Frederick W. Smith

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Fred Smith once walked into a Las Vegas casino carrying the last $5,000 his young company owned. A crucial business loan had just been refused. A fuel bill of $24,000 was due, and the planes could not fly without paying it. At a blackjack table he turned that $5,000 into $27,000. The winnings covered the bill and kept the company alive for one more week. Frederick Wallace Smith, the founder and chairman of FedEx, built the world's largest express transportation company. He did it after a childhood marked by loss, and after years in a war zone. What kind of person stakes an entire company on a card table? What did he carry with him into that casino? And what did his rise cost along the way? The answers begin far from Las Vegas, in a small town in Mississippi.

  2352

• 2. A Memphis Boyhood

  ›

  Marks, Mississippi, is where Frederick Wallace Smith was born, on the 11th of August 1944. His father, James Frederick Smith, was known as Fred and had already built a business empire. He founded the Toddle House restaurant chain. He also founded the Smith Motor Coach Company, which became the Dixie Greyhound Lines after The Greyhound Corporation bought a controlling interest in 1931. The elder Smith died when his son was only four. The boy was raised by his mother and his uncles. A bone disease crippled him while he was young, but he had regained his health by the age of ten. He went to Presbyterian Day School in Memphis for elementary school and Memphis University School for high school. As a teenager he became an amateur pilot. In those same years he co-founded Ardent Studios with two childhood friends, John Fry and John King. The studio went on to record many influential soul and rock acts on the Stax label. It is closely tied to the acclaimed Memphis band Big Star. A teenager running a recording studio and flying planes was heading toward Yale University.

  3481455

• 3. Yale and Old Friends

  ›

  A grade of C is attached to one of the most repeated stories about Fred Smith. According to some sources, he wrote an economics paper at Yale that laid out an overnight delivery service, and the professor gave it that mark. Smith himself said in an interview that he did not remember the grade. He had arrived at Yale in 1962 to study economics. He joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, known as DKE, and eventually became its president. He also belonged to the Skull and Bones secret society. His fraternity brother at DKE was a future president of the United States, George W. Bush. Smith also became friends with John Kerry, a future senator and Secretary of State. The two men shared a love of aviation and were flying partners. Smith earned his economics degree in 1966, and the Marine Corps was waiting for him.

  1011131516

• 4. Over Vietnam

  ›

  On the morning of the 27th of May 1968, Company K of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, ran into a North Vietnamese Army battalion on Gò Nổi Island in Quang Nam Province. The enemy was dug into well-prepared positions. Smith was commanding the company, with the rank of first lieutenant. When the enemy counterattacked on the Marines' left flank with mortar support, he ran through heavy fire to the point of hardest fighting. There he pulled several wounded men to safety and shouted encouragement while directing his men's fire. Then he moved across open ground to higher ground and called in artillery and air strikes. Some landed within fifty meters of his own position. Seeing the confusion this caused the enemy, he raced to the company's right flank and led an attack on the weakest point of the opposing force. The North Vietnamese unit broke. His company captured two enemy soldiers, along with documents and valuable equipment. For this action he received the Silver Star. His service ran from 1966 to 1969, first as a platoon leader and then as a forward air controller. In that role he flew in the back seat of the OV-10 aircraft. He served two tours in the Vietnam War. He also received the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. He was honorably discharged in 1969 as a captain. The following year he made his first move as a businessman.

  211920174

• 5. Building the Network

  ›

  Ark Aviation Sales, an aircraft maintenance company, was the first business Smith bought. He took a controlling interest in 1970, and by 1971 he had pointed it toward trading used jets. On the 18th of June 1971, he founded Federal Express. He paid for it with a $4 million inheritance, worth roughly $32 million in 2025 dollars. He also raised $91 million in venture capital, equal to about $724.2 million in 2025 dollars. By 1973 the company was flying small packages and documents to 25 cities, using a fleet of 14 Dassault Falcon 20 jets. His focus was an integrated air and ground system. His model was a bank clearing house. In that arrangement, representatives from many banks travel to one central location to swap materials, instead of exchanging them pair by pair. Federal Express applied the same logic to parcels, routing shipments through one middle point. Smith would remain at the head of the company he built, as founder and chairman, for the rest of his life.

  34755172

• 6. The Night of the Indictment

  ›

  The 31st of January 1975 brought a federal grand jury indictment against Smith for forgery. The case arose from a suit filed by his two half-sisters. It alleged that he had forged documents to obtain a $2 million bank loan. It also alleged that he and executives of his family's trust fund had sold stock from the fund at a loss of $14 million. A warrant was issued for his arrest, and he posted bond with federal authorities in Memphis. That same evening he was involved in a fatal hit and run. The victim was George C. Sturghill, a 54-year-old handyman. Smith was arrested and charged with leaving the scene of a crash and driving with an expired license. He was released on a $250 bond. Those charges were later dismissed. It was not the first deadly crash in his life. During his first summer break from Yale, he was driving friends out to a lake in Memphis when he lost control of the car. It flipped, and the passenger in the front seat was killed. The cause of that crash was never determined. As for the forgery charge, a jury later found him not guilty.

  454725046

• 7. Washington and the Sidelines

  ›

  In 2000, Smith appeared as himself in the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away, in the scene where Hanks's character is welcomed back. It was filmed at FedEx's home facilities in Memphis, Tennessee. That same year, Smith's old Yale friend George W. Bush won the presidency, and speculation arose that Smith might become Defense Secretary. He was Bush's first choice, but he declined for medical reasons, and Donald Rumsfeld was named instead. In 2004 Smith counted both major candidates, Kerry and Bush, as friends. He endorsed Bush's re-election. When Bush later decided to replace Rumsfeld, Smith was offered the job again. He declined once more, this time to spend time with his terminally ill daughter. In 2008 he backed Senator John McCain and was named national co-chairman of the campaign committee. Football drew him in as well. In 1995 he owned the Memphis Mad Dogs of the Canadian Football League. In 2003 he joined Robert Rothman and Dwight Schar in buying a minority share of the Washington Redskins. Together the three held 40% of the team until 2021, when they sold to majority owner Dan Snyder after growing discontented with him. In June 2009, Smith expressed interest in buying a 60% controlling share of the St. Louis Rams from Chip Rosenbloom and Lucia Rodriguez. He also owned or co-owned other entertainment companies, including Alcon Entertainment. In 2023 he was a special sponsor of the revived Memphis Showboats.

  2730312829

• 8. Honors and Farewell

  ›

  The American Academy of Achievement gave Smith its Golden Plate Award in 1998. He entered the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame and, in 2000, the SMEI Sales & Marketing Hall of Fame. Chief Executive magazine named him CEO of the Year for 2004. In 2008 he received the Kellogg Award for Distinguished Leadership on the 29th of May, and the Bower Award for Business Leadership from The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Tony Jannus Award for distinguished contributions to commercial aviation went to him in 2011. In March 2014, Fortune ranked him 26th on its list of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders. His pay as CEO in 2008 totaled $10,434,589. That included a base salary of $1,430,466, a cash bonus of $2,705,000, and options worth $5,461,575. In March 2022 he announced that he would give up the CEO role and become executive chairman. He named long-time FedEx executive Raj Subramaniam as his successor, and the change took effect in June 2022. Smith had 10 children. They include the photographer Windland Smith Rice, the film producer Molly Smith, and Arthur Smith, listed as Ohio State's offensive coordinator. Forbes estimated his net worth at $5.3 billion when he died in Memphis on the 21st of June 2025, at the age of 80. On the 3rd of October 2025, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

  3335363754