Harold Hamm

Harold Glenn Hamm is an American entrepreneur primarily involved in the oil and gas business who is best known for pioneering the development of the large shale oil resources of the Bakken formation.

• Fracking pioneer Harold Hamm runs Continental Resources, one of the nation’s biggest independent oil companies.
• The 13th child of Oklahoma sharecroppers, he picked cotton barefoot as a child and started working at a gas station at age 16 to support his family.
• He eventually started his own trucking company hauling water to and from oilfields, then in 1971 took out a loan to drill his first well.
• In the 1990s he had the vision to use horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in North Dakota’s Bakken region, transforming the US oil industry.
• Today Continental produces more than 330,000 barrels per day, much of it from North Dakota. Hamm owns 76% of the company.
• In 2018 Hamm, who has type-2 diabetes, pledged an additional $34 million to the Harold Hamm Diabetes Center at the University of Oklahoma.