He Changed Forever Our Expectation of Convenience and the Pace of Global Commerce
6/23/25 – – With all the news breaking over the weekend, you may have missed the announcement that FedEx founder Fred Smith passed away at age 80. It’s hard to remember how the world functioned before Frederick W. Smith convinced us that our packages “absolutely, positively have to be there overnight.”
Smith, who served in the Marines during Vietnam and majored in economics at Yale, launched and shepherded his audacious hub and spoke delivery concept – – criticized as “interesting but unfeasible” by his Yale professor – – through a half century of growth and innovation.
He credited both institutions for his success: “Yale taught me to think, and the Marines taught me to do.”
In April 1973, the first fleet of Federal Express aircraft (20 small Dassault Falcon jets) took flight, delivering packages to 25 cities overnight. Today, FedEx’s 700 planes, including aircraft as large as Boeing 777s, deliver 16 million packages per day to 650 airports in 220 countries. The company, which last year reported revenues of $87.7 billion, employs 500,000 people globally to execute, with very few crises, its air and ground logistics services.
When Smith decided to step down from his CEO position in 2022, The Wall Street Journal published a fascinating interview (linked below) with the then 77-year-old entrepreneur. At the time, I included excerpts from the exchange between Smith and the Journal’s Tunku Varadarajan in a blog post.
In honor of his passing, here are four takeaways from the WSJ article that capture Smith’s candor and wisdom, much in need as we navigate the turbulence of today’s tumultuous world order:
The Future of Our Economic System
In his view, one of the problems with our political discourse is “the isms. People talk about capitalism and socialism and communism. There’s only two kinds of economic systems: the market-driven and the government-directed. That’s it! The more you move toward a state-directed economy, the less efficient and more corrupt it becomes.”
On the Importance of Free Trade
Free trade is Mr. Smith’s greatest passion. Trade, he says, has enabled the U.S. to be the only global power in human history to get rich while also enabling the rest of the world to prosper. In his view, the neglect of U.S. industry in favor of the financial and tech sectors—for which successive administrations in Washington are culpable—has led to a spike in populism that casts global trade as a villain.
The Threat of Chinese Mercantilism
“You can’t pretend that a mercantilist state like China is a free trader. It’s not.” He’d like a “coalition of the willing” of free-trade states to challenge the Chinese at every opportunity. For his part, he’d like to have a chat with Xi Jinping. “I know President Xi. I met him when he was the party head down in the eastern part of China. If I had a conversation here today, I’d say, ‘Mr. President’— just as I did with Trump — ‘I strongly advise you to re-embrace open markets, which made you rich.’”
America’s Role in Sustaining a Positive World Order
After nearly 50 years at the helm of FedEx, he can remember times when American political discourse wasn’t “this balkanized electronic thing, where no one compromises.” His service with the Marines left him with the enduring belief that his country is a force for good—and that a Pax Americana is part of the natural global order. This American peace, he believes, is about more than just preventing war. “It means trade as much as you can and make the world open for commerce. Trade helped to lift 600 million Chinese out of abject poverty. Somebody’s got to defend it.”
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