HowardHughes is such a person.
You may say, in a sense, Hugh does not belong to the group we are gathered here. Many monopolists have struggled from humble places (even if they can't be called rags). At first, they were just like you and me-they had no special financial support except for the ambitious ideas that often ran through his mind. This attribute makes them interesting people. In this sense, Howard Hughes is not the person we particularly want to introduce, because he has a considerable legacy from the beginning.
However, despite this unqualified fact, there are two reasons including Hugh. First, no matter what conditions people set, Hugh is so magical and extremely rich that it is difficult for you to ignore him. He is one of the two or three richest people in America and, God knows, one of the two or three richest people in the world. Ignoring him is like saying to an arc lamp, "Never mind, it's not there. Let's take a look at the fluorescent lamp under it. "
Another reason is that it is fair to say that most of Hughes' huge wealth is earned by his own brain and backbone. Therefore, his experience may give us some enlightenment. He didn't sit on his father's inheritance, and watched the dividends roll in and gradually became the richest man in the world. After all, his legacy is not that huge-it is estimated that it is about half a million dollars. When howard hughes started his strange career in the 1920s, he was just one of the children of thousands of fathers who made a fortune during the oil boom in Texas. Most of these children are unknown now-in fact, many have fallen and their names are no longer famous. Young howard hughes chose a completely different path. He didn't regard his father's capital as a flowering seed-he hoped someone would stand up, step into the world and spread them.
Howard hughes is a sower. The forest he planted includes many strange flowers and trees.
Howard hughes's life lacks a place similar to the office headquarters. This is a very obvious fact.
He directs his business from a telephone booth, a hotel room or wherever he happens to be. Most of the information about his obviously different enterprises is stored in his mind. However, the general institutionalized businessman will inevitably keep this information in the filing cabinet. It is difficult for people he employs, even his close family, to know where he will be one day. He will go back and forth at any time in his widely circulated adventure. Obviously, he has no plan, let alone a formal agenda. This way of working makes his colleagues who are used to step by step greatly annoyed and confused.
If you need to contact him, you dial a telephone number and then connect to the switchboard. He (perhaps at some point in his career) is in Hollywood, Las Vegas or Houston. You leave a message for the secretary. It's probably been weeks. Finally, if there is no way to contact you, he will call you back, perhaps from a nearby town or the other side of the world. Call back may be at 1 pm, of course, it's your time. Hugh won't mind this. It may be 4 o'clock in the morning at his place.
Hughes didn't notice the formal structure of the business world: its command system, its documents, its timetable, everything. He works whenever he wants, sometimes for 36 hours or more. When his work enthusiasm is high, whether it is normal working days or weekends, whether it is midnight or normal working hours. As a spokesman in his film career, he put forward a view on his behavior: "He is the kind of person who breaks every rule taught by Harvard University School of Economics. He only listens to one rule, saying that you want to make money. "
He seems to be a completely disordered person, even like an absent-minded person. This impression is wrong. Howard hughes may be a genius. He has an insatiable mind for the answers to all kinds of questions, just like a dog is insatiable for meat. When he swallowed and digested one question, Hugh went out to look for another. He has a wide range of interests and is curious about everything. He has a good memory and can be interested in more than a dozen things at the same time. He will never be satisfied with only one business, because there is always another business leading to an office headquarters. His curiosity, his insatiable desire for all kinds of facts and his first-hand experience have reached the point where he can't let others run a part of his huge kingdom, but has to sit in the middle palace and count the money himself. As katharine hepburn once said, "He will never be fixed in one place, he will always be on his way to another place."
By the time he was 70, Hugh had obviously settled down. Never talk to the media, but wrap your actions in a clever secret; Therefore, it is difficult for people to always know where he is. But he seems to spend part of his time somewhere in the Caribbean and part of his time in Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, he owns an amazing amount of priceless real estate. He may feel old. He's a little tired. Maybe the injuries he suffered in some plane crashes became more and more serious with his age, which made him inconvenient to move. In his life, he witnessed many plane crashes. On the other hand, perhaps this apparent disconnect in his life is just a period of reflection and reorganization. He may set foot in a bold new career in a different direction.
Howard hughes's life is an example of how to get rich in many ways.
"Diversification" is of course a common skill used by some cautious people to walk around the stock market, and this time it is the skill of running a company. The idea is to make many things do for you at the same time, so as to make the so-called "average rule" work for you. In this way, one thing may fail, but another thing, with the help of luck, will succeed.
