Herbjorn Hansson is a quirky Norwegian known for doing things his way.
Quarterly earnings calls — very rarely. Open letters to his shareholders — frequently.
He built an investor base through relentless courtship of retail investors, appearances on a CNBC television investment show and slavish devotion to a shareholder dividend: he’ll pay it even when Nordic American Tankers is not turning a profit.
So perhaps he has met his perfect match in Beal Bank and its self-made founder, the iconoclastic billionaire Andrew Beal.
Beal, 66, is a college dropout who plays high-stakes poker, races sports cars and once founded a rocket company he thought could rival NASA, according to articles in Forbes and other business journals.
Finding his fortune
He founded his own bank near Dallas in 1988 and may be best known for curtailing its activities during the boom banking years of 2004 to 2007, then pouncing and making a fortune on the excesses of others during the world financial crisis that followed.
Described in 2010 as Dallas’ richest man, Beal was quoted in a 2015 Forbes article as preparing to make big bets on the oil and gas industry based on a thesis of long-term oil price appreciation.
Noting his self-made fortune of an estimated $12bn at the time, Forbes described him as “the Warren Buffett of the banking business”.
At the last reporting on 31 December 2018, Texas-based Beal Bank and sister bank Beal Bank USA of Las Vegas had combined assets of more than $7.5bn and combined total capital of more than $2.8bn.
