Charles Koch considers himself a liberal and wants to "find common ground” with the Obama administration.
What? That’s right, the man many consider to be the banker and high priest of political conservatism and libertarianism in the United States says you can call him a "classical liberal," or even just a liberal. But he means that in what he believes is the original sense of the term. “It’s someone who wants society to maximize peace, civility, tolerance, and well-being for everybody,” Koch said. “That’s a society that gets rid of these obstacles to opportunity and innovation,” he said, speaking of what he perceives is excessive government intervention. “Historically [liberal] is a great word,” Koch said. “Then liberals became people who wanted the government to control people’s lives.” As for working with the White House, we’ll get to that in a second.
I interviewed the 80-year-old CEO of Koch Industries—who Forbes says is worth some $40 billion and is the ninth richest man in the world—at the EY Strategic Growth Forum in Palm Desert, Calif., last Friday. Koch Industries, is a diversified industrial company based in Wichita, Kan., with interests in everything from oil fields to toilet paper.
No one ever called Charles de Ganahl Koch (last name is pronounced like the soda company) a dummy. Love or hate his politics, but he does have three degrees from MIT and he did take the family business from $23 million in sales in the mid-1960s to the second-largest private company in the U.S. (after Cargill) with sales of over $110 billion.
After years of funding lobbying and political campaigns behind the scenes, Koch has recently become public facing and even come out swinging with a new book, "Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World’s Most Successful Companies."
He is nothing if not crafty and shrewd when it comes to parrying with a reporter. When I asked him about Donald Trump he responded: “I’m against politics.” I asked him again about Trump. “I’ve learned we can’t say anything about an individual politician because David, my brother, said he liked Walker, so now I started reading in the press that we put millions behind his campaign,” Koch said. “You want to know how much we put behind his campaign? Zero. Then, we said OK, we’ll invite Fiorina to the seminar. OK, now [people said] we’ve selected her. We hadn’t selected her. It’s just she was doing well in the polls and said some things that made sense and so on. So I can’t, I don’t dare comment about anybody because it’ll be blown totally out of proportion.”