Las Catalinas is not designed for hoi polloi. Homes will have full-time attendants to clean and handle light cooking. A landscaping crew tends the trees and flowers. A concierge will help book a sail, a zip line excursion or a climb to the rim of a volcano. A rental management office sublets houses for $3,000 to $10,000 a week. The hardest task residents and visitors will undertake is getting there, which entails flying to the town of Liberia and then renting a car for the 45-minute drive on roads shared by boys herding cattle.

'Worst-case Scenario'
Claugus, who was recently diagnosed with treatable prostate cancer, finds the idyll he has helped create enormously relaxing.
"Worst-case scenario," he says, "I've got a house with seven buddies, 1,200 acres and all this open space and beautiful beaches, for $13.5 million."

It's a price Claugus can afford to pay. He bought his first shares of stock at age 8. After earning a chemical engineering degree from Ohio State University in 1973 and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard four years later, he promised himself he would be a millionaire by age 52. He says he made it by 38, though it entailed living on a third of his salary as a chemical engineer at Rohm and Haas Co. and investing the rest.

Claugus started GMT in 1993 with $3 million-half his own, the rest from friends. As of mid-August, his hedge funds owned a 9.1% stake in Calgary-based oil exploration firm Paramount Resources Ltd., plus 10.5 million shares of United Airlines Inc. and 9.3 million of Delta Air Lines Inc. He also runs an oil and gas company that has an Alaskan drilling partnership with Madrid-based Repsol YPF SA. He is now worth at least $1 billion, according to a source familiar with his assets and data compiled by Bloomberg.
Claugus says that successful investors are right less than 70% of the time.

"So, by definition, that means a third of the time you are going to be wrong, even if you are the best," Claugus says. "You just have to be careful and not let it bother you."

If Claugus regrets his Costa Rican investment, he's not saying so, though he admits he and Brewer have had their differences. One is over parking garages. The auto-averse Brewer insists that Las Catalinas not have any. Cars are parked in a lot a few hundred yards away, and residents walk to their homes. "I still struggle with not having a place to park my car," Claugus says.
Yet he has accepted the plan, and Brewer's idea that the town shouldn't be walled off from surrounding communities, where about 50,000 Costa Ricans live.

"We want it to be a Costa Rican town, not an American town in Costa Rica," Claugus says while stopped on a mountain bike on a ridge overlooking the ocean.

As construction of the hotel and more homes gets under way, Claugus has made one more demand of his partner. He wants a full-time, on-site sales manager to accelerate new purchase-a job that until now has been done by Brewer in Atlanta.

Brewer has acceded to that and other ideas from his more practical partner.

"I've learned a lot from Tom and his more data-driven, analytical approach to things," Brewer says. "Day to day, I am trying to move our whole company that way."