The Man Who Made Time Move

A tribute to Fred Smith, Founder of FedEx (1944–2025)

I was barely an adult when I first met Fred. It was in Memphis, 2007. I’d tagged along to a logistics-focused investment roundtable I had no real business attending — too young, too green, too quiet. My uncle had a last-minute scheduling conflict and tossed me the pass. “Go shake some hands,” he said. “Just don’t get in the way.” I nodded, buttoned up, and arrived with the kind of eager intensity only a young person out of Uni could manage.

I remember the room more than the agenda. There were supply chain czars, cargo insurance veterans, and a few folks from Boeing and UPS who wore practiced smirks. Then he walked in — quiet at first, no big entrance. Fred Smith didn’t need one.

He wasn’t the kind of billionaire who entered a room and sucked the oxygen out of it. He entered and added oxygen. The temperature changed. People sat straighter. I remember he shook every hand — even mine — with the same deliberate firmness. When it came to me, he smiled and said, “You don’t look like you run a fleet yet.”

I didn’t. Still don’t. But for ten minutes, he made me feel like I might one day.

What I’ve come to realize since is that Fred had that effect on people. He saw the full arc of a person, not just their current station. He believed in capacity, to build, to reinvent, to rise. He saw logistics as a manifestation of trust, not just efficiency. Planes, trucks, and containers were vessels, sure, but for him, they were vessels of promise. And there’s a certain poetry in that.

This is a man who, when FedEx was just starting out, gambled the company’s last $5,000 on a blackjack table in Vegas to make payroll. Not because he was reckless, but because he believed too deeply to quit. That anecdote has floated around boardrooms for decades, and it sounds like myth — except it’s true. I’ve heard at least three of his former lieutenants retell the story, and all of them conclude it the same way: “Fred never blinked.”

And that’s the thing. Fred didn’t blink. Not when he came back from Vietnam with shrapnel in his shoulder and the belief that civilian logistics could be reimagined using military precision. Not when Wall Street analysts called FedEx a pipe dream. Not when fuel crises, labour strikes, or even 9/11 upended global trade.

He was a veteran, a capitalist, a strategist, and a patriot — all fused into one man who somehow still found time to coach his kids' sports teams and personally reply to handwritten letters from warehouse workers in Indiana or couriers in Singapore.

One of his former employees once told me, “You never wanted to disappoint Fred, because you knew how much he believed in you. Even if he barely knew you.”

That was his genius. Not just that he built a global logistics empire. But that he built loyalty through faith.

Years later, when I was working on a logistics investment in the Middle East, I sent him a question via a mutual contact. I didn’t expect a reply. I got one in two hours. It was concise — three sentences — but it completely reframed how I thought about time sensitivity and local regulatory workarounds.

Speed was his strategy. But not in the attention-deficit way tech chases scale today. Fred’s version of speed was purposeful, almost philosophical. It wasn’t about haste; it was about reliability. The absolute belief that a promise made should be a promise kept, anywhere on earth, overnight.

There’s this story — maybe apocryphal, maybe not — about how he once walked through a FedEx hub at 2 a.m. in Memphis and noticed a new handler had stacked parcels slightly off-grid. He didn’t yell. He just picked one up and said, “Every package is a person waiting.”

He meant it.

He’d seen what it meant to wait for something you needed — a letter from a family member, a spare part for a grounded crop-duster, a passport before a deadline. He built FedEx not to dominate shipping, but to erase the anxiety of waiting.

In many ways, Fred Smith wasn’t just in the business of logistics. He was in the business of certainty. And that’s why so many of us felt safer in a world where Fred was still around.

Today, with his passing, I keep thinking of that first handshake — of how someone so powerful could see past suits and job titles and sense intent. I wasn’t special. That’s the point. He made everyone feel like they could matter. That they had something to deliver.

He wasn’t a saint. He was hard-nosed, intensely competitive, and sometimes stubborn. But he was real. When FedEx had bad quarters, he took responsibility. When policies didn’t work, he changed them. He backed veterans when it wasn’t fashionable. He built infrastructure before “infrastructure” became a buzzword. And he did it all while carrying the weight of 500,000 employees and the trust of billions of customers.

Rest easy, Fred Smith.
Time will miss you.