The Guy Who Spent $40 Million On The Luce Is A Red Fedora-Wearing Inventor

The story of the $40 million Ferrari Luce sold at auction felt, at first, like another unhappy reminder of how impossible it is to buy a Ferrari and how fanatical its followers are about trying to impress the company. Outside the circle drive of the Portola Hotel where the auction was held, I heard a jaded journalist joke that maybe it was time to bring back the guillotine shortly after the gavel dropped.

Even the well-heeled inside the RM Auction murmured unfounded assumptions that something odd seemed afoot, maybe money laundering. The vibes were a mix of shock and disgust, with the exception of one slightly inebriated young man who said he knew who the winner was. They’re all wrong, he seemed to imply. The winner was just a generous inventor finding a fun way to give money to charity.

The name of the bidder has been revealed and that drunk kid was probably closer to the truth than most.

Meet Dr. Herbert Wertheim, A Self-Made Inventor Whose Products You Probably Use Every Day

I get the instinct. I do. A $40 million check for a car that’s got no history, and no provenance seems wrong. It cleared a price higher than the most important Shelby Daytona (before fees).

However, if you were to go into a lab in order to develop a human being with the most sympathetic upbringing, you could hardly improve on Dr. Herbert Wertheim. This is the son of immigrants, whose family moved to the United States in pursuit of a better life.

According to Wertheim himself, in an interview for an award, it wasn’t exactly a happy home. He lived above the family’s meager bakery in Florida, trying to dodge an abusive father. Eventually, his mother left, but the courts kept young Herbert in the shop with his dad to help with the business.

By the time he was 16, he repeatedly ran away from home and was caught and sent to juvenile hall, where a judge gave him a choice: Live in a reformatory or join the Navy. He wisely chose the Navy.

“I got three meals a day, a place to sleep, and a great education. The more I learned, the more they taught me, I loved it. The Navy was my mother and father and family,” he says. “To this day, it was one of the most important parts of my life. My success in life would not have been possible without the Navy’s guidance, encouragement, and help.”

After finishing his electronics course, Wertheim went to guided missile school. At the same time, he took dozens of Navy correspondence courses. After graduating near the top of his class, he went on to become a naval aviator, frogman, and diver. Upon his discharge in 1960, armed with a GED certificate that he earned while in the Navy, he attended Brevard Community College near Cape Canaveral, Florida, as a full-time pre-medical and engineering student. To support himself, he sold Collier encyclopedias and worked the night shift for General Dynamics and NASA.

As a NASA engineer, Wertheim helped design vision and neurological instrumentation systems. His work at NASA got him interested in vision, so he applied for and was accepted at the Southern College of Optometry in Memphis. He won a scholarship, which helped with his tuition. Wertheim had to work to pay all the other living expenses.

Wertheim is a serial inventor and, after graduating and starting a practice, he continued to develop instruments and tools. He was one of the first medical professionals to discover a link between UV light and cataracts, leading him to invent the UV-tinted sunglasses that nearly everyone uses now. Eventually, Wertheim stopped seeing patients so he could focus full-time on inventing tools to help people retain their sight.

Even if you can agree that his wealth has been honestly earned, I understand the compulsion to question the impulse to spend money in a way that seems so extravagant. Is this just a ploy to get in good with Ferrari? Maybe. But is the second time that Dr. Wertheim has purchased a Ferrari at auction to support The Ferrari Foundation; I think he’s probably well established with the automaker.

Bryant Kreaden, the former manager of Ferrari of Beverly Hills, correctly guessed this person was more interested in the charity part of the transaction than the actual vehicle. Via DM he told us that “all the haters can now shut up … it was for a good cause.”

While the underbidder at the auction was apparently another major Ferrari collector, Wertheim is more established as a major philanthropist. Certainly, there’s some ability to get a tax write-off, but both Wertheim and his then-wife Nicole signed The Giving Pledge (a non-binding agreement to give away the majority of one’s wealth to charitable causes in their lifetimes). One of the big focuses of the couple’s giving is aiding the endowments of public colleges and universities, stating that:

Many of America’s private universities have more than 20 times the endowments of most public institutions of higher learning, and our state legislators are decreasing funding to these public institutions that needs to be made up by private funding. The Wertheim family’s talent, time and energy will be dedicated to The Wertheim Family Foundation’s future efforts to support the endowments of public universities and colleges

To date, he’s pledged or given at least $100 million to create a cancer center at Baptist Health South Florida, $100 million to the University of Florida, $50 million to UC Berkeley, another $65 million to Florida International University, and now another $50+ million to the Ferrari Foundation.

Apparently, Being A Billionaire ‘Is Not So Easy’

Here’s an interesting quote from NPR:

“You know, being a billionaire is not so easy. I’m serious when I say that. If you have a billion dollars, you have to figure out some way to give away $100 million 10 times. If you have 4 or 5 billion, you have to figure out 50 times how to give away $100 million. And to do it sensibly and with good judgment,” Wertheim told NPR.

Giving away the money hit the additional snag when Wertheim’s wife, Nicole, filed for divorce a couple of years ago. This led to a custody battle over the couple’s multi-billion dollar fortune, as Forbes reports. Nicole Wertheim passed away earlier this year, so the management of the charitable foundation appears to have reverted to Dr. Wertheim (though family drama continues as the couple’s daugher, Erica Wertheim Zohar, insinuated in a piece in the LA Times that her dad had quashed memorial tributes for his deceased ex-wife).

With complete control of the money, Wertheim has decided that Ferrari’s charity is a nice addition to his giving portfolio. The Ferrari Foundation has a broad remit, so it’s hard to pin down the one specific thing it does, though it’s fair to guess that, with a backer like Wertheim, education will be a key part of the mission going forward. Indeed, the foundation recently supported the rebuilding of the Aveson Charter School, which burned down in the Eaton fire in Altadena, California, down the coast from where the auction happened.

Can I be certain that Dr. Wertheim had no other motives and was entirely pure of heart with this gift? Of course not. His schtick is wearing red hats everywhere, and some of his donations are not ones I’d make. I’ll just say that there were a lot of conspicuous and obscene displays of wealth on hand during the week in Monterey, and, amazingly, the biggest cash drop of the weekend no longer seems to me like the most egregious of them.

Top photo: Ferrari