At 30 years old, Frederick W. Smith had every reason to quit.
He was broke.
His investors had lost faith.
His board fired him.
The FBI wanted to put him behind bars.
His marriage was crumbling.
And the dream he had written up in a Yale economics class — to create a nationwide overnight delivery service — looked like a pipe dream.
But this is America. And in America, it’s not where you start — it’s how you finish.
Fred Smith didn’t just pull himself up — he pulled half a million people with him.
He founded Federal Express in 1973 with a few small planes and a big idea.
Today, FedEx's market cap is more than $54 billion. It serves 220 countries, employs over 500,000 people, and delivers more than 16 million packages a day.
That’s not just a business success. That’s a triumph of American capitalism.
FedEx operates the world’s largest cargo airline fleet with approximately 650 aircraft.
Smith’s story is the kind we look for every time we make a recommendation in American Prosperity.
That’s why I recommended FedEx in September 2019. Five years later, when we closed the position, subscribers locked in a solid 103% gain.
We look for rockstar CEOs — men and women who can lead through storms, take the hits, and build businesses that endure. And Fred Smith was one of the best.
In April 1978, FedEx went public with just a handful of planes and a bold idea: overnight delivery, guaranteed.
If you had the foresight to put just $1,000 into the stock back then, you’d be sitting on more than $265,000 today.
A 26,000% return.
This is the power of betting on visionary leadership and a business that solves a real problem, and then having the patience to hold on.
When Others Folded, He Doubled Down
Born in Mississippi in 1944, Smith learned grit early. His father — a co-founder of Greyhound — died when Fred was just four. By 15, he was flying planes.
By the late 1960s, he had served two tours in Vietnam as a Marine platoon leader. He returned home with a Silver Star, Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts.
Fred Smith in 1976, the year FedEx proved the doubters wrong and turned its first profit.
So when the banks turned him down… when his company couldn’t buy fuel… when he literally had to gamble in Vegas to make payroll — winning $27,000 at blackjack … Smith didn’t fold.
He doubled down.
Federal Express turned its first profit in 1976. A year later, deregulation of the airline industry opened the door for FedEx to carry more cargo on larger jets.
While the government-run Postal Service lumbered along, FedEx guaranteed, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight” — and it delivered.
Smith wasn’t just a great operator. He was a visionary.
In 1994, FedEx became the first major logistics company to offer online package tracking, years before Jeff Bezos shipped his first book out of a garage.
A Titan of Capitalism
He stood up for capitalism. “There’s only two kinds of economic systems: market-driven and government-directed,” Smith told The Wall Street Journal in 2022. “The more you move toward a state-directed economy, the less efficient and more corrupt it becomes”.
When Amazon started building its own logistics network, Smith took a stand. In 2019, FedEx ended its contract to deliver Amazon packages, refusing to be a middleman for its biggest competitor.
Smith stepped down as CEO in 2022, on FedEx’s 50th anniversary, naming Raj Subramaniam as his successor. At the time, activist investor D.E. Shaw was pushing for cost cuts and streamlined operations.
He never obsessed over his legacy. When asked, he said: “The legacy will be the success of the company and, I hope, the success of my children”.
When Fred Smith passed away at age 80 last week, America didn’t just lose a CEO. We lost a pioneer, a patriot, and a Marine who used discipline and vision to transform global commerce.
At American Prosperity, we study leaders like Fred Smith because they show us what’s possible. We’re not betting on tickers. We’re betting on people, on vision, on execution, and on grit.
That’s how you build generational wealth — and that’s why we do what we do.
Rest in peace, Fred. Your legacy is still flying high.
If you want to read more about Fred Smith and how he founded FedEx, I highly recommend Inventing FedEx: The Cruel Ordeal. You’ll be hooked from the very first paragraph.
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Regards,
Charles Mizrahi
Prosperity Insider
