Business Notes Fortunes

"A billion dollars isn't what it used to be," Nelson Bunker Hunt once said, and last week he showed that he knew what he was talking about. Bunker and his two brothers, Lamar and W. Herbert, disclosed the size of their Texas fortune for the first time. They told the Wall Street Journal that the family holdings are worth about $2.6 billion, after bank debts of $1.7 billion are subtracted. That may be handsome enough even by Texas standards, but the brothers were worth about twice as much, $5.1 billion, in 1980.

The troubles began in 1979, when the Hunts tried to corner the market in silver, buying about 59 million oz. Silver prices rose at first, but then they began plunging and the family fortune went down with them. Things only got worse when the price of oil dropped. The brothers' personal holdings, listed at more than $3 billion in 1980, stood at $600 million last month. Banks that have lent money to the Hunts put the family wealth at $2.2 billion, or about $400 million less than the brothers' estimate. That still means the Hunts are not exactly down to their last billion.