Jon Huntsman Sr.

In late 1973 the Arab oil embargo cut off supplies of polystyrene, and Huntsman Container Corporation, three years old and running on a mortgaged house and bank debt, came close to going under. Jon Huntsman had left the presidency of Dolco Packaging in 1970 to make foam packaging for the fast-food chains spreading along American highways. He had put up plants in Fullerton, California, in 1971 and Troy, Ohio, in 1972. Without resin, neither one could run. The company survived, and in 1974 it produced the item that made the name: the hinged polystyrene clamshell for the McDonald's Big Mac. Huntsman Container also turned out the first plastic plates and bowls for the fast-food trade. In 1976, after opening its first plant abroad at Skelmersdale in England, the company was sold to Keyes Fiber in a stock deal. Huntsman ran the container business for Keyes for four more years and took a seat on its board.

The packaging career came out of eggs. Huntsman joined Olson Brothers, a Los Angeles egg producer, in 1961 and rose to vice president of operations. The company was losing money on cracked shells, and Huntsman pushed the development of the first plastic egg carton. That work led him to Dow Chemical's polystyrene group in 1965 and, in 1967, to the presidency of Dolco Packaging, a joint venture between Olson and Dow. Between the container company's two plant openings he also spent time in Washington: associate administrator at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1970, then special assistant and staff secretary to President Nixon in 1971. He left the White House staff in 1972 to run Huntsman Container full time.

Two figures give the scale. In 2014 the company reported 80 manufacturing and research sites in 30 countries and roughly 12,000 employees. By 2023 revenue was about $6.1 billion, down from earlier years, with about 7,000 employees and a headquarters in The Woodlands, Texas, rather than Salt Lake City. Peter Huntsman, who became president and chief operating officer in 1996 and chief executive in July 2000, still runs it.

Huntsman Chemical Company started in Salt Lake City in 1982, and its method was contrarian from the first day: buy polystyrene, styrene and polypropylene businesses at the point in the cycle when their owners had stopped believing in them. Between 1986 and 2000 the company bought 36 businesses, and by its own account, repeated on Wikipedia, 35 of them made money. The two purchases that changed the company's size were Texaco Chemical in 1994, for $1.1 billion, and the polyurethanes and related businesses of Britain's Imperial Chemical Industries in 1999, for $2.8 billion. The name changed to Huntsman Corporation in 1994. The Deseret News, in its 2018 obituary, described the firm as once the largest privately held chemical company in the United States, and it stayed private until February 2005, when it listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Two large deals fell apart on his watch as chairman. In 2007 Apollo Global Management agreed to buy the company through its Hexion unit and then walked away; Huntsman sued and settled in December 2008 for $1.1 billion. In 2017 a proposed $20 billion merger with Clariant of Switzerland was called off in October. Huntsman stepped down as executive chairman at the end of 2017, a few weeks before he died. Nobody has sourced the private company's peak revenue, so treat any single figure you see with care.

The one fact about Huntsman's faith that bears directly on the business is the timing. Wikipedia gives his dates as president of the Church's Washington, D.C. Mission as 1980 to 1983 and the founding of Huntsman Chemical as 1982; the two overlap, and no source explains the overlap. He was in his mid-forties, a former White House staffer and CEO, supervising missionaries in the capital before going back to plastics. The Church News reported that during those years he drove the mission's Chevrolet Malibu rather than buying himself a better car. He later served as a stake president, a regional representative and, from 1996 to 2011, as an area seventy, a volunteer regional leadership post.

No is only the beginning of the conversation.

That line, quoted by the Deseret News after his death, was the way he described fundraising and dealmaking alike. Gordon B. Hinckley, then president of the Church, once said of him: "He did not become a philanthropist when he grew rich. He gave freely when he was poor." When Huntsman died on February 2, 2018, the First Presidency issued a statement calling him "esteemed as a leader for his exceptional capacity, commitment, philanthropy and service throughout the world." His Church roles, in order:

• Stake president and regional representative, dates not published
• President, Washington, D.C. Mission, 1980-1983
• Area seventy, 1996-2011

Huntsman and his wife Karen founded the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah with a $10 million gift in 1993, then gave $100 million more in 1995, a sum roughly equal to what the American Cancer Society distributed to researchers in a year. In November 2013 he gave or raised $120 million for a research building devoted to children's cancers; it was dedicated on June 21, 2017, his 80th birthday. By 2018 the family and its close associates had put more than $656 million into the institute. He was a four-time cancer survivor himself, and his mother died of breast cancer. The universities got the rest: an unrestricted gift of more than $50 million to Wharton, which named Jon Huntsman Hall after him; $26 million to Utah State University in 2007, which renamed its business school for him; and, with Charles Koch, another $50 million to that school in 2017. He made 46 trips to Armenia after the 1988 earthquake and estimated his relief spending there at $50 million or more. The Chronicle of Philanthropy ranked the Huntsmans second among American donors for 2007, and by 2010 his giving had pushed him off the Forbes 400. Forbes counted the total at $1.55 billion in 2016. He said he wanted to die broke.

The record has one sour note. In 2017 he publicly attacked Vivian Lee, the head of University of Utah Health, threatened to withhold $250 million from the institute in a dispute over its governance, and she resigned; the Salt Lake Tribune, which carried the editorials against her, was owned by his family at the time. He had also come close to politics himself, leading Utah's Republican gubernatorial primary polls in March 1988 before dropping out in April. The record shows a man who put a children's cancer building on his own birthday and died seven months later.