SETTLING back in his rocking chair, feet spread to feel the heat of the stove, Burt Shavitz liked to reflect that he had everything he needed. A piece of land first: 40 acres of it, fields and woods, on which he could watch hawks and pine martens but not be bothered, with luck, by any human soul. Three golden retrievers for company. A fine wooden house, 20 feet wide by 20 feet deep, once a turkey coop but plenty spacious enough for him. From the upper storey he could see glorious sunsets, fire off his rifle at tin cans hanging in a tree, and in winter piss a fine yellow circle down onto the snow, and no one would care.
As the co-founder of Burt’s Bees, he could have been a multimillionaire. He had once held a third of the cosmetic company’s stock, valued in 2003 at $77m; he had surrendered it a decade earlier for property worth $130,000. In 2007 Clorox, a big corporation famous mostly for bleach, bought Burt’s Bees for a sum just shy of $1 billion. A fortune moulded originally from his honey and his beeswax allowed the other co-founder, Roxanne Quimby, once his lover, to purchase 100,000 acres of Maine to return them to their pristine wildness. His...
from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1GGR4RO
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