America's $124 trillion Great Wealth Transfer is underway, and baby boomers are passing their fortunes down to their heirs. But what happens when an ultrawealthy person has no descendants? For 81-year-old billionaire John Poindexter, the answer is an unconventional one: he is funneling a growing share of his wealth into one of the country's emptiest corners — a West Texas ghost town of roughly 25 people.

Shafter, Texas, sits in a county that keeps getting emptier. Census Bureau data shows Presidio County had an estimated 5,433 residents in 2025, down 11.4% since 2020 and from 7,818 in 2010. The median household income is just $43,802 — about half the median U.S. income — nearly one in five residents lives in poverty, and density amounts to roughly 1.6 people per square mile.

Poindexter, a Houston manufacturing magnate, is betting on the town anyway. Since late 2020, his Tidewater and Big Bend Foundation has taken in nearly $67 million in contributions, according to IRS filings compiled by ProPublica. That total includes $20.6 million in the fiscal year ending November 2024, when the foundation reported $62.5 million in net assets.

The foundation's signature project is Shafter itself, the former silver-mining town where about 25 people live, according to the Big Bend Sentinel. Plans reported by the New York Times call for a resort and a living history museum anchored by a rebuilt saloon, general store, and post office, with about a dozen adobe homes available for overnight rentals.

When the Times asked why his family won't inherit his wealth instead, Poindexter's answer was plain: “I've never been married, I have no children.”

That is a different path from Warren Buffett, who has directed his $140 billion fortune to four of his family's foundations and left the spending decisions to them. With no children to hand the reins to, Poindexter is building his own. According to the Times, his foundation will eventually own all of his properties, including the 30,000-acre Cibolo Creek Ranch, where Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016.

‘The place is going to boom’

Shafter's Presidio Mine operated from 1883 to 1942 and produced 35.2 million ounces of silver, according to Black Bear Minerals, which now owns it. When the mine closed, the town emptied out — a familiar pattern across the mining West, where settlements often rose and fell with the life of a single operation.

By early 2025, Poindexter had bought several Shafter properties and offered to restore the historic church at the town's entrance, the Big Bend Sentinel reported. Not every resident is sold on the plan, but a new restaurant and shop would likely be welcome — the closest place to buy groceries today is Presidio, 19 miles away.

David Long, a Shafter resident and the town's water board president, told the Sentinel that the preservation efforts could prompt more people to move to the ghost town.

“This is a wake-up call for sure, for people to start considering what's going to happen to the town,” Long told the Sentinel. “Once we get a dependable, good water system in here, the place is going to boom.”

His emphasis points to the practical groundwork — water above all — that stands between the town's present and the boom he predicts.

How Poindexter made his fortune — and where it's going

Poindexter served in Vietnam, received two Silver Stars and two Purple Hearts, and spent 14 years in finance before founding J.B. Poindexter & Co. in 1985. He remains the company's sole owner. While his net worth is not public, the Times has characterized him as a billionaire.

The company grew from $40 million in revenue in 1994 to more than $2.7 billion in annualized revenue through more than 40 acquisitions, according to a 2024 EY announcement naming him a regional Entrepreneur of the Year. J.B. Poindexter & Co. builds the bodies of UPS's brown delivery trucks and says it produces 66% of the step vans in the U.S. class five delivery market.

Echoes of Colonial Williamsburg

Poind is not the first wealthy American to try to restore a town's past. The Shafter plan is “kind of the same as Colonial Williamsburg, where you can actually stay in town and then some of the structures will just be museum visiting,” Henry Thompson, an officer of Poindexter's foundation, told the Big Bend Sentinel.

The Colonial Williamsburg restoration dates back to 1926, when John D. Rockefeller Jr. began quietly buying up properties in the former Virginia capital, according to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He insisted on staying anonymous, and a year later committed $5 million to restore the whole town. Not everyone was on board: when the Rockefellers were finally revealed as the donors at a town meeting, at least one resident stood up to object.

The century-old precedent offers both a template and a caution: restorations of this scale unfold over decades, and local buy-in has never been automatic.

Poindexter, meanwhile, is taking a far more public approach. He invited about 200 guests to Shafter over Labor Day weekend, the Times reported.

His bet also differs from the ones today's tech billionaires are making. A group of Silicon Valley investors spent roughly $800 million buying up Solano County farmland to build California Forever, an entirely new city, and faced plenty of local backlash along the way. They want to build the future from scratch; Poindexter wants to bring back the past.

“I think that we've forgotten our origins,” he told the Times. “We've forgotten this enormous debt we have to prior generations.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.