Richard Rainwater was a Texas billionaire who had a Midas touch for real estate, entertainment and oil. He co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team with President George W. Bush.
American investment advisor and author John Train described Rainwater in his Money Masters of Our Time (1980):
Richard Rainwater’s investing technique resembles no one else’s in this book. First, he peers into the future to discern a promising area and tries to visualize an enterprise that would succeed in it. Then, he makes a few concentrated investments in the sector. (So far, like many others.) Then, however, he does not necessarily sit back and wait patiently, but is willing to climb aboard the companies he has invested in, forcefully molding them, hiring and firing, refinancing, merging, until the resulting enterprise approaches his original vision.
In his career investing on his own, Richard Rainwater enjoyed a net compound annual rate of return of 26 percent through the end of 1998. The figure is dented by a disastrous performance that year, only the second bad one. (For his first five years as a private investor, Rainwater claimed annual returns of over 70 percent.)