Forget the fancy Ferraris and precious Picassos. Instead, new Forbes 400 member David D. Halbert chose the ultimate flex: convincing Tom Fazio to build him a “no-budget” 18-hole golf course in Texas.
“If you don’t have a hole named after you then you’re not a member,” laughs David D. Halbert, as he pulls the cart up to the first tee at his personal golf course. This one is called the “Jake hole” – because that’s the nickname his grandkids call him.
Located on 170 acres along Lake Granbury, 60 miles southwest of Dallas Fort-Worth airport, the championship length (7,500 yards from the tips) Halbert National is the latest creation by legendary golf designer Tom Fazio. Halbert, who spent some $50 million to build this par 72 track, owns 100% of the course. There is no membership and only Halbert’s friends and family can play the course. Little surprise than that Halbert was no passive client. “I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted to try,” says Halbert, who is 69. Thankfully Fazio, he says, “Is very open to input from different people.”
The driving range is reversible — there’s a tee box on either side.
Halbert National
Wearing faded jeans and a bright yellow golf shirt, Halbert puts down his tumbler of small-batch Halbert National whiskey (a blend of 9-year and 16-year old bourbons) and sends a drive soaring down the fairway. He gets a kick out of showing off holes where he convinced Fazio to alter his vision. Like on the par 4, 11th where Halbert told the bulldozer operator to put in a 30-foot hill in the fairway where Fazio originally had just a 7-foot rise. When Fazio saw it, he reshaped the hill a little and removed a bunker. On the first hole, where Fazio had buried a stream underground to avoid it being a perpendicular hazard, Halbert insisted on bringing it to the surface as a babbling brook lined with limestone steps. “The most fun thing I think I’ve ever done was to build that course,” says Halbert.
“I want the owner engaged. For him to be part of it, to love it,” says Fazio, 80. Based in Jupiter, Fla, Fazio came out to visit Lake Granbury a dozen times over the two-year project. Last time he got along that well with a client was the late casino magnate Steve Wynn, for whom Fazio designed Shadow Creek, an oasis of pine trees and waterfalls hewn from the Nevada desert which hosted a PGA Tour event in 2020 two years after it staged The Match, the made-for-TV spectacle of Tiger Woods playing Phil Michelson one-on-one. Says Fazio: “Having your own golf course is the ultimate piece of art. I fulfill dreams.”
The total price of Halbert’s satisfaction will be upwards of $70 million once he’s built out a lodge and acquired neighboring lots. “I want it to be nicer than Augusta,” says Halbert. Cost of upkeep? “About the same as our flight crew,” he says coyly. (That would equate to about $3 million a year for a Gulfstream G550.)
I thought, “If I’m going to do it, I’ve go to do it now.”
David Halbert
He can afford it. This is Halbert’s first year on the Forbes 400. In March the biotech he founded, Caris Life Sciences went public, quickly surging surged to a market cap of $10.3 billion. He owns 44%, good for a net worth of $4.9 billon.
Halbert grew up in Texas — San Antonio and Abilene — the son of a surgeon. He met Kathy, his wife of 46 years, at Abilene Christian University (to which they later donated $30 million). He picked up golf a couple years out of school; his yeoman’s swing is self-taught and he plays to a handicap of 12.5. “It’s sort of my only hobby.”
He says he knew from an early age he would be an entrepreneur. He owned some natural gas wells in Colorado. A chain of gas stations in Hawaii. Then he got into home oxygen deliveries. “Entrepreneurs don’t need education, they just need opportunity and capital,” he says. In 1987, when he was 31, he launched what became the pharmacy benefits manager AdvancePCS. He sold the publicly traded company to Caremark in 2004 for $7.5 billion, personally making about $250 million.
Soon Halbert will build a more extensive lodge and cabins on the course.
Halbert National
That same year he and Kathy built the lake house in Granbury, which has a small town feel and a fun-loving boating community. They soon bought the land across the lake. “I was afraid this was all going to be homes and docks and thought, that’s going to kill the view,” says Kathy. Initially the family enjoyed riding 4-wheelers and skeet shooting. Then Kathy picked up golf but was self-conscious about playing slow and didn’t like feeling pressure to pick up and move on. She thought having a 3-hole, par 3 course would be fun to practice on; “I just wanted this little thing where if I didn’t have anybody behind me and I could swing like an idiot.” Careful what you wish for.
