You know Paris & maybe Nicky Hilton.

But do you know their GREAT-Grandfather who created the world’s first international hotel chain?

A man who bought America’s most expensive house And left BILLIONS to charity.

Meet: Conrad Hilton An underrated tycoon who came from nothing:

Conrad Hilton’s “Be My Guest” was published in 1957.

When you stay at a Hilton Hotel, you may find it in your bedside drawer.

He actually wrote it himself. Tip: it’s more fun than the Gideon Bible. The story...

1887: Conrad Nicholson Hilton is born on Christmas day.

Father Gus is a Norwegian immigrant who sells supplies in the back blocks of New Mexico.

Gus opens a store, but the financial crash of 1907 wipes out the family.

But the Hiltons still have:

- A very large adobe house next to a main railway line

- Mrs Hilton’s great cooking

- Helping hands (there’s lots of kids)

They turn the family house into a hotel. With room & meals only $2.50 a day, it does well.

By the time he’s 23, Conrad has been working for his dad for 11 years.

Dad makes him a business partner, but he’s eager to go out on his own.

Anything but hotels!

Conrad’s dream is to own a chain of banks. At 26, he raises enough money to start a small one.

Then WW1 happens.

Hilton spends his service in France.

While on active duty back in the U.S. he gets the news that Gus Hilton has died in a car wreck.

Returning to New Mexico, his home town now seems like “a toy town of adobe and wood surrounded by emptiness”.



With savings of $5011 and “big ideas”, Conrad still pursues his dream of owning a chain of banks.

He only meets brick walls.

A dying man, a friend of his father’s, instructs him to go to Texas:

“There you will make your fortune”.

Hilton moves to Cisco TX, where he looks around to buy a small bank.

Again he gets nowhere.

Exhausted, he enters a small, very crowded hotel to find a room for the night.

Then a thought: Could this bustling, rundown hotel, the Mobley, be a better idea than owning a bank?

Like most people in Cisco, the hotel’s owner is crazed by the possibility of oil riches - and eager to sell.

Hilton hands over his life’s savings.

The Mobley becomes the first of several ‘old dowagers’ i.e. decrepit properties with good finances - that Hilton buys.



But Hilton wants something more: his name on the front door.

The first ‘Hilton Hotel’, in Dallas, is a massive project. He has to raise a million dollars.

After running out of money twice, in August 1925 the hotel finally opens.