Harold Hamm & family

About Harold Hamm & family

Fracking pioneer Harold Hamm founded and chairs Continental Resources, one of the nation's biggest independent oil companies.

The 13th child of Oklahoma sharecroppers, Hamm 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 U.S. oil industry.

Today Continental, which went public in 2007, produces 400,000 barrels' worth of oil and gas per day. Hamm and his 5 children took the company private in a $27 billion deal in 2022.