Carl R. Pohlad (born August 23, 1915, in West Des Moines, Iowa) is the owner of the Minnesota Twins baseball franchise since 1984 (succeeding Calvin Griffith). He has been widely criticised for both a seeming eagerness to allow the team to be eliminated in league contraction and a failure to spend enough of his immense wealth on improving the team. He has been defended as an owner in his willingness to continue to operate the team while losing several million dollars each year (in 2005, Pohlad broke even solely because of revenue sharing).

In 1997, Pohlad almost sold the Twins to North Carolina businessman Don Beaver, who would have moved the team to the Piedmont Triad (Greensboro - Winston-Salem - High Point) area of the state. The defeat of a referendum for a stadium in that area and a lack of interest in a move to Charlotte killed the deal.

Pohlad grew up in Minnesota. He began a series of small businesses after graduating high school. He enjoyed modest success even through the Depression, during which he learned the importance of cutting costs and frugality. After the Depression, he began getting into investing and the banking business. Over several decades, he built a banking empire, finally selling Marquette Bank to U.S. Bancorp in the 1980s. Forbes ranks him tied for the 78th richest person in the United States, with a net worth of nearly 3 billion dollars. ^*

Pohlad's wife, Eloise died in 2003.

Baseball executives | Forbes World's Richest People | 1915 births | Living people | People from Minnesota | Minnesota Twins