panam.captain

by Timothy Mellon

“My name is Timothy Mellon. Please call me Tim.” After years of avoiding the spotlight, Timothy Mellon, or Tim as he’d ask you to call him, shares the story of his life in panam.captain. From growing up in Virginia in his family home and farm, to searching for the lost wreckage of Amelia Earhart, panam.captain follows the many opportunities that came Mellon’s way and how he turned them all into success. While attending Yale, he fell in love with computer programming and started a company out of Guilford, Connecticut in which he was the sole employee. Once taken as far as it could go, he sold the company and moved on to invest in another adventure, making ties for the railways. It naturally followed that instead of supplying the railways, that he should buy a railway. Through his story, Mellon speaks with great passion about the deals and acquisitions that turned into an expanding enterprise. As a pilot with over 11,500 hours of logged airtime, his next move was to purchase the company Pan Am out of bankruptcy. As owner of the company, and with the skill necessary to do the job, he became a commercial airline pilot and quite literally kept the American institution that is Pan Am flying in the air. panam.captain is a well-documented collection of lessons for business and life, all learned through the expansive experiences and industrious nature of Timothy Mellon.  

184 pages, Hardcover

Published July 23, 2024

Reviews

[alex zeidman · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just read an advanced copy of this trash fluff piece. Surprise surprise the billionaire who originally self-published an autobiography, but it was taken off-line in 2016 after some incendiary passages became public, including a line that Black people were “even more belligerent” after social programs were expanded in the 1960s and ’70s. Obviously edited professionally so this virulent racist doesn’t show his true colors again.

Nothing redeeming to read here. Boring, self congratulatory book to shove more money into two multibillionaire pockets.

[James]

I did not read the book, but I am putting this "review" up just to give some context about the text, from what I can gather.

This book was written by the reclusive billionaire Timothy Mellon (as in Carnegie Mellon, old money). He seems like an interesting enough guy to write an autobiography, but this book has a bit of a history.

While Goodreads currently shows this as published by Skyhorse and released in 2024, an e-book under the same name and author was self-published by Mellon in 2015, for the cost of a $9 donation to certain institutions.

This e-book, as reported by the Washington Post in 2020 (that story has more details), had Timothy Mellon using "racial stereotypes to describe African Americans in his autobiography". After this story broke, the original links to buy the copy were deleted (to what I can gather).

The book, once self-published, but then deleted, seems to have been re-released in 2024 by an actual publisher.

What should be done by someone with more time and willpower than I have, is find a copy of the original e-book from 2016 that has now been scrubbed, buy a copy of the new book, and compare the two copies. Are they overall the same book? And specifically, did the re-print cut out the controversial passages from the original?

Maybe I'll get around to completing that project, but for now I'll let others go down the rabbit hole.