Talk:J. R. Simplot

Head injury
I don't have time, but someone might want to add something about his fall after the bowl game. It sounds like a serious injury.

http://www.idahostatesman.com/238/story/65903.html Pgrote 05:47, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Atheist
Oh, really? The only evidence that the contributor of this "fact" has to offer is a listing in the somewhat dubious Celebrity Atheist List, using a single-sentence quote from Fast Food Nation, a sensationalizing book that isn't even a biography of J.R. Simplot. Unless evidence can be produced that Simplot actually believed there wasn't a deity, at best we can say that his religious beliefs were agnosticism or "unknown". This smacks of intellectual dishonesty, at the least. &mdash;QuicksilverT @ 15:50, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
 * This obit suggests he was an atheist.--droptone (talk) 12:24, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
 * How so? --BDD (talk) 19:26, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

'Natural causes' is not a cause of death
It's just a meaningless phrase, except that he wasn't murdered etc. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.193.144.79 (talk) 09:19, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Esquire Magazine's "What I've Learned"
The article would be enhanced by including the "What I've Learned" Esquire interview with Mr. Simplot. It is how I first heard of him and how I came to admire his plain speaking, down-to-Earth wisdom and philosophy.

Fusedmind (talk) 15:00, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Tax evasion not mentioned?
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and it was an accepted fact that JR Simplot got in trouble for tax fraud, yet there is no mention of this in his biography. Why not?

References (there are many more):

http://fortune.com/2012/02/12/the-simplot-saga-how-americas-french-fry-king-made-billions-more-in-semiconductors-fortune-1995/ http://imnh.isu.edu/digitalatlas/geog/rrt/part6/chp19/142.htm http://smeedonstate-ism.com/columns/1977.htm (search for "Simplot and the Judge") — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.135.125.75 (talk) 14:05, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on J. R. Simplot. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20080530014343/http://www.simplot.com:80/company/jr_simplot.cfm to http://www.simplot.com/company/jr_simplot.cfm

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 22:50, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Fish Farming
He was an early adopter of fish farming, I believe. He fed the waste from his potato / french fry operations to fish (Tilapia) and then sold the fish.

This was characteristic of him, he found ways to increase his company's productivity and cut its waste.

He was in the fertilizer business (I believe), because he used so much of it in his own farming business that he decided he needed to produce his own and then he grew the fertilizer business to be one of the biggest in North America at that time.

He was a billionaire and the oldest billionaire at his death, as is noted but he was / would have been one of the earliest billionaires and a billionaire when that meant much more than it does today. Back in the 60's and 70's, there were just a handful of billionaires on the planet. It was very rare.

Living Every Day (talk) 17:22, 29 March 2022 (UTC)


 * This information could be included if you have reliable sources (WP:RS) to support it. You could add the source information here on the talk page, or add it to the article using the citation toolbar.Dialectric (talk) 18:09, 29 March 2022 (UTC)