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Tshuva and his family marking the Plaza's centennial in 2007 Jemal Countess/Wireimage
Isaac Tshuva arranges sugar packets on a table at his Leonardo City Tower Hotel in Tel Aviv, each one representing the location of a gas deposit off the Israeli coast: The uppermost packet is the Tamar field that his company, Delek Group, helped discover last year. Two packets below it are smaller strikes to the south, which Tshuva says indicate there's more gas still to be tapped. "The amounts we've found are going to fulfill much of Israel's energy demand for the next two decades," says the 61-year-old billionaire, whose family immigrated to Israel from Libya in 1948 when he was an infant. The discoveries have turned Tshuva into Israel's energy king and the country's sixth-richest citizen, with an estimated net worth of $2 billion, according to TheMarker, a Tel Aviv business daily. The gas finds ultimately could meet half of Israel's energy needs and provide the country with the energy independence that is vital to its security.
Surrounded by oil-rich but hostile neighbors, Israel has long fretted about energy. Moses, the joke goes, led his people around the desert for 40 years before settling in the only place in the Middle East without oil. The Tamar field's estimated 7.7 trillion cubic feet of gas will go a long way toward weaning Israel from dependence on imported coal and gas. "These are all blessings from the heavens," Tshuva says as he settles into a black leather armchair.
The discovery is helping him expand a global empire that includes luxury apartment towers, power plants, gas stations, and New York's Plaza Hotel. It may also help salvage an audacious $5 billion plan to put a Plaza on the Las Vegas Strip that the financial crisis has stalled.
A gregarious man who greets visitors with a warm pat on the shoulder and favors dark suits with no tie, Tshuva has a taste for extravagant projects. And he's constantly on the prowl for ideas, even if they entail big risks—such as his decade-long hunt for gas in Israel's waters that has only now started to pay off. "The man has good intuition," says Ronen Elgali, head of research at Sphera Fund, a Tel Aviv hedge fund with $360 million under management.
Growing up in Netanya, a quiet coastal city some 20 miles north of Tel Aviv, Tshuva shared a one-room apartment with his parents, grandmother, and seven siblings. He started working as a laborer at age 12 to support his family, attending school at night. After three years in the army he skipped college and began working in construction for the Defense Ministry. When Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula in the 1967 war, he helped erect the Bar Lev Line, a chain of fortifications along the Suez Canal. By the early 1970s, Tshuva was winning contracts to build low-income housing in Netanya.
Over the years, Tshuva has picked up powerful friends—and endured his share of criticism. He pals around with Israeli President Shimon Peres and was close to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. A close business relationship with Ted Arison, the Israeli American founder of Miami-based Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL), paid off in 1998. At the time, Tshuva was a second-tier building contractor looking to elbow his way into Israel's business elite. He had acquired a quarter of the shares of Delek Group, then an automobile importer and Israel's second-biggest gas station chain, and wanted to gain control of the company and its cash hoard of tens of millions of dollars. Arison's Bank Hapoalim held a 25% stake in Delek that he agreed to sell to Tshuva for some $100 million.
The takeover wasn't universally welcomed in Israel. To win Delek, Tshuva had to push out the Recanati family, an influential Israeli clan that had extensive interests in shipping and banking. Many in the Israeli business community, most of whom are of European origin, saw the uneducated Libyan emigré as an interloper. Buying Delek "was a big jump," says Moshe Tery, former chairman of the Israel Securities Authority, who in the past has worked as a money manager for Tshuva. "Eyebrows were raised due to his unusual background."
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