True Story

Introduction

Our story begins somewhat unremarkably in a European airport in 1982. Dietrich Mateschitz, a thirty-six-year-old Austrian toothpaste salesman, boards a plane for a routine business trip to Thailand. In fairness, Mateschitz was a fairly industrious and successful toothpaste salesman, having risen to the position of international marketing director for a German toothpaste manufacturer called Blendax. But there was nothing about Mateschitz at this moment that would have tipped you off to the fact that he was about to discover something that would make him one of the world’s wealthiest men and that he would create a company that, if you had to pick just one, is today’s best example of a company built on the concepts explored in this ...