Wheatland resident Charles Hoskinson is a very wealthy man. In fact, he’s a billionaire, which he said is all the more reason to help people in North Carolina devastated by Hurricane Helene last month.
Paying it forward to society is a major priority in his life.
“I’m blessed with resources. What am I going to do, just buy 15 Lamborghinis and go race them?” Hoskinson told Cowboy State Daily. “At some point, you have to go from me to we to us. You have to think about your community. It’s a very important thing to do.”
Hoskinson donated his Black Hawk helicopter and four pilots to assist people stranded in the mountain towns of western North Carolina with critical supplies over a dozen days in October, racking up more than 48 hours of flight time.
While there, Hoskinson’s staff flew around various political dignitaries in the helicopter, including Donald Trump Jr. Getting the proverbial boots on the ground is something Hoskinson finds incredibly important to secure more public resources.
“It’s really important that people who are in a position to make policy or influence policy actually go to the places impacted when things happen,” Hoskinson said. “There’s nothing worse than somebody hearing about it secondhand or thirdhand and developing an opinion by proxy or from afar.”
How It Happened?
Hoskinson, an entrepreneur who owns a 500-head historic bison ranch in Wheatland and has family in Gillette, made most of his money in cryptocurrency. He’s the co-founder of the well-known Ethereum blockchain platform.
In many ways, his charitable response to disaster relief in North Carolina is simply one more chapter in his larger efforts to help rural communities.
Hoskinson has branched out into the fields of mathematics, synthetic biology, biotechnology and medicine with various investments. He’s also made donations to the Platte County Sheriff’s Office, bought a firetruck for Wheatland Fire-Rescue and bought a restaurant in the town.
“Try to live a balanced life where I do a little bit of everything,” he said.
That attitude is also what led him into aviation and the purchase of his Black Hawk helicopter. Soon after buying the aircraft, Hoskinson quickly realized the chopper was not only an incredible toy but also could serve as a tool to do some public good.
“I’m a big believer that if you have a capability you should use that capability,” Hoskinson said.
In 2023, Hoskinson, along with his father and brother, opened a health clinic for anti-aging and regenerative medicine in Gillette. The $100 million investment has become a multi-specialty practice with about 10,000 patients.
“It shouldn’t be the case that the only way Gillette, Wyoming, is going get great health care on the primary care side is a crazy billionaire builds a clinic,” Hoskinson said. “That’s not a sustainable, scalable business model, and unfortunately that’s looking like it’s the rule instead of the exception to the rule for a lot of rural America.”
When it became clear Helene would be hitting inland and western North Carolina earlier this fall, Hoskinson contacted some of his friends and family and North Carolina U.S. Sen. Ted Budd to see if they felt confident the federal government would provide them the assets they needed to stay safe. Since hurricanes rarely hit this region, Hoskinson received a clear message that it was extremely likely local resources would quickly become overwhelmed, and he knew he had to step in.
“It became very clear that whatever capabilities we were going to have in that area, they were going to be overrun very quickly,” Hoskinson said. “It’s one of those all-hands-on-deck type of things.”
This prediction was correct as immediate resources were quickly overrun as the massive storm knocked out bridges, roads, electricity and homes. Many have criticized President Joe Biden and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to this disaster, which Hoskinson described as “a little bungled.” He expects some investigations into the matter in the future.
The crew delivered 16 tons of emergency goods in Charles Hoskinson's Black Hawk helicopter. (Courtesy Charles Hopkinson) 
The crew delivered 16 tons of emergency goods in Charles Hoskinson's Black Hawk helicopter. (Courtesy Charles Hopkinson) 
Some of the supplies included insulin and EpiPens. (Courtesy Charles Hopkinson) 
Many communities in western North Carolina became isolated from the outside world as a result of the hurricane. (Courtesy Charles Hopkinson) 
Much of western North Carolina was ravaged by Hurricane Helene last month. (Courtesy Charles Hopkinson) 
The crew delivered 16 tons of emergency goods in Charles Hoskinson's Black Hawk helicopter. (Courtesy Charles Hopkinson) 
(Courtesy Charles Hopkinson)
In The Air
Within less than 48 hours of Hoskinson contacting his pilots Cory May, Alton Lusk, Mark Joy and Sam Sutton, they were on the ground in Hickory, North Carolina, with the Black Hawk after departing from Cheyenne Regional Airport.
