This story begins in Texas, USA.

There, two things are abundant: oil and the daring cowboy spirit to gamble big.
And the Hunter brothers—Nelson Bunker Hunter and William Herbert Hunter—happen to embody both.

Their father, H.L. Hunter, was a legendary figure who made his fortune through poker and eventually built a vast oil empire. Besides immense wealth, he left his sons a deep-rooted distrust of government-issued currency.

With this inherited skepticism, coupled with an innate gambling instinct, in the early 1970s, the Hunter brothers set their sights on an ancient metal—silver.
Prologue: Two "Big Brains" Counting on the Abacus
At that time, silver prices hovered around $1.50 per ounce.
In the eyes of the Hunter brothers, this was almost free. They firmly believed that the dollar would eventually be swallowed by inflation, and silver—an asset that has repeatedly served as currency throughout human history—was the true "hard currency."

Their plan was simple, direct, and even a bit crude:

Since it’s valuable, buy it all.
Thus, an extremely rare accumulation effort in financial history began.

They mobilized nearly all their family’s wealth and connections, quietly sweeping up silver through affiliated companies and offshore accounts worldwide. Not only did they buy futures contracts, but more importantly—demanded physical delivery.
Tons and tons of silver were shipped into warehouses in New York and Switzerland.

At its peak, the Hunter brothers controlled over 50% of the deliverable silver inventory worldwide, with enough silver to cover