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American billionaire John Poindexter has no wife, no children and no one to inherit the manufacturing fortune he built over four decades. So at 81, he is spending it on a town that barely exists.
Shafter, in Presidio County near the Mexican border, has about 25 residents. Its Presidio Mine produced 35.2 million ounces of silver between 1883 and 1942, and the town emptied when it closed. The county around it is still shrinking: 5,433 people in 2025, down 11.4% since 2020, with a median household income of $43,802 and one in five residents in poverty.
Poindexter is betting on it anyway. Since late 2020 his Tidewater and Big Bend Foundation has received nearly $67 million in contributions, according to IRS filings compiled by ProPublica, including $20.6 million in the year to November 2024, when it reported net assets of $62.5 million. The New York Times reported this month that the foundation will eventually own every property he has, including Cibolo Creek Ranch, the 30,000-acre resort south of Marfa where Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016.
"I've never been married, I have no children," Poindexter told the Times when asked why his family would not inherit. Where Warren Buffett has routed his fortune through his children's foundations, Poindexter is building his own institution and deciding what it does.
The plan for Shafter, according to the Times, is a resort and living history museum: a rebuilt saloon, general store and post office, with about a dozen adobe homes for overnight guests. Henry Thompson, an officer of the foundation, compared it to Colonial Williamsburg, which John D. Rockefeller Jr. began quietly buying up in 1926. Poindexter is less quiet.
He hosted about 200 guests in Shafter over Labor Day weekend and, by early 2025, had bought several properties and offered to restore the 1890 Sacred Heart church at the town's entrance, the Big Bend Sentinel reported.
Not every resident is convinced, but the nearest grocery store is 19 miles away in Presidio, and a restaurant and shop would be welcome. "Once we get a dependable, good water system in here, the place is going to boom," David Long, president of the local water board, told the Sentinel.
Poindexter made his money slowly. A Vietnam veteran with two Silver Stars and two Purple Hearts, he spent 14 years in finance before founding J.B. Poindexter & Co. in Houston in 1985. He remains its sole owner.
The company grew from $40 million in revenue in 1994 to more than $2.7 billion through more than 40 acquisitions, and builds the bodies of UPS's brown delivery trucks; it says it makes 66% of the step vans in the U.S. class five delivery market. This year he was elected to the Texas Business Hall of Fame.
His net worth is not public. The Times calls him a billionaire, and the scale of the foundation's endowment suggests why.
"I think that we've forgotten our origins," he told the paper. "We've forgotten this enormous debt we have to prior generations." Silicon Valley's billionaires spent $800 million on Solano County farmland to build a city from nothing. Poindexter wants to put one back.
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