Even for a former gym teacher from Dazey, N.D. (pop. 100, give or take), 69-year-old hotel magnate and billionaire Gary Tharaldson is pretty unpretentious.
Tell the richest man in the state that you’re flying in to visit him at his Fargo headquarters and he’ll offer to fetch you himself, rolling up in his red Cadillac crossover and wearing his everyday work uniform of shorts and a sport shirt. Cruising along one of Fargo’s main drags, he’ll frown at all of the undeveloped land–potential competition for the existing hotels (even though they aren’t his).
“He’s beyond down-to-earth–he’s almost subterranean,” says Bruce White, a successful Marriott franchisee who has known Tharaldson since they both started in the hotel business in the early 1980s.
Tharaldson is a driven, shrewd cost-cutter. In March 2006 he sold a portfolio of 130 hotels in a variety of chains to Goldman Sachs for $1.2 billion. Six months later he sold the Westward Ho Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, which he’d owned for only a few months, to Harrah’s at a profit of $109 million.
“Real estate was going crazy in Las Vegas back then,” he says.
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Not long after, it cratered. Those sales capped an empire-building effort that began in 1982 when Tharaldson bought a Super 8 motel in Valley City, N.D. He added other low-end hotels and then moved into “limited service” business-suite hotels (no room service, no restaurants), eventually operating more than 350 across the country.
Almost immediately after his massive windfall–with only a brief time-out to head to the 2006 NCAA men’s basketball final in Indianapolis–Tharaldson, then 60, started on his next act.
“I wondered what I’d do with the money and if it would change me,” he recalls. In his Fargo office, looking over projections for his current enterprises, he says, “I think it didn’t.”
This time out he is placing big bets on natural resources: ethanol, raw land and water. It adds up to an estimated personal fortune of $930 million. The plan is to build his current holdings into an additional $1 billion portfolio over the next five years, while his 18-year-old son from his second marriage, Gary II, the one of his seven children he considers most likely to succeed him, gets an education.
When Tharaldson got started in the early ’80s, he was an ambitious working-class guy who’d figured out that the only way to get ahead was to own assets rather than look for a big paycheck. His style has always been to set huge goals and then try to exceed them, once telling an interviewer, “From my youth I always wanted to create something on a big scale. I wasn’t sure what that would be, but I knew whatever it was it was going to be big.”
