Gelbaum emerged from the wreckage as a principal in a new investment firm, operating a new hedge fund using math formulas pioneered by Thorp.
Gelbaum declined to talk about the firm, Sierra Enterprises Group, from which he retired a few years ago. His business success, he said, "was all a matter of chance. It certainly wasn't because I worked 5,000 times as hard as the average person or was 5,000 times smarter than the average person."
He was more forthcoming about his venture into the cattle business. In the mid-1990s, he bought a pair of ranches "to run in an environmentally sensitive manner."
The Kane and Two-Mile ranches are in northern Arizona, a place Gelbaum learned about in a college ecology class. This is where Theodore Roosevelt once hunted mountain lions to reduce predators and increase the number of deer. The deer population soared and then starved in what became a textbook case of disrupting nature's balance chronicled by America's foremost ecologist, Aldo Leopold, in "A Sand County Almanac."
"It caught my imagination," Gelbaum said. So he bought the ranches and arrived with a message. "I told people when I came to Arizona I wanted to be good to the land and good to the people."
He won praise for removing cattle from wilderness areas and for raising wages of the cowboys and providing them housing and health care. He recently agreed to sell the ranches to the Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation group, for $4.5 million.
The ranches cover about 1,000 acres and control grazing rights on 900,000 acres of surrounding federal land.
Four years ago, President Clinton turned a large swath of these grazing lands into the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, and Gelbaum won the admiration of then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.
Babbitt's plan provoked the ire of local ranchers, who complained that it would run ranchers off good grazing land. At the height of the protests, Gelbaum's ranch manager stood up in a packed meeting hall and explained that his boss controlled all of the grazing rights in the area and considered the monument perfectly compatible with his ranching operations.
The speech hushed the protesters and allowed the monument to go forward.
"I half-thought about recommending to the president to name the national monument after David Gelbaum," Babbitt said. "Without David Gelbaum, it might well not have happened."
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Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this report.
