The future titan of American industry was being groomed to help his wealthy family advance their already considerable business interests in this booming Iranian economy. His father ran a conglomerate that was active in development, construction and off-shore drilling.
Like the Shah himself and other children of elite families, he was raised with a very Western outlook. As a youngster, he attended an American high school in Tehran and later a Swiss boarding school.
He was not just financially and socially privileged, but he was also intellectually gifted.
When he turned sixteen in 1973, he was accepted at MIT. He headed off to Boston where he earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering and stayed an extra year for a master’s.
His father then died unexpectedly. He immediately prepared to return home to help run the family business, which was always the plan.
But history got in the way.
In early 1979, the Iranian Revolution resulted in the exile of the Pahlavi family and the rise to power of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Khomeini came from a family of clerics. He fiercely opposed the White Revolution, which he saw as a form of Western colonialism and submission to the United States and Israel.
Iran abruptly became an Islamic Republic. All of the businesses that the family operated were nationalized. Western influences of any kind were systematically rooted out of the country.
With Iran in turmoil, and nothing to come back to, his mother urged her son to remain in the United States for further education. He applied to various business schools and chose Stanford, primarily because he liked the northern California climate.
From privilege to pariah
The future CEO earned his MBA from Stanford in 1980. There was nothing left for him in Iran, which was in complete disarray. So he set out to look for a job in the United States.
Despite his fancy degrees, he encountered two main problems.
First, the U.S. was in the midst of a serious recession. Fed Chair Paul Volcker was lifting interest rates aggressively to combat runaway inflation. Unemployment rates were spiking.
Second, the Iran-Hostage crisis had been going on for several months. More than fifty U.S. citizens were being held captive by the Ayatollah. The American public was outraged.
As the young man interviewed for jobs, his Iranian heritage was not exactly helping. He applied for 86 jobs and got 87 rejections. One company accidentally rejected him twice.
Just a few years prior, he was at one of the most respected academic institutions in the world, preparing for his father to hand him a business empire.
Now his father was gone, the empire was gone, and corporate employers winced when they saw his name on top of a resume.
The twenty-four year old, who once had everything, now had nothing to fall back on but his own brains and instincts. He realized that if he wanted to run a business empire, he would have to build one himself.
And that’s exactly what he did….
To finish reading this article… and our complete analysis of this investment idea and why we believe it has the potential to deliver mid-teens, if not higher, annual total returns for many years ahead… subscribe now to the 76report.
Click HERE to begin your subscription for as low as $1 per month with promo code DOLLAR.