David H Murdock

David H. Murdock, who rose from hardscrabble beginnings to become a billionaire investor, real estate mogul, corporate raider and philanthropist, and whose late-in-life devotion to healthy nutrition led him to announce that he planned to live to 125, died on Monday June 9 2025 at his ranch in the Southern California city of Thousand Oaks. He was 104. Murdock, who dropped out of school at 14 and was briefly a homeless veteran of World War II, made his first fortune in real estate and then acquired controlling stakes in a variety of public companies, including the Dole Food Company and the textile manufacturer Cannon Mills. High school dropout drafted into Army 1943; settled in Detroit after WWII. Bought diner with $1,800 loan; flipped quickly for small profit. Built homes in Arizona, California; survived real estate market crash. Bought slice of Dole produce outfit, Castle & Cooke real estate firm. Dole sales up 10% in past 12 months despite rising food costs. Actively pursuing health and nutrition research since his third wife passed away from cancer in 1985. Expanded his $1.5 billion North Carolina Research Campus; studying biotech, disease, biorepository. Over time, he turned Castle & Cooke into a successful real estate developer, separating it from its Dole subsidiary. In 2012, he took in hundreds of millions of dollars by selling Lanai to the Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison. He ran Dole for more than 30 years, piling up enormous profits year after year through its global reach, with world headquarters in Dublin and U.S. headquarters in Charlotte, N.C. Married five times, Mr. Murdock was especially devoted to his German-born third wife, Gabriele Murdock, whom he married in 1967. She died of ovarian cancer in 1985 at age 43. The couple had two sons, and Mr. Murdock adopted a son from his wife’s previous marriage. Less than a year after the death of his wife Gabriele to cancer in 1985, his oldest son, Eugene, 23, drowned in the pool at the family’s estate in Beverly Hills, Calif. Mr. Murdock’s second son, David II, was killed at age 36 in a car crash on the Santa Monica Freeway in 2004. Murdock is survived by his youngest son, Justin, and a granddaughter.