Modules
Biography
Texas-based Paul Foster built a fortune in oil refining.
In 2017, he sold his company Western Refining to San Antonio-based Tesoro for $6.4 billion. The merged entity was later renamed Andeavor and sold to Marathon Petroleum.
Through Franklin Mountain Investments, Foster owns stakes in more than 30 companies spanning real estate, restaurants and sports. In 2025, he sold his energy venture for $2.5 billion.
A graduate of Baylor University and a registered CPA, Foster handled the books for small oil refineries across the Southwest.
He and his partners took over bankrupt El Paso Refining in 1992. He bought out his partners five years later.
Foster serves as a trustee of the Baylor College of Medicine and is a member of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas' Energy Advisory Council.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Paul Foster
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Paul Foster, linked to Energy and 'Oil refining', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 35 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 2.2 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.