Jim Clayton (businessman)

James L. Clayton, Sr. (born 1934) is an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He founded Clayton Homes in 1966 and built it into the United States' largest producer and seller of manufactured housing, a publicly traded company that was sold to Berkshire Hathaway in 2003 for $1.7 billion.

Early life
James L. Clayton was born March 2, 1934 in Finger, Tennessee. His father was a sharecropper. As a child, he aspired to become a country music singer. After high school, he went to Memphis to attend college and perform in honky tonks. After becoming ill at the end of the first year, he transferred to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he was a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity and received an engineering degree in 1957. He received a law degree from the University of Tennessee College of Law in 1964.

Career
While a student, Clayton started an informal business of fixing and reselling used cars, establishing a used-car business in 1956. That business grew into a group of Knoxville-area automobile dealerships operated by Jim Clayton and his brother Joe; Jim Clayton sold his interest in the business to Joe in 1981.

Clayton branched into the mobile home business in 1966.

Clayton published an autobiography, First a Dream (FSB Press, ), in 2002, cowritten with Bill Retherford. Reportedly, the book motivated Warren Buffett to buy Clayton's company, but a 2004 article in Fast Company magazine suggested that the story was not as simple as was widely reported.

Philanthropy
Clayton has made many charitable contributions in the Knoxville area, including a $3.25 million donation for construction of the Knoxville Museum of Art; a $1 million donation to the University of Tennessee College of Law for its Center for Entrepreneurial Law; and a $1 million donation to East Tennessee Baptist Hospital to establish the Clayton Birthing Center. With his wife, Clayton also made two $1 million donations to Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tennessee, which is near his home town.

Personal life
With his former wife, Mary Shelton, Clayton shares four children, 10 grandchildren and five great-grand children. In 2019 he married Michell Haskew Witt.  The Claytons reside in Knoxville, Tennessee.

References

External links
 http://jimclayton.com/

Category:1934 births
Category:Living people
Category:American company founders
Category:American investors
Category:American manufacturing businesspeople
Category:American real estate businesspeople
Category:American retail chief executives
Category:Businesspeople from Tennessee
Category:People from Knoxville, Tennessee
Category:Philanthropists from Tennessee
Category:Tennessee lawyers
Category:University of Tennessee alumni
Category:University of Tennessee College of Law alumni
Category:People from McNairy County, Tennessee