The $124 trillion Great Wealth Transfer is underway, and baby boomers are passing down their fortunes to their heirs.
But what happens when an ultrawealthy person has no descendants?
In the case of 81-year-old billionaire John Poindexter, he’s getting creative and funneling some of his wealth into a quite unexpected cause: a super small town in West Texas.
Shafter, Texas, is a ghost town in a county that just keeps getting emptier. Presidio County 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 just $43,802 (about half the median U.S. income), nearly one in five residents lives in poverty, and only about 1.6 people live per square mile.
But Poindexter, a Houston manufacturing magnate, is betting on it anyway. Since late 2020, his Tidewater and Big Bend Foundation has taken in nearly $67 million in contributions, according to IRS filings compiled by ProPublica. That includes $20.6 million in the fiscal year ending November 2024, when the foundation reported $62.5 million in net assets.
The foundation’s signature project is Shafter, the former silver-mining town where about 25 people live, according to the Big Bend Sentinel. The 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.
When the Times asked why his family won’t inherit his wealth instead, Poindexter said: “I’ve never been married, I have no children.” That’s a different path from Warren Buffett, who has directed his $140 billion wealth to four of his family’s foundations so they can choose how to spend it. With no children to hand the reins to, Poindexter is building his own. Poindexter’s 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 place is going to boom’
Shafter’s Presidio Mine operated from 1883 to 1942 and produced 35.2 million ounces of silver, according to Black Bear Minerals, which now owns it. After the mine closed, the town emptied out.
By early 2025, Poindexter 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. For now, the closest place to buy groceries is Presidio, which is 19 miles away. Shafter resident and water board president David Long told the Sentinel the preservation efforts could spur more people to move to the ghost town.
“This is a wake-up call for sure, for people to start considering what’s going to happen to the town,” Long told the Sentinel. “Once we get a dependable, good water system in here, the place is going to boom.”
How Poindexter made his fortune and dedicated it to restoration
Poindexter served in Vietnam, received two Silver Stars and two Purple Hearts, and spent 14 years in finance before founding J.B. Poindexter & Co. in 1985. He remains its sole owner. While his net worth isn’t public, the Times characterized him as a billionaire.
His 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. The company 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.
Poindexter isn’t the first rich American to try to restore a town’s past.
The Shafter plan 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,” Henry Thompson, an officer of Poindexter’s foundation, told the Big Bend Sentinel.
The Colonial Williamsburg restoration dates back to 1926, when John D. Rockefeller Jr. began quietly buying up properties in the former Virginia capital, according to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He insisted on staying anonymous, and a year later he committed $5 million to restore the whole town. Not everyone was on board. When the Rockefellers were finally revealed as the donors at a town meeting, at least one resident stood up to object. Poindexter, meanwhile, is taking a much more public approach. He invited about 200 guests to Shafter over Labor Day weekend, the Times reported.
It’s also a different bet from the ones today’s tech billionaires are making. A group of Silicon Valley investors spent roughly $800 million buying up Solano County farmland to build California Forever, an entirely new city, and faced plenty of local backlash along the way. In other words, they 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.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
