SOON after eight on most mornings, an elderly man steps out of a Fifth Avenue apartment house and walks with a faltering gait to an office building on Sixth. Few passers-by give him a second glance; in his somber suit, topped by a plastic raincoat on wet days, he seems to be just another Manhattanite going to work. The appearance is misleading. He is Daniel K. Ludwig, the quiet billionaire who has built a shipping, real estate and financial empire that girdles the globe. At 73, Ludwig is worth between $2 billion and $3 billion, which makes him one of the world's half-dozen wealthiest men. Now there are signs that his huge empire may not long survive him in its current form.
Ludwig has no son to whom he can leave control, and no trusted manager who is being groomed as undisputed successor. He has always been reluctant to delegate authority and to build a management team that might challenge his autocratic rule. Because he owns most of his enterprises outright, there are no stockholders to force a change in his ways. He never sees the press, and at National Bulk Carriers, his main operating company in the U.S., executives will cheerfully deny that they know anyone named Ludwig. Says a senior executive who left his employ this year: "Mr. Ludwig organizes his business as a system of separate cells. The members of one cell do not usually know that the others exist, except by rumor. Only Mr. Ludwig knows the full extent of his empire, and how it all fits together."
Even so, the outlines of the empire can be discerned through the camouflage with which Ludwig obscures his activities. The six principal divisions: SHIPPING. Ludwig's 59 oceangoing ships include the six biggest tankers afloat, each more than 326,000 deadweight tons. In all, Ludwig has some 5,000,000 deadweight tons on the high seas—a bigger operation than that of either Aristotle Onassis or Stavros Niarchos. FINANCE. Ludwig owns or controls savings and loan companies that have assets of more than $200 million and deposits of $4 billion. They include Colonial Savings and Loan Association,of San Francisco, with assets of $111.6 million, and Colonial Savings and Loan Association of the South, with assets of $87.3 million.
REAL ESTATE. Through American-Hawaiian Steamship, Ludwig is developing land in several parts of the U.S. The holdings include Westlake Village in Southern California; Ludwig's partner in that $1 billion venture is the Prudential Insurance Co. Ludwig also owns land in the Bahamas and condominium developments in Australia, and has interests in office and apartment buildings in New York.
HOTELS. Ludwig owns or operates such hotels as the Princess in Bermuda, and the International in Freeport on Grand Bahama Island. He is building or planning hotels in San Francisco, Bermuda, West Germany and Mexico. NATURAL RESOURCES. Ludwig owns the world's largest producer of salt by the sun-evaporation method, in Mexico; coal mines in Australia; potash fields in Ethiopia; and iron-ore deposits in both Australia and Canada.
PETROLEUM AND PETROCHEMICALS. As well as owning a refinery in Panama, Ludwig is a partner in development of a refinery and petrochemicals complex in Dade County, Fla.