David H. Murdock once took Dole Food private. Now the self-made billionaire is betting he can do it again.
On Tuesday, Mr. Murdock, the chairman and chief executive, offered to buy the 60 percent of Dole he did not already own for about $645 million, valuing the company at nearly $1.1 billion. It is the latest audacious move by the nonagenarian in a life full of them.
Mr. Murdock is credited with building Dole into a fruit behemoth, beginning with his 1985 deal to buy troubled Castle & Cooke, once one of Hawaii’s agricultural giants. It was the company that brought Hawaiian pineapples to the United States while also running one of the state’s biggest sugar cane operations.
Under his leadership, the company became an enormous real estate developer, with properties throughout the country. And its Dole arm, named for one of the state’s leading families, became one of the world’s biggest sellers of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Dole separated from its historical parent in 1996, and seven years later Mr. Murdock agreed to buy it for $2.3 billion. The company went public again in 2009, in an offering that valued Dole at $1.1 billion.
But Dole has sought to shake up its business in recent years, including by selling its packaged goods and Asian fresh produce arms to Itochu of Japan for $1.7 billion to focus on other parts of the world.
The business has proved volatile, however, subject to unexpected bouts of bad weather that have weighed on earnings. Last year, it lost $144.5 million, while sales declined 11 percent, to $4.2 billion.
Mr. Murdock may view Dole’s current slump as only one more obstacle for him to overcome. His life reads like a Horatio Alger story, from a modest childhood in which he dropped out of school at 14, to his period of homelessness after leaving the Army. A chance encounter with a loan company employee gave him $1,200 in loans to buy a local diner, which he sold within a year and a half for $1,900.
Mr. Murdock then turned to real estate development in the Southwest, building affordable housing, before turning to investments.
It also inspired a hard-charging entrepreneurial streak in him.
“I never had a boss in my whole life,†he told The New York Times Magazine in 2011. “I’ve totally destroyed anybody’s ability to tell me what to do.â€
Mr. Murdock has parlayed that career into great wealth. Forbes estimated his fortune at about $2.4 billion as of March, ranking him No. 613 on its billionaires list.
Those riches have underpinned his other great preocuppation of late, health. He was instrumental in the construction of a 5.8-million-square-foot nutrition research facility dedicated to the proposition that a largely plant-based diet is the key to longevity.
His devotion to nutrition perhaps reflects the same tough-mindedness that he may bring to his efforts to take Dole private. From The Times Magazine article:
I experienced this during a visit in early February to his California ranch, where I joined him for lunch: a six-fruit smoothie; a mixed-leaf salad with toasted walnuts, fennel and blood orange; a soup with more than eight vegetables and beans; a sliver of grilled Dover sole on a bed of baby carrots, broccoli and brown rice.
“How did you like your soup?†he asked me after one of his household staff members removed it. I said it was just fine.
“Did you eat all your juice?†he added, referring to the broth. I said I had left perhaps an inch of it.
He shot me a stern look. “You got a little bit of it,†he said. “I get a lot â€" every bit I can.†He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s O.K. You’ll go before me.â€