This technology is not foolproof. If you take this road too far, your career will become too fragmented, so that you have no time to take care of any of your careers, and therefore, some or all of them will collapse. Some people, like athletes, can wander in completely different fields of thought, otherwise they will feel bored and uneasy; Others, such as Hilton, feel more comfortable and efficient when they concentrate on a small number of ideas. It seems that this type of mind can't do well in another type of environment. Everyone must realize how his mind can play its best role. If you want to try to make a fortune in Husky, you must first determine whether you have a Husky mind.
190565438+howard hughes was born in Houston on February 24th. His father, an oil speculator and oil explorer, was not a particularly successful person at that time. But Hugh had a valuable idea in his mind, which came true when Howard Jr. was a toddler. That is the idea of inventing a new drilling rig. If this idea is feasible, it can penetrate hard rocks and go deep underground, thus opening up a huge oil reservoir that has never been reached before.
This idea was finally put into practice. Lao Hugh applied for a patent, found a manufacturing company and leased the patent. This adventurous spirit was transformed into a small but prosperous Hu Machine Tool Company.
1924, that is, Howard 18 years old, Lao xiu died. The industry dominated by Haschi Drilling Tool Company is estimated to be slightly above $600,000. According to his father's will, 18-year-old Howard got 3/4 shares in this company, and the rest 1/4 was given to a group of relatives.
Under normal circumstances, the law is very stingy to let minors exercise the right to vote in stocks when inheriting the controlling interest of a company. In this case, it can be assumed that George W. howard hughes will follow the usual way: before he reaches 2 1 year, he can hand over his equity to a stock trust.
"Most teenagers will go this way," said a new york banker who had contacts with Hu Shi in his later years. "Why not? It doesn't matter. Just wait three years. That year was very prosperous, the company did a good job and made money without much effort. A child can assume that dividends will skyrocket and the value of his stock will continue to rise. Any ordinary child will happily sit on his donkey for three years, and have endless money without doing any work. But this special child, Hu's child, is not an ordinary child. "
Indeed, he is not an ordinary child. Dozens of biographers have visited his primary school teacher and his friends since childhood, trying to discover some characteristics of Hugh through them, but all they get from these explorations are "dry wells" (according to the terminology of oil seekers, it means wells that produce no oil and have no results). Those who knew Hugh as a child could only shrug their shoulders and say, "He's just-you know, a normal kid."
Like many rich people we have met and will meet, Hugh is undoubtedly a late bloomer. Apart from being good at math and physics, he is only a scholar at school. In his spare time, he likes to play with a small radio or other gadgets, but in anyone's memory, he did not show special creativity in his childhood; He didn't show any obvious entrepreneurial spirit: he didn't sell newspapers or do other jobs, he was unsociable, the girls didn't seem to have much interest in him, and he didn't seem to have much patience with them. Indeed, in their teenage circle, Hugh really looks unremarkable. He is the kind of boring and well-behaved boy who never does anything too much. They come to class, do poor homework, and then go home from school. Many years later, people said, "What kind of person is he? Is he really sitting in my classroom? "
However, all of a sudden, at the age of 18, the quiet child became angry for reasons that he or anyone could not fully explain.
He decided that he didn't need to live quietly for another three years. To everyone's surprise (especially those relatives who owned the remaining shares of Old Hughes 1/4 Machine Company), he went to court and argued that he was qualified to vote for his own shares. A rarely cited Texas law allows the court to give him the right to share these shares if he can make a reasonable application. He brought it up.
"I want to suggest to you," the judge said to him when handing him a ruling, "find some old people to share your new responsibilities over the past few years. Your education should not stop here, but you should continue to go to college. "
Hugh nodded politely, but he had no intention of going back to any classroom. He never got a college degree. But he listened to another part of the judge's advice, and he found a capable person to help him run Hughes Machine Tool Company.
"Despite his immaturity," john keats said in his biography of howard hughes, "despite his embarrassing neurotic appearance, his unprovoked melancholy and his lonely life, this young man is a rare talent who knows people and does their duty." A few weeks after the court decision, he sat in his father's office in Husky Machine Tool Company and met some people who sought accounting positions from the company. He hired NoahDietrich. This industrious and shrewd man soon became the general manager of Hughes Machine Tool Company. In the next thirty years, when the boss goes out to do other things, he is in charge of this company and other enterprises in Houston. It is common for the boss to go out.
