There was] a massive PR effort by a plaintiff’s lawyer who did this again at another one of our plants. We eventually paid $1 million as a nuisance thing. The lawyers gave everyone a small portion, kept 40 percent and moved on to the next chemical plant. 

We are in a very dangerous, difficult industry, with a great capacity for explosions and fires. Yet the other side of the coin is that virtually everything we see, feel or touch anywhere, whether it’s carpeting, shoes or cosmetics, is made up of plastics or petrochemicals. So at what point do you say let’s do away with these products and go back to living in caves?

We have cut our emissions in Texas by 88 percent in the last four years, which is something Texaco never did. It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and criticize until somebody wants to open a box of Tide and do laundry or someone wants a Diet Coke.

Although you have long been a Republican supporter, you wrote to the Senate Energy Committee in 2003 arguing that businesses and consumers “are being fraudulently ripped off by big oil companies and futures traders at the New York Mercantile Exchange who establish prices for natural gas . . . .”

If the price of corn and wheat changes two or three cents a day, they stop trading. In the case of oil or natural gas, they have no limits. It’s a free-for-all that has nothing to do with supply and demand, and everything to do with speculation that does not exist in other commodities or agricultural products. I do believe that there is a great inequity between those who produce oil and other industries that utilize those products. There has to be some responsibility on the part of government at some point to step in and say we have to bring balance out of chaos.

OPEC has become extremely wealthy. You have to ask yourself, is this free enterprise? Of course it’s not free enterprise. OPEC is controlled by a cartel. There is no free market out there. It’s completely manipulated. If the government is ever willing to stay out and let market forces work, OPEC will cease to exist and the big oil companies will have other things to do than count their profits.

So who says winners never cheat?

The market has been continually escalating more toward an emphasis on profits at all cost, with the exception of what is illegal. There is also such a thing as ruling out what is immoral or bad behavior, but we have tossed those elements right out of the equation. It has been so subtle over the last 25 to 30 years that no one ever really noticed.
 
In buying companies, I dealt with many equity and asset management firms because they have taken the place of banks in the world today; that was a real eye-opener for me and one of the reasons I wrote the book. We’d shake hands on a deal and the next morning they’d show up and start negotiating all over again. Your word means virtually nothing, and their contracts are so filled with loopholes that they mean virtually nothing. I went to not one or two but eight or nine of them, and it was an embarrassment to be a part of the American financial system. This is not the second- or third-level people. I’m talking about presidents and chairmen, many of whom are well known.

I don’t want to sound too critical because there are so many exceptions—there are great lawyers, there are great bankers and there are tremendous people who are exceptions to the rule. I’m very proud of David Matlin, who runs the investment fund Matlin Patterson Global Opportunities Partners; [he] is our partner. I give him very high marks in a very cutthroat world out there. But there are a lot of people who get right to the point of legality and make sure that what they are doing is not illegal, but it could be unethical.

But you built Huntsman Chemical by buying distressed companies at rock-bottom prices, including an acquisition of the Hoechst plants that you took off their hands for no money down.

When you are dealing with a company that wants to get rid of a distressed division, you offer them a price that reflects their value, and you take care of their employees. That is all fair. What I’m saying is that once we agree on a price, we are supposed to quit negotiating and shake hands. You don’t come back and start negotiating the next morning. You can keep negotiating for months, but once you say this is the deal and the other side says the same thing and you shake hands, that ought to be as binding as a lawyer writing a contract. I just wish it were. It used to be.