[4] Following the death of William Cargill in 1909, his son-in-law John MacMillan steered the company out of a debt crisis and into stability.
[5][6] The "family reportedly keeps 80% of Cargill Inc.'s net income inside the company for reinvestment annually.
[11][12] The family was also the majority owner of The Mosaic Company,[11] the largest producer of potash and phosphate fertilizer in the United States.
[14] In 2012, the unknown heiress Margaret Anne Cargill, posthumously earned the #1 spot in the Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual list of America's 50 most generous donors.
"[14] The family-owned Cargill Inc., expanded from a "small-scale frontier enterprise"—a grain storage business—with William Cargill's acquisition in 1865 of a "grain flat house" (a warehouse at the end of a railway line in Iowa) into a "complex international organization and a successful competitor in global markets.
[16]: xxxi Cargill's wealth increased, as the Great Plains were transformed into a breadbasket, providing grain to the country, and the railroads expanded east to west in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
[15] In 2019, Forbes described Cargill Inc as an "international producer and distributor of agricultural products such as sugar, refined oil, chocolate and turkey" that also "provides risk management, commodities trading and transportation services.
[18] He saved the company from bankruptcy and created a work environment that fostered a loyal and dedicated workforce.
[16]: xiii The success of the company under his tenure from 1936 to 1960 was due in large part to the team he formed with a second-generation family member, MacMillan Jr's uncle, Austin Cargill, who had joined the company in 1913,[16]: 245 and Cargill MacMillan Sr.
[16]: xiii Until 1960, when Edwin Kelm was named as president of Cargill Inc, the company's history had been marked by "family complexity".
[4] From 1999 until his retirement in 2007, a nonfamily member, American investor and businessman, Warren Staley, was CEO of Cargill, Inc. of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
[28] A Star Tribune article at the time of his retirement, said that prior to Staley's tenure, Cargill was considered to be "the agricultural industry's version of the CIA".
"[28] In a 2007 Forbes article on "The Richest People You've Never Heard of", Cargill Inc was 90 percent owned by the Cargill-MacMillan family and was still the "largest private company in America".
"[3] As the world economy collapsed and the price of fertilizer decreased, the "food family's fortune" suffered.
[30] A new generation of the Cargill family was appointed to the board of directors, according to the Wall Street Journal.
[1] The "family reportedly keeps 80% of Cargill Inc.'s net income inside the company for reinvestment annually.
[33] Their oldest son, Cargill MacMillan Jr (born Hennepin County, Minnesota, March 29, 1927 – November 14, 2011) and his wife had four children.
[36] The two children of their oldest son, James R. (Susan) Cargill II (born 1949), whose hometown was Birchwood, Wisconsin.
Marianne Liebmann studied at Montana State University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree.
[42] Four members of the Cargill family ranked 220 on "The 400 Richest Americans 2009" list, each with a net worth of $1.6 billion.
MacMillan Jr, who was a "longtime" member of Cargill Inc board of directors, had "no day-to-day role in the company".
[34] Cargill heiress Marion MacMillan Pictet (1932–2009) ranked #176 on Forbes list in 2010 with a net worth of $4.5 billion,[43][44][45] an increase over $4.3 in 2009.
[33] The net worth of her daughter, Gwendolyn Sontheim Meyer (born 1961/62), the great-great-granddaughter of William W. Cargill, was $4.4 billion in 2020, placing her #680 on the richest people in the United States in 2020.
When all of these Mosaic shares are finally sold, the two charities could become "two of the wealthiest grant makers in the United States.
"[14] In 2012 Margaret Anne Cargill posthumously earned the #1 spot in The Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual list of America's 50 most generous donors, beating George Soros, Michael Bloomberg and Paul Allen.