Billionaire Brings Hope To Veterans

The 37-year-old Marine had been wounded twice during three tours overseas including the bloodiest battle in Afghanistan earning two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. After returning to San Diego in 2010, he faced a new enemy: himself.

Carlisle had come to SkyRose Ranch in San Miguel, California, for Fight Club, a faith-based program Hughes runs for veterans with PTSD, but he was skeptical of the God factor. Characteristically fuming, he spent the first day with his tattooed arms crossed over his chest.

Over the next six days, he and a handful of other veterans went zip-lining, rode horses and raced ATVs. Instructors, all graduates of the program, led classes on character and trauma. In the evenings, the men shared stories around a campfire and bunked together in well-appointed yurts. One lesson in particular stood out to Carlisle: “What you’re doing now isn’t working. Why not try something different?”

With 7 miles of nature in every direction, there was nowhere to escape his thoughts. But after three tough days, Carlisle felt a shift.

“I’d been physically alive but emotionally and spiritually dead. By the time I left, the light at the end of the tunnel was lit again. There was hope,” he recalls.

When Hughes saw Carlisle’s smile at the graduation, it was just the transformation he was hoping for.

“I get a good seat to watch miracles happen,” Hughes says.

Hughes, 55, has hosted some 500 veterans and active-duty servicemen in the Mighty Oaks Warrior program at his ranch since 2012. That number is likely to double by next year. In addition to Fight Club, which is for men, there are retreats for women, couples and, soon, families. The program is part of Serving California, a nonprofit Hughes founded last year to help veterans, crime victims and inmates transition back into society.

The Malibu-based billionaire didn’t plan on starting a charity when he purchased the ranch—he just wanted to be a cowboy. He’d spent 20 years working for his father, B. Wayne Hughes Sr., who made billions building Public Storage, the world’s largest self-storage chain.

Later, Hughes partnered with his dad to start American Commercial Equities, a real estate firm in Malibu where he’s still executive vice president. With a net worth of $1.1 billion, he wanted to spend the second half of his life “pushing cattle around.”

On the 20,000-acre ranch, filled with rolling hills and oak forests, his 300 cattle joined elk, mountain lions, bobcats, deer and bald eagles. Hughes, who resembles a huskier Robert Redford, looked the part especially when riding one of the ranch’s dozen horses.

He bought a second home 20 miles away and started coming up from Malibu several times a month to “hit the reset button.”

One day, when Hughes was surveying the ranch in his Range Rover, he heard on the radio that an average of 22 veterans were committing suicide every day. He was shocked by the statistic. Hughes had never been in the service, but his father and grandfather had been, and the ranch was surrounded by military bases. He wondered if it could be a place where others, too, could start over.

“It was an epiphany,” he says, “a heart thing.”

Hughes teamed up with Chad Robichaux, a veteran of eight tours in Afghanistan and a certified pastoral counselor who had started Mighty Oaks in 2011. (He’s now director of veterans affairs at Serving California.) Hughes spent nearly $1 million to build a luxurious lodge and yurts to fit 35 guests. He wanted the veterans to feel pampered, so he got plush towels, high-thread-count sheets and a chef to serve local organic produce and black Angus steak.

“This is the kind of stuff you find at a Four Seasons, not a down-market summer camp. The little things matter,” he explains.

Hughes is proud to report there have been no suicides or divorces among the program’s graduates since its inception. In fact, half have come back to become instructors themselves. And starting next year, the program will give alumni grants to replicate the program nationwide.

“He didn’t have to do this,” Robichaux says of Hughes. “He could kick back on the beach in Malibu for the rest of his life. But I watch him come in at 8 a.m. and sometimes be the last one to leave. And he’s not trying to make a billion dollars–he’s trying to save people’s lives and families.”

Hughes has poured at least $5 million into Serving California over the past year and raised more than $2 million from other donors (programs are free, and Hughes refuses government grants). Besides serving veterans, the nonprofit funds a dozen recovery homes that host more than 100 women who have been victims of abuse or human trafficking.

It also runs The Urban Ministry Institute, a three-and-a-half-year Christian educational program with nearly 1,000 students in 22 prisons. Of the 150 graduates who have been released, only 10% have gone back to prison, compared with California’s recidivism rate of 65%.

Hughes, an avid surfer, describes the people he wants to reach this way: “In surfing, there’s a place called the impact zone, where the waves are so large that you can’t get past them or to shore, and you’re getting pounded. This bandwidth of society is stuck in the impact zone.”

Hughes came to philanthropy by way of politics. A conservative, he’s been a major donor to the super PAC American Crossroads and the advocacy group American Action Network, both linked to Karl Rove. He was also an early backer of Resurgent Republic, a conservative polling group, and has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates. But ultimately, Hughes decided that Washington politics weren’t for him.

“I wanted to be a changemaker, but I didn’t want to do it from 30,000 feet. If I wanted to make a difference, I needed to start in my own backyard,” he said.

Hughes’ desire to help abuse victims and ex-offenders was sparked in 2010, when he met the late Chuck Colson, founder of the Prison Fellowship, a Christian ministry for inmates. Before he found God, Colson had been President Nixon’s “hatchet man” during the Watergate scandal and spent seven months behind bars for illegal attempts to discredit whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg. In 2011, Hughes told Colson he wanted to grow his program in California.

It was important for Hughes that his charity work be rooted in Christianity, since faith had changed his own life when he was in his late 30s. “I wasn’t the best husband; I wasn’t the best father; I wasn’t the best that I could be,” he says. “You get as far as you can go, and you say, why isn’t this working out?”

Hughes still dabbles in politics. Stirred by his prison work, in last month’s election he gave $1.3 million to back a successful California ballot measure that will reduce penalties for most minor drug and theft crimes. Other top supporters—including billionaires George Soros and Nicholas Pritzker—were liberals.

Hughes also seems to have inexhaustible energy for new projects. Once an aspiring actor, he recently started Cantinas Entertainment, a film and TV production company, and The Love Your Neighbor Co., a social media network, to spread uplifting content. He’s also building an evangelical camp for kids with his wife, Wendy, and is creating a culinary training facility for chefs in a separate part of the ranch.

“At the end of the day, the biggest beneficiary of all this has been me. If you can help somebody in your lifetime, you’ve done a really good thing. If you can help 2,000 people, that’s pretty good. And it’s really fun!” Hughes says, adding, “Being a cowboy is a close second.”