Larry H. Miller

Larry H. Miller is the author and subject of Driven, his autobiography and the source of everything the wiki records about him. He tells the story of a Utah parts-counter stock boy who, on April 6, 1979, bought his first car dealership for $3.5 million while leveraged “about 40:1” with only $88,000 in the bank — and over the next three decades built the Larry H. Miller Group into roughly 90 companies across six states (40+ auto dealerships, movie theaters, a motorsports park, a production company, the Utah Jazz, and the arena that became the Delta Center), doing $3.2 billion in annual sales. His self-described method was singular: “I overpower problems with work.” He worked 80–90 hours a week, six days a week, for 20 years, deciding early that the way to win was simply to outwork everyone until he “could not be denied.”

The book is as much a cautionary tale as a success story. Miller treats his relentless work ethic as both what made him successful and what made him “a failure” as a father — missing his children’s youth, with his wife Gail functioning as a near-single parent and unacknowledged 50/50 business partner. Recurring threads the wiki ties to his story include Entrepreneurship (his ten-point definition of an entrepreneur), Hard Work, Capital Allocation (buying ~90 businesses while refusing to overpay), Reputation (negotiating so every seller felt fairly treated — “I never had to avoid the previous owner”), and Faith (tithing as the personal inflection point: “how many coincidences before they’re not coincidences”). He counted John Adams a kindred spirit after reading David McCullough’s biography — “His story is my story.”

Context: Larry H. Miller (1944–2009) was an American businessman best known as the longtime owner of the NBA’s Utah Jazz and founder of the Larry H. Miller Group of Companies, one of the largest privately held auto-dealership and sports/entertainment empires in the United States. He was a prominent member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Where this appears

• Driven — author and subject of the autobiography; the source of his work-ethic philosophy, dealership-and-Jazz empire-building, and the family-cost cautionary thread