Would you like to be a billionaire, or at least live like one? That's right, a billionaire. Someone whose net worth is more than 1,000 million dollars.
Dumb question, right? Money may not buy happiness, but you'd like the chance to find out for yourself.Oddly enough, the chances are good you already have. If you work hard at your job, are devoted to your family, pay your bills, avoid bad habits and take time to smell the roses . . . you're living like a billionaire.
That is, if the billionaire's name is James LeVoy Sorenson.
According to this year's Forbes ranking of the world's 465 billionaires, Utah's share of the super-rich is precisely two: Jon M. Huntsman and James L. Sorenson, whose $2.9 billion fortune -- up $500 million from last year -- places him in 172nd place.
Let's ponder that for a moment. Of the 6 billion people on the planet, only 171 of them are wealthier than Jim Sorenson.
What to do with all that money? Buy a yacht? A jet? A mansion? An island? An emerging Third World nation?
At the very least, most of us would quit the daily grind to devote full time to spending our money and living like kings.
Which is why we'll never be billionaires. Sorenson has a really big house in Holladay, some might even call it a mansion, but no jet, no yacht, no island, and, at age 78, he's much too busy starting and running new companies to waste time on high living. (Sorensen once owned a Lear jet but decided it was too expensive to operate. He prefers flying coach class.)
Think about it. If you start with nothing -- as did Sorenson -- and spend a lifetime being a hard-working, thrifty entrepreneur, you don't suddenly decide to become Aristotle Onassis just because you can.
Well, fine, but surely he must have a penthouse office suite overlooking the city; an architectural masterpiece that proclaims him to be a titan of industry.
Sorry, no again. Sorenson operates his empire out of a smallish, one-level, cinder-block building on West Temple in South Salt Lake, an edifice to which he has arrived every morning for the past 30 years, long before he joined the billionaires' club.
Nor does he drive to work in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, but if it makes you feel better, he recently traded in his old Ford Bronco for a Lexus sport-utility vehicle. And the legendary 1960s shag carpet that for decades covered the floor in his office has finally been replaced.
The most noticeable objet d'art in Sorenson's office is a blown-up black and white photograph, taken in 1925, that hangs on the wall behind his desk. It shows a small boy standing in front of a Model T Ford and a very modest house (it was originally a chicken coop). The boy is Jimmy Sorenson, age 3, and the structure in the background is the Sorenson family home in Yuba City, Calif., where they moved from Sorenson's birthplace in Rexburg, Idaho.
Whenever he needs a reality check, Sorenson can just swivel his chair around and be reminded of his roots and how very far he has come.
The bulk of Sorenson's fortune is composed of stock in Abbot Laboratories, to which he sold his medical devices company, Sorenson Research, in 1980. (Deseret Pharmaceutical, another company he founded, was sold to Becton Dickinson in 1960.)
But Sorenson doesn't spend much time watching his Abbott shares rise in value. He concedes he couldn't sell them anyway, not without taking a capital gains tax hit the size of Paraguay's GNP. So the shares are mostly for collateral for loans when he wants to start a new business and for scorekeeping by entities such as Forbes.
Incidentally, Sorenson once held sway as the richest Utahn but has been displaced in the Forbes rankings by Huntsman, who is said to be worth $3.2 billion, or $300 million more than Sorenson.
If this rankles Sorenson, he doesn't let on directly, but there's an edge to his voice when he speaks of his fellow Utah billionaire and LDS Church member. It's clear that he thinks his own path to riches has been of a higher order than Huntsman's.
"I love Jon Huntsman, but if you want to see opposites in business, we're it," says Sorenson. "He buys smokestack America and builds his net worth that way. My claim to fame is innovation. Creating new and better things."
From a business standpoint, Sorenson is more proud of his 50 patents on medical devices and his current business ventures than of his billions of dollars' worth of Abbott stock.
Those companies include DataChem Laboratories, Sorex Medical, Sorenson Laboratories, Sorenco Laboratories and Sorenson Vision Inc., which is currently marketing a video-conferencing system for business using the Internet. He also owns thousands of acres of land in Utah and actually made his first serious money in local land speculation -- a practice he terms his "hobby."
But more than his businesses and real estate holdings, it is clear from talking to Sorenson that he views his wife, Beverley Taylor Sorenson, and their eight children and 50 grandchildren and great-grandchildren as his major successes in life, far outweighing his business accomplishments.
His book, "Finding the Better Way," begins with this dedication: "For my children and grandchildren, whom I love, and for all their children who will follow in the great chain of my posterity."
As might be expected of a billionaire, he spends almost as much time giving money away as making it, although he is reticent to talk about his charitable giving.
Ironically, he may be better known for a donation he took back than those he has made. In 1989, Sorenson gave 250,000 of his Abbott shares to the University of Utah, a gift then valued at approximately $15.7 million, the largest donation the school had ever received to that point.
But Sorenson made the donation with the understanding that the university's school of medicine and medical center would be named after him, a fairly routine practice in which universities show their gratitude to large donors (the Huntsman Center, Marriott Library, Rice-Eccles stadium).
When the medical center renaming deal surfaced, it was met with a storm of protest from faculty and students as well as at least one state senator. Three months later the university's Institutional Council voted to return the shares, which Sorenson says, with a glint in his eye, would be worth $100 million today.
(Last April, when Abbott Labs stock was trading at around $53, that would have been true; the shares would have been worth $106 million. But Abbott has since moved down to about $42, which would put the original shares' value at around $84 million today. The stock has split two-for-one three times since 1989.)
Reflecting on that uncomfortable time, Sorenson says he learned something from it. "I learned that I was giving for the wrong purpose. You should never give to get something. That was the wrong reason."
In any case, the University of Utah's loss was Utah State University's gain. Sorenson says he has since made major contributions to the Logan school.
And though he seems to have a magic touch for business, as evidenced by his net worth and track record, not all of his commercial ventures work out. One of the more notable examples is the Jordan Queen, a full-size replica of a Mississippi River paddle wheeler that began life at 4500 South on the Jordan River as a restaurant, was converted into a reception center, and then earlier this year was torn down.
"That place was a loser; couldn't make it pay," says Sorenson, making it clear he will have no further comment on the issue.