Billy Joe “Red” McCombs, who built his Texas dealership empire from a pair of used-car stores in Corpus Christi, died Sunday. He was 95.
McCombs’ business enterprises spanned from real estate to ranching, professional sports to energy. But it was his start in automotive retail that launched what would become McCombs Enterprises, the umbrella company serving all of his businesses.
“I built a business empire working out of an office at a car dealership,” he told Automotive News in a 2011 profile.
McCombs was born Oct. 19, 1927, in the town of Spur, Texas. He played football as a student at Southwestern University in Texas — where he later would serve on the board of trustees — and entered the military before dropping out of law school at the University of Texas in 1950.
McCombs then got his automotive start at a Ford dealership in Corpus Christi. He excelled as a new-car salesman but moved into used-car sales when, as he told Automotive News, he saw a salary chart showing he earned less than the store’s lowest-paid used-vehicle sales employee. He would go on to open two used-vehicle lots in Corpus Christi, later adding a dealership selling the ill-fated Ford Edsel, before moving to San Antonio to help turn around a struggling Ford dealership there.
His dealership group would grow at one time into the sixth-largest in the U.S., counting sales of $1.3 billion in 1997, according to Automotive News in 2011. Red McCombs Automotive ranked No. 69 on Automotive News‘ list of the top 150 dealership groups in the U.S. in 2021, with sales of 13,905 new vehicles and 11,378 used vehicles. In 2021, the nine-store group brought in $1.13 billion in revenue. As of November, the group had seven stores selling Ford, Toyota, Hyundai and Genesis vehicles.
McCombs would expand his businesses into energy, ranching and real estate. He co-founded Clear Channel Communications, which sold in 2008 and later was renamed iHeartMedia. He had owned the San Antonio Spurs, Denver Nuggets and Minnesota Vikings professional sports teams.
Forbes estimated his net worth at $1.7 billion at the time of his death..
“He is definitely a visionary,” his grandson, Joe Shields, director of business development for McCombs Enterprises, told Automotive News for a profile in November. “He just has this innate ability to foresee where things are going.”
His family’s philanthropic gifts, through the McCombs Foundation, have totaled more than $135 million, including to the University of Texas at Austin business school and the Red and Charline McCombs Institute, dedicated to cancer research at the University of Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Center.
He married his wife, Charline, in 1950. Charline died in December 2019.
“Red was a visionary entrepreneur who touched many lives and impacted our community in immeasurable ways,” the family said in a statement on Monday. “But to us he was always, first and foremost, ‘Dad’ or ‘Poppop.'”