This earlier post from a year and a half ago checked in on Ft. Worth billionaire Richard Rainwater and his typically contrarian bet on the telecommunications industry. Following on that theme, this recent Oliver Ryan/Fortune article catches up with Rainwater, who continues to live quietly in Ft. Worth with his wife, Darla Moore, the former Chemical Bank bankruptcy-financing star. Rainwater aptly describes his investment strategy as follows: “Most people invest and then sit around worrying what the next blowup will be. I do the opposite. I wait for the blowup, then invest.”
Rainwater, who is currently sitting on about half a billion of cash, is refining his contrarian investment perspective:

The next blowup, however, looms so large that it scares and confuses him. For the past few months he’s been holed up in hard-core research modeóreading books, academic studies, and, yes, blogs. Every morning he rises before dawn at one of his houses in Texas or South Carolina or California (he actually owns a piece of Pebble Beach Resorts) and spends four or five hours reading sites like LifeAftertheOilCrash.net or DieOff.org, obsessively following links and sifting through data. How worried is he? . . . “I’m long oil and I’m liquid,” he says. “I’ve put myself in a position that if the end of the world came tomorrow I’d kind of be prepared.” . . . This is the first scenario I’ve seen where I question the survivability of mankind. I don’t want the world to wake up one day and say, ‘How come some doofus billionaire in Texas made all this money by being aware of this, and why didn’t someone tell us?'”

Rainwater has had his share of missed bets, although his successful ones far exceed the failed ones. His wife jokingly calls him “Dr. Doom,” but he is no crackpot, so take a moment to read the entire interesting piece.