Special Report: Mormon billionaire asks: Am I mad?

Is he nuts? Not if his business record is anything to go by. Huntsman has built the last private industrial conglomerate in the world, worth $10 billion (£5.6 billion). It includes ICI’s chemicals division on Teesside, which he bought five years ago and is now expanding.

Huntsman’s latest deal makes him one of Britain’s biggest industrial employers. Thousands depend on him.

Although they know his name — it is embroidered on their shirts and caps — few workers know what drives their American boss. Huntsman rarely talks to the press and spends more time working as a lay preacher in the Mormon church in Utah than running his multinational company.

But last week the 66-year-old invited The Sunday Times to his office and home in Salt Lake City. Huntsman said he wanted to talk “business and spirituality”. It was an odd invitation, but in the hard-drinking, fast-talking world of chemicals, Huntsman cuts an odd figure.

With his neat Savile Row pinstripe suit and beautifully groomed hair, he looks more like an English aristocrat than one of the biggest players in the petrochemicals business. He does not drink alcohol or coffee or smoke cigarettes, and his idea of swearing is to mutter “backside”.

His business style is also unconventional. Before going to his head office and visiting his family’s vast country home in Deer Valley where he entertains heads of state and leaders of the Mormon church, he suggested we have lunch in a local hospital. He was not sick, he assured me. “I just love the hospital. It’s more important to me than my business. Some day I hope to die in it.”

The reason he likes the hospital so much is that he had built it and it summed up his business philosophy. “I like making money — but what I really enjoy is giving it all away to enhance life, to relieve suffering.”

Huntsman donates $15m a year to the Huntsman Cancer Institute. He gives many tens of millions more to fund shelters for battered women, scholarships for workers’ children and to support the Mormon church.

No businessman has ever earned so much and then given it all away. He divides every dollar of free cashflow and puts half into the business and half into good works. Before he dies, he said he would give away his last cent, “so I will have nothing”.

His philanthropic zeal dominates his private conversation and his public speeches. Company reports and mission statements are illustrated with pictures of a grinning Huntsman with his wife, Karen, their nine children and 54 grandchildren.

Such studied saintliness from a billionaire can grate on cynical eyes and ears. The trouble is that the Huntsman story is a classic American “rags to riches” dream. This pious man with an eye for profit is one of the heroes of American capitalism.

How did he develop his philanthropic approach to making money? How can he reconcile Mormon and Mammon? What drives him? And, when he retires, what is the future for Huntsman’s British workers? He was born in Blackfoot, Idaho, the son of a schoolteacher. His family was poor but, as devout Mormons, they always paid their 10% a month “tithe” to the church.

The young Huntsman won a scholarship to Wharton Business School in Pennsylvania. On graduation, he went to work for his uncle doing “the worst job in America” — selling eggs in Los Angeles. He hated it, but eggs were to make him rich.

His uncle’s firm used 100m flimsy cardboard egg cartons a year. Huntsman decided to come up with a sturdier, plastic box. “It was in the early 1960s when plastics were just starting. I sensed that if we could do a plastic egg carton, I could do a lot of other plastic products.” To fund the development, he encouraged his uncle to merge his egg business with Dow Chemical, the American giant.

Huntsman became president and created the world’s first plastic egg box. Billions were sold and its success led to his big break. “I wanted to do more food packaging, so I went to McDonald’s and told them that if they used polystyrene boxes they would no longer have people waiting in line. They could pre-cook their burgers and have them ready and hot for customers when they arrived.”

By thinking outside the burger box, Huntsman went on to supply the clamshell Big Mac cartons that now litter streets from London to Tokyo.

Two deals with Shell, a couple of corporate IOUs, a remortgage and lots of borrowed money later, and the Huntsman Corporation was born in 1970.

Soon the firm was making petrochemical products in every American market while also snapping up foreign operations discarded by rival groups.

Huntsman’s trick was to buy unloved firms at distressed prices and then push through as much volume as possible. He is particularly proud of the $2.8 billion (£1.6 billion) ICI deal, signed in 1999, partly because it was so profitable, but mostly because he can trace his family roots back to the north of England.

Today, he may not be a household name, but Huntsman’s products are in every household. The firm’s 15,000 employees in 30 countries make chemicals that are used in Dove soap, Surf washing powder, Crest toothpaste, Head & Shoulders shampoo, Gillette shaving foam, Nike trainers, children’s toys, diet Coke and the interiors and tyres of most cars.

The $3 billion private fortune Huntsman has amassed allows him to indulge his passions. He fly-fishes regularly in Idaho with Dick Cheney, the American vice-president, who Huntsman met while doing a stint at the White House working as President Richard Nixon’s executive assistant in the 1970s. He supports his eldest son, Jon Jr, a Republican who is running for the governship of Utah in elections this November. Most of all, he loves to entertain right-wing heads of state at his Deer Valley home — even if long weekends in the hills don’t always go to plan.

“I remember one occasion when Margaret and Denis Thatcher were staying. I woke up early in the morning and was surprised to see Denis up, too. He looked terrible. I said ‘What’s the matter?’ He replied: ‘You put us in a double bed. I haven’t slept with Margaret for years. That was the worst night of my life. I need a gin’.” Huntsman sent an aide to buy a case of gin. “It’s the only time I’ve had alcohol in the house.”

But his greatest passion is his cancer-research institute. Cancer killed his mother and father, and 15 years ago he himself battled prostate and mouth cancer. Now he has the evangelical zeal of a man who has cheated death and wants to make the most of his second chance.

Huntsman’s critics accuse him of having ulterior motives. The Salt Lake City Tribune claims his chemical plants cause cancer and he is trying to salve his conscience by building a medical centre.

Huntsman laughed off the suggestion. “If people don’t agree with me, that’s fine. But they’re not going to stop me.”

The truth is, he sees his life’s work as a great trek, just like the trek his ancestors made from Britain to the east coast of America and on to Utah.

“I believe our dreams can come true. I think that our business and our commitment to find a cure for cancer is in every way a trek across America.”

He sees no conflict between religion and huge wealth. “I can’t separate corporate life from religion. It’s a duty to God and to yourself to put back into society more than you took out.”

But Huntsman won’t be making money for much longer. Last week’s £200m investment on the new Teesside plastics plant is the last deal he will sign. On Monday, he announced that his firm would go public with a flotation next year. Then he will retire.

Huntsman may, as he put it, “be fading off into the sunset”, but as he carefully placed his most valuable Beanie Babies in a locked drawer and walked out of his office, he made one pledge. Whatever happens to the firm, he will use the rest of his private fortune to protect the one factory in his business he values above any other.

“I would take Teesside over any plant in the world. The people of Teesside are the finest, the most committed. They have been loyal to me and I will be loyal to them.”