“It was pretty remarkable, and they were really overwhelmed by the time they came in,” Hoskinson said.
May said they met no other volunteer crew that had traveled as far away as Wyoming.
“Everyone was just floored that people from the state of Wyoming care that much to respond across the country,” May said.
By building connections and keeping a creative mindset, the crew was able to make headway in uncharted waters.
“That’s one of the hallmarks of what we’ve tried to create, much like the Wyoming pioneer spirit of we know how to get stuff done just because we can get stuff done,” said Craig Ramsey, a staffer with Hoskinson’s Input Output company.
Due to the rugged, mountainous nature of western North Carolina, many small towns in the area became isolated from the rest of the world and emergency relief when the hurricane knocked out critical infrastructure with massive flooding and mudslides. The size of their Black Hawk also allowed them to reach many remote locations that even smaller helicopters couldn’t get to.
The wet and muddy conditions often made it difficult to land, requiring significant focus and coordination from the pilots.
Seeing a helicopter and crew of their size often came as a surprise to people on the ground, said May, particularly when they touched down with little to no prior warning.
Often, Hoskinson’s crew would land and then talk to people on the ground just to find out what they needed as many had been completely disconnected from the outside world.
Every day of the trip, they worked from sunrise to sunset. Providing a sense of relief to the victims of the storm, May said, felt incredibly fulfilling.
“In a lot of those cases those people had never been contacted because there was no way for anybody that didn’t have the assets of helicopters to get in there to actually talk to them,” pilot Lusk said.
Their tasks included delivering 16 tons of food, water, medical supplies and prescriptions, and other survival gear to different communities. For someone with diabetes, receiving supplies of insulin can be a matter of life or death.
Giving urgency to all these tasks was the knowledge that cold weather was quickly on its way.
The hurricane also threw an unexpected curveball when rampant flooding drew countless ground wasps out of the earth due to the flooding. This brought a need for Hoskinson’s crew to deliver hundreds of EpiPens and wasp spray that was purchased in Wyoming.
“There were wasps everywhere, everywhere we’d land there were swarms of wasps everywhere,” Lusk said.
They transported 47 12,000-watt generators, each weighing 400 pounds to help restore power.
The crew also transported medical teams made up by 33 personnel and cadaver dogs from location to location and took World Mobile staff out to set up three different systems that tied into the Starlink satellite internet system in order to boost the satellite signal over a greater area. Often, they would drop off a medical team in the morning, and then deliver supplies to various locations during the day. At the end of the day, they would pick the medical team back up.
Charitable Connections
What Lusk and May found most moving about the experience was the sense of unity among the many Appalachian communities destroyed by the flooding and the volunteer workers trying to help them. May said it reminded him a lot of the sense of connection that swept America after 9/11.
Lusk remarked how many times he heard a female volunteer say, “I’m just a mom.”
“Being able to witness the community involvement and the community come together, the way they did, was something that I definitely took away from there that will live with me for the rest of my life,” Lusk said.
Hoskinson said their group made valuable connections with other emergency response organizations while in North Carolina. He believes private enterprise should always play a role in assisting the public government in disaster relief, seeing it as no different from helping neighbors who might be battling a fire near his ranch.
“It’s that reciprocity you have to maintain,” Hoskinson said.
He plans to fund other rescue efforts on a yearly basis in response to future natural disasters like Hurricane Helene, and found it provided valuable training experience for his staff because of the real life emergency scenarios you can’t possibly simulate. He also plans to use physicians from his clinic in Gillette the next time he’s involved in a disaster response like this.
“It’s the most difficult thing you can put yourself into and keeps everybody very sharp,” Hoskinson said. “We’d like to do that on an annual basis.”
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
