Jon Huntsman Jr.

At 32, Jon Huntsman Jr. became the youngest United States ambassador in more than a century. George H. W. Bush named him to Singapore in June 1992, the Senate confirmed him unanimously in August, and he served from September 22, 1992 to June 15, 1993. He had been in Washington since 1983, when he was a White House staff assistant under Ronald Reagan, and had spent 1989 to 1991 as a deputy assistant secretary of commerce for East Asia. The Singapore post was the first of three embassies and set the pattern for everything after: a public job, then a return to the family business in Salt Lake City, then another public job. He is the only American to have served as ambassador in both Beijing and Moscow. He is also a man who dropped out of Highland High School to play keyboards in a rock band called Wizard, got a G.E.D., studied Chinese at National Taiwan Normal University, spent two years in Taiwan as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and finished with a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 at 27. The Mandarin is the thread. Barack Obama cited it when he nominated a Republican governor to Beijing in May 2009.

Three embassies, one governorship, one presidential run, and never the corner office at Huntsman Corporation.

Huntsman Corporation began in 1970 as Huntsman Container Corporation in Fullerton, California, founded by Jon Huntsman Sr. and his brother Blaine, and made its first fortune in 1974 with the styrofoam clamshell that held a McDonald's Big Mac; the container business went to Keyes Fiber in 1976, Huntsman Chemical followed in 1982, the group took the Huntsman Corporation name in 1994, bought 36 businesses between 1986 and 2000, and went public on the New York Stock Exchange in February 2005. Today it is run from The Woodlands, Texas by his brother Peter Huntsman as chairman, president and chief executive, and it reported revenue of about $6.1 billion for 2023 with roughly 7,000 employees. Jon Jr.'s part in that was real but bounded. From 1993 to 2001, between the Singapore embassy and the trade representative's office, he was an executive at the corporation, chief executive of Huntsman Family Holdings, the private entity that held the family's shares, and chairman of the Huntsman Cancer Foundation, tied to the institute his parents founded at the University of Utah with a $10 million gift in 1993 and $100 million more in 1995. He sat on the corporation's board and chaired the cancer foundation again from 2012 to 2017, according to Chevron's 2020 press release, and in January 2012 the Huntsman Cancer Institute named him chairman in place of his father. Jon Sr. died on February 2, 2018, having given away more than $1.5 billion in his lifetime, $1.9 million of it to the super PAC backing his son's 2012 campaign. You can read the son's career as a long argument with the father's: the older man built one thing for 48 years, the younger one has rarely stayed anywhere longer than four, the 1993-2001 stretch at the family firm being the exception. Or you can read it as a division of labour inside a family that had more capable sons than companies. Peter got the plant. Jon got the passport.

Huntsman filed to run for governor after Mike Leavitt left in 2003 to run the Environmental Protection Agency, beat Nolan Karras 66-34 in the June 2004 Republican primary and Scott Matheson Jr. in November with 58 percent. Four years later he took 77.7 percent and every county. Politics on this site is dates and figures, so here they are, from his Wikipedia entry:

• Tax cuts of $407 million from 2005 to 2007, by the Utah Taxpayers Association's estimate, including replacing a progressive income tax with a 7 percent top rate with a flat 5 percent tax.
• Statewide sales tax cut from 4.75 to 4.65 percent; sales tax on unprepared food cut from 4.70 to 1.75 percent; motor vehicle registration fees raised.
• State budget up from $8.28 billion to $11.57 billion over his term; the Cato Institute gave him an A on taxes and an F on spending in 2006.
• Job growth of 4.8 to 5.9 percent between 2005 and 2009, depending on the method, ranking Utah first or fourth among states.
• Signed the Western Climate Initiative in 2007 and a school voucher law the same year that voters later repealed by referendum.
• Approval above 80 percent when he resigned on August 11, 2009 to go to Beijing; the Pew Center on the States named Utah the best-managed state.

He ran for president from June 21, 2011 to January 16, 2012, finished third in New Hampshire, endorsed Mitt Romney, a distant relative, and skipped the 2012 Republican convention. He co-chaired the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, which put the cost of illicit technology transfer to China at up to $600 billion. He lost the 2020 Utah governor's primary to Spencer Cox by fewer than two points. He is a national co-chair of No Labels, and in April 2025 Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismissed him along with the rest of the Defense Policy Board.

Mastercard announced on March 11, 2024 that Huntsman would join as vice chairman and president of strategic growth from April 15, with a brief covering partnerships with governments and public-sector institutions plus the company's philanthropy and sustainability work. He said he looked forward "to further scale new business opportunities". The appointment came on top of the Chevron board seat he took back on September 15, 2020, a Ford directorship he has held since February 2012, with a spell as Ford's vice chairman of policy in 2021 and 2022, and a trusteeship of the Huntsman Foundation. The Mastercard release counts ten honorary doctorates; Wikipedia counts eleven. On religion he has been more candid than most Latter-day Saint politicians and less orthodox. He told Time he considered himself more spiritual than religious, told Newsweek in December 2010 that the Church did not have a monopoly on his spiritual life, and then in May 2011 said: "I believe in God. I'm a good Christian. I'm very proud of my Mormon heritage. I am Mormon." His mother, Karen Haight Huntsman, is the daughter of the apostle David B. Haight, and through his father he descends from Parley P. Pratt. The mission to Taiwan gave him the language that Obama cited in 2009, which is as direct a line from Church service to a job as this site can draw. His brief at Mastercard covers governments and public-sector institutions, which is to say the work he did for three presidents, done now for a payments company.