Paul Getty (1892 - 1976). Jean Paul Getty, known widely as J. Paul Getty, was an American-born British petrol-industrialist, and the patriarch of the Getty family. He founded the Getty Oil Company, and in 1957 Fortune magazine named him the richest living American, while the 1966 Guinness Book of Records named him as the world's richest private citizen, worth an estimated $1.2 billion. At his death, he was worth more than $6 billion. A book published in 1996 ranked him as the 67th richest American who ever lived, based on his wealth as a percentage of the concurrent gross national product. Despite his vast wealth, Getty was infamously frugal, notably negotiating his grandson's Italian kidnapping ransom in 1973. Getty was an avid collector of art and antiquities. His collection formed the basis of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, and more than $661 million of his estate was left to the museum after his death. He established the J. Paul Getty Trust in 1953. The trust is the world's wealthiest art institution, and operates the J. Paul Getty Museum Complexes: The Getty Center, The Getty Villa and the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the Getty Conservation Institute. Getty was born into a Christian Scottish American family in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Sarah Catherine McPherson and George Getty, who was an attorney in the insurance industry. Getty was raised as a Methodist by his parents. His father was a devout Christian Scientist and both were strict teetotalers. In 1903, when Getty was 10 years old, George Getty travelled to Bartlesville, Oklahoma and bought the mineral rights for 1,100 acres of land. Within a few years Getty had established wells on the land which were producing 100,000 barrels of crude oil a month. As newly minted millionaires, the family moved to Los Angeles to escape the harsh Minnesota winters. At age 14, Getty attended Harvard Military School for a year, followed by Polytechnic High School, where he was given the nickname Dictionary Getty because of his love of reading. He became fluent in French, German and Italian. Getty was also conversational in Spanish, Greek, Arabic and Russian. A love of the classics led Getty to acquire reading proficiency in Ancient Greek and Latin. He enrolled at the University of Southern California, then at the University of California, Berkeley, but left both before obtaining a degree. Enamored with Europe after traveling abroad with his parents in 1910, Getty enrolled at the University of Oxford on November 28, 1912. A letter of introduction by then-President of the United States William Howard Taft enabled him to gain independent instruction from tutors at Magdalen College. Although he was not registered at Magdalen, he claimed the aristocratic students accepted me as one of their own and he fondly boasted of the friends he made, including Edward VIII, the future King of the United Kingdom and Emperor of India. He obtained degrees in economics and political science from Oxford in June 1913, then spent months traveling throughout Europe and Egypt before meeting his parents in Paris and returning with them to America in June 1914. In the autumn of 1914, George Getty gave his son $10,000 to invest in expanding the family's oil field holdings in Oklahoma. The first lot he bought, the Nancy Taylor No. 1 Oil Well Site near Haskell, Oklahoma was crucial to his early financial success. The well struck oil in August 1915 and by the next summer the 40 percent net production royalty he accrued from it had made him a millionaire. In 1919, Getty returned to business in Oklahoma. During the 1920s, he added about $3 million to his already sizable estate. His succession of marriages and divorces so distressed his father that Getty inherited only $500,000 of the $10 million fortune his father left at the time of his death in 1930. Getty was left with one-third of the stock from George Getty Inc., while his mother received the remaining two-thirds, giving her a controlling interest. In 1936, Getty's mother convinced him to contribute to the establishment of a $3.3 million investment trust, called the Sarah C. Getty Trust, to ensure the family's ever-growing wealth could be channeled into a tax-free, secure income for future generations of the Getty family. The trust enabled Getty to have easy access to ready capital, which he was funneling into the purchase of Tidewater Petroleum stock. Shrewdly investing his resources during the Great Depression, Getty acquired Pacific Western Oil Corporation and began the acquisition of the Mission Corporation, which included Tidewater Oil and Skelly Oil. In 1967, Getty merged these holdings into Getty Oil.