Jean Paul Getty was an American industrialist. He founded the Getty Oil

Getty Oil

Getty Oil is an oil company founded by J. Paul Getty. It was at its height during the 1960s. In 1971, the Getty Realty division was formed to manage the real estate needs of Getty stations. The division was later spun off, but now owns the rights to the Getty brand...

 Company, and in 1957 Fortune

Fortune (magazine)

Fortune is a global business magazine published by Time Inc. Founded by Henry Luce in 1930, the publishing business, consisting of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, grew to become Time Warner. In turn, AOL grew as it acquired Time Warner in 2000 when Time Warner was the world's largest...

magazine named him the richest living American

Wealthiest Americans (1957)

In 1957 Fortune magazine developed a list of the seventy-six wealthiest Americans; the list was republished in many American newspapers. The primary source of wealth was indicated as being inherited or stemming from a particular business or industry...

, whilst the 1966 Guinness Book of Records named him as the world's richest private citizen, worth an estimated $1,200 million. At his death, he was worth more than $2 billion. A book published in 1996 ranked him as the 67th richest American who ever lived, based on his wealth as a percentage of the gross national product

Measures of national income and output

A variety of measures of national income and output are used in economics to estimate total economic activity in a country or region, including gross domestic product , gross national product , and net national income . All are specially concerned with counting the total amount of goods and...

.Despite his wealth, Getty was known for being a miser

Miser

A miser, cheapskate, snipe-snout, penny pincher, piker, scrooge, skinflint or tightwad is a person who is reluctant to spend money, sometimes to the point of forgoing even basic comforts and some necessities...

.

Getty was an avid collector of art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

 and antiquities

Antiquities

Antiquities, nearly always used in the plural in this sense, is a term for objects from Antiquity, especially the civilizations of the Mediterranean: the Classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, Ancient Egypt and the other Ancient Near Eastern cultures...

; his collection formed the basis of the J. Paul Getty Museum

J. Paul Getty Museum

The J. Paul Getty Museum, a program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, is an art museum. It has two locations, one at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, and one at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California...

 in Los Angeles, California

Los Angeles, California

Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...

, and over $661 million of his estate was left to the museum after his death.