Meanwhile, Halbert had founded a number of startups including Caris Life Sciences, in 2008. Caris has built up a database of individual genetic and medical records covering some 800,000 cancer patients. They feed all this data to AI algorithms which applies pattern recognition and molecular profiling to determine the best treatments for patients. Last year FDA approved Caris’ first diagnostic test which they use to “interrogate,” or better understand, existing tumors. Future diagnostics products will include cancer blood tests that can be done earlier than any existing test. Halbert is not a PhD (aside from an honorary doctorate from Abilene Christian), but he employs dozens of them.
Over the years, Halbert the golfer had become a member of at least four Fazio designed courses. He still dreamed of building at home. Halbert was already 66, and Fazio 77 when they first met in 2022. Halbert thought, “If I’m going to do it, I’ve got to do it now.” And he knew Fazio – who gets paid a flat consulting fee on each course – was picky about clientele. “You have to convince him to work with you,” says Halbert, who happily sent his plane a dozen times to pick up Fazio and fly him to Granbury where they would spend days walking the land. “Initially I tried to talk David out of it,” says Fazio. “I asked him how do you expect to get your money back?”
“It’s an attitude. I can come out here with my girlfriends and a pitcher of margaritas and whack away.”
Kathy Halbert
Halbert won over Fazio by explaining that this would be “a no-budget course. You can spend as much as you want and do whatever you want on it.” That has involved moving a million tons of dirt and planting 2,000 trees to sculpt what used to be flat hayfields along a quarter mile of lakefront. Grass is always a challenge. Halbert National is planted with three different zoysia varieties and a genetically engineered “super dwarf Bermuda” strain called TifEagle. To ensure perfection, Halbert hired the former facilities director of Larry Ellison’s private Porcupine Creek course in California to run the place.
Fazio says that more than half the cost of a new golf course can be spent underground on irrigation and drainage. He points to a recent $15 million renovation of Dallas National that involved an underground cooling system to keep its finicky bentgrass greens happy in the southwestern heat. A maintenance building can cost $5 million. A pump station in a lake is $2 million.
Being in Texas helps. Permitting has been a breeze. Halbert and pro-business Granbury get along. The Brazos River Authority, which manages the 8,300-acre lake, sold Halbert an 8-acre sliver along the water and allows him to use it for irrigation. Hood County appraised the 162-acre property at just $3.04 million last year (barely its land value), levying $60,000 in taxes. Back when it was hayfields the land had an assessed taxable value of just $40,000.
Kathy loved watching the two big picture guys plan. “Tom says all he does is move dirt, but I tell him, you create peace. Because they’re under so much heavy pressure. When they can get out and be in God’s world and see the sunshine and the beauty — that’s not just a golf course, it’s an attitude. I can come out here with my girlfriends and a pitcher of margaritas and whack away.”
Lake Granbury is 40 miles southwest of Fort Worth.
Halbert National
Halbert doesn’t want to keep it (entirely) to himself. “I certainly intend to have it played,” he says, hoping to lure fellow Dallas National members and PGA superstars Scottie Scheffler, Jordan Spieth and Bryson DeChambeau to the course once the grass is all grown in next year.
Expect the course to also appeal to son Patrick Halbert’s business partners, including Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine with whom he created the Gin & Juice line of premixed cocktails, as well as the new brand Still Gin.
Although it’s fairly uncommon, there are other billionaires who have built private golf courses, including Warren Stephens (net worth: $3.5 billion), whose Alotian course in Little Rock, Ark. is another Fazio masterpiece. Kelcy Warren (net worth: $7.3 billion), of pipeline giant Energy Transfer, owns the Lajitas course on the Rio Grande in west Texas. Ted Turner ($2.8 billion) has a course on his 9,000-acre Nonami Ranch in Georgia. Michael Jordan ($3.8 billion) built his Grove XXIII course on a former citrus plantation in Florida and has personally approved only a handful of members.
Halbert’s course will have local company. Tiger Woods is building his second course nearby, a private club (and gated community) called Bluejack Ranch. Fazio too is working on the Maverick golf community for Discovery Land Company, both outside of fast-growing Fort Worth. To keep up with the competition, Halbert intends to keep tinkering, moving a couple fairways and planting a few more $35,000 “signature trees.” To extend the total distance to 7,777 yards, he has acquired adjacent lots, clearing out old lake shacks and trailer homes, and will add a formal driveway. In time they’ll have a boat to ride from the dock at the house to the course. In early September Halbert and Fazio were sharing over email a listing for a $58,000 amphibious hovercraft golf cart.
Kathy Halbert says, “We do curse a few things, like the Canadian geese,” which are not impressed by the 10,000 square foot teebox of perfect zinc zoysia grass as anything more than a litter box. To scare them off, says Halbert, “We’re training some dogs.”
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