Billionaire With No Heirs Pours $67 Million Into a Texas Ghost Town

Houston manufacturing billionaire John Poindexter has funneled nearly $67 million into a foundation whose flagship project is Shafter, Texas — a former silver-mining ghost town where roughly 25 people live.

Since late 2020, Poindexter's Tidewater and Big Bend Foundation has taken in the contributions, according to IRS filings compiled by ProPublica. The money included $20.6 million in the fiscal year ending November 2024, when the foundation reported $62.5 million in net assets.

Poindexter, 81, has no heirs. "I've never been married, I have no children," he told The New York Times when asked why his family won't inherit his wealth. The Times, which first reported the story, characterized him as a billionaire. His foundation will eventually own all of his properties, the Times reported, including the 30,000-acre Cibolo Creek Ranch where Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016.

The choice of Shafter is a bet against demographics. Presidio County, where the town sits, had an estimated 5,433 residents in 2025 — down 11.4% since 2020 and down from 7,818 in 2010, Census Bureau data shows. The median household income is $43,802, about half the U.S. median. Nearly one in five residents lives in poverty, and only about 1.6 people live per square mile.

Shafter's Presidio Mine produced 35.2 million ounces of silver between 1883 and 1942, according to Black Bear Minerals, which now owns it. When the mine closed, the town emptied.

Poindexter's plans, according to the Times, call for a resort and living history museum anchored by a rebuilt saloon, general store, and post office, with about a dozen adobe homes available for overnight rentals. By early 2025 he had bought several Shafter properties and offered to restore the historic church at the town's entrance, the Big Bend Sentinel reported.

Not every resident is sold on the plan, but a new restaurant and shop would likely be welcome. The closest place to buy groceries today is Presidio, 19 miles away.

"This is a wake-up call for sure, for people to start considering what's going to happen to the town," David Long, a Shafter resident and water board president, told the Sentinel. "Once we get a dependable, good water system in here, the place is going to boom."

Henry Thompson, an officer of Poindexter's foundation, told the Sentinel the project is "kind of the same as Colonial Williamsburg, where you can actually stay in town and then some of the structures will just be museum visiting."

The comparison has a precedent. John D. Rockefeller Jr. began quietly buying properties in the former Virginia capital in 1926, according to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He insisted on anonymity, then committed $5 million in 1927 to restore the whole town. Poindexter is taking the opposite approach: he invited about 200 guests to Shafter over Labor Day weekend, the Times reported.

The contrast with today's tech billionaires is just as sharp. A group of Silicon Valley investors spent roughly $800 million buying up Solano County farmland to build California Forever, an entirely new city — and drew local backlash for it. Those investors want to build the future from scratch. Poindexter wants to bring back the past.

"I think that we've forgotten our origins," he told the Times. "We've forgotten this enormous debt we have to prior generations."

Poindexter made his money the industrial way. A Vietnam veteran with two Silver Stars and two Purple Hearts, he spent 14 years in finance before founding J.B. Poindexter & Co. in 1985. He remains its sole owner. The company grew from $40 million in revenue in 1994 to more than $2.7 billion in annualized revenue through more than 40 acquisitions, according to a 2024 EY announcement naming him a regional Entrepreneur of the Year. It builds the bodies of UPS's brown delivery trucks and says it produces 66% of the step vans in the U.S. class five delivery market.

His path also diverges from Warren Buffett, who has directed his $140 billion wealth to four of his family's foundations so they can decide how to spend it. Poindexter, with no children to hand the reins to, is building his own legacy in adobe and silver-mining history — one of the more idiosyncratic answers yet to the $124 trillion Great Wealth Transfer now moving boomer fortunes to the next generation.