William Koch: Wine Lawsuit, Chamber of Commerce Meeting, and Not Learning A Damn Thing At M.I.T.

As you may know I have covered William Koch many times before in a profile, the $1.3 billion lawsuit, and his own private town. In recent news it was decided in court today that Koch waited too long to file a lawsuit against Christie's after Koch had purchased a wine was supposedly belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Judge John G. Koetl wrote a 38 page opinion (I guess he had a lot to say about it). There is what is known as statue of limitations that basically say if you are harmed you have a limited period of time before you can come forward and after that you can’t really do anything about it. I taught in my business law classes it was 3 years but in this case it was 4 years starting in 2000 and Koch waited until 2005 to file the lawsuit. The bottle was bought in 1988 for $100,000 and relied on Christie’s for representation. Koch filed the lawsuit after he sent samples to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to carbon date it and they said it had less of than a 5% chance of being from the period it was claim to be from.

In other news, William Koch made an appearance recently at a Chamber Commerce of Breakfast that was held 7:45 a.m. on October 2, 2012 at the Palm Beach Chamber of Commerce. Tickets were only $30-$50 for non members or guests. I found this  article from the Palm Beach daily News that actually talked about the event. Apparently there was an audience of 570 people which is pretty good for 7:45 in the morning. William introduced himself as “just a hick from Kansas”. He claims that he was a nerd while at M.I.T. and couldn't compete with the Harvard men when it came to getting girls. William is married to Bridget Rooney who has a family that owns the Pittsburgh Steelers (mother in law refers to Bill as poor Koch brother even though he is worth $4 billion). My favorite part is that even though he got three degrees from M.I.T. (including a PhD in chemical engineering) he claims he didn't learn “a damn thing”. During he said that he learned from trial and error (mostly error he says). He also lost $200 million over is careers in bad business deals (one of them was Checker cab and an onion pill to lower cholesterol while he was at Koch Industries).  On management Koch believes that you have to find great people and motivate them through bonuses and money to entice them.

William Koch is a truly interesting person. He seems like the type of guy you would want to have lunch or dinner with and hear his life story of the good, the bad, the ugly, and interesting. In this recent article Koch revealed his literary side in front of presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Romney was at Koch’s home and Romney had mentioned the book “Men to Match My Mountains” and Koch said, “You know, the title of that book comes from a poem” and then Koch recited the whole poem from memory.  I hope Bill Koch writes an autobiography one day so we can all learn about his interesting story.