Hugh, who is in his teens, has begun to want to complete a set of business methodology. "Treating an enterprise is like a clock," said an acquaintance in the banking industry. "At first, he took it apart to see what made it tick, then installed it, fiddled with it until it worked effectively, finally wound it up, and then walked away, leaving it alone. Only when he breaks or rewinds the wind does he return to it. "
This is how he treated Hughes Machine Tool Company. The young host carefully studied its business and repeatedly speculated and adjusted this or that part. He fired some people and used some people, and Dudley was one of them. He bought back his relatives' shares, thus gaining control of 100%. Finally, with Dudley as the manager, when everything went well and the money was rolling in, Hugh walked away.
A completely different industry caught his attention and captured his endless curiosity: movies.
After an actor friend knew his wealth, he came to him with the idea of a movie and applied for support. Hugh agreed to invest 50 thousand dollars. This movie is a great failure. When the film was shot in Hollywood, his curiosity prevented him from sitting in Houston. He once watched and even participated in the whole process, from the discussion of the first script to the final editing of the film.
This experience greatly inspired him. In his view, if you are lucky and well managed, you can earn as much money in Hollywood as in Texas. Step by step, he began to invest in various companies in Hollywood, including a studio, a laboratory for experimental color movies and a laboratory for audio movies (in those days, audiences could only watch silent movies). The company organization behind all these speculations is becoming more and more complex. Hughes Machine Tool Company has become the major shareholder and creditor of every new adventure in the film industry, but the appearance of Machine Tool Company is behind the scenes. Many people in Hollywood don't know who this new young man really is or where he got these seemingly bottomless funds.
After his first failure, Hugh made a lot of money in his three films. Critics think those movies are empty, superficial and over-commercialized, but Hugh doesn't seem to care-this situation makes those critics even more angry in the years to come. This once very lonely young man seemed to know little about human nature when he was young, and developed a public taste that was almost always uncomfortable. He can know humor, sex, violence, blood and other best-selling things in the movie "Menu" at a taste. His films are aimed at grasping people's tastes, not developing people's wisdom. "This is business." It is said that at a Hollywood banquet, he said to a cynical and gentle lady, "The purpose of doing business is to make money. If it happens to be able to express art, this is one of its purposes, but it is secondary and accidental. "
Hugh's fifth film is an expensive heroic story, called Hellscream, which describes the air combat in World War I.. At first, it was a silent film that cost more than $6.5438+0 million. Just before it was released, the audio film suddenly aroused people's interest. To the great surprise of his financial advisers, including Dudley, Hughes ruined the whole movie and started making audio movies from scratch. The original girl's name was jean harlow. Some people say that Jean Harlow can't perform, but she can speak English, and her every move reveals the meaning of "sex" that the whole world can understand.
Hugh personally directed the filming of this film, and he needs to change his hat from time to time, because he directs the script writing and editing for a while. He often works 24 hours a day and never sleeps. Jean Harlow said, "I have never seen anyone work so hard and for so long."
Joan Harlow seems to care deeply about Hugh, but he never gets anything in return. Hugh himself is a rich and handsome young man who enjoys interesting and varied sex lives among those "quasi-stars", but he rarely gets mixed up with the female stars in his movies. This is his ability to concentrate, and he regards those unique ladies as the property of business. Jean Harlow's blond hair and watery eyes remind him of money, not sex.
Angel of Hell was released on 1930, and critics are still nagging about it. But Hughes' thermometer once again shows the accuracy of measuring public sentiment. This movie became a big-budget movie, and Jean Harlow became a world-famous star. Her name became the source of sex. Hugh invested more than 3 million in this film, with a total income of about 8 million.
At the same time, the expansion of Hu machinery company is also very smooth. Now, he not only manufactures drilling rigs for oil fields, but also produces more and more industrial machinery and equipment. Its stock value cannot be accurately measured because it has never been traded in the open market, but under Dudley's management and under the supervision of young bosses from time to time, its value is bound to rise sharply. Hollywood industry, as Hughes tries to seek more and more benefits and take more and more risks, will certainly increase in value in equal amount.
/kloc-at the end of 0/930, I retired to my 25th birthday. He inherited 500,000 yuan when he was eighteen. His current net worth is conservatively estimated at around 20 million yuan.
His attention turned to another business field.
What new business touched his curiosity again? Airplane.
When he was filming Angel of Hell, he was obviously moved by the plane again. He asked countless questions to pilots and mechanics, and watched people take down the plane for repair with children's curiosity. He even took flying lessons and got a pilot's license.
Shortly after the filming of Hellscream, Hugh began to leave Hollywood for a long time. He will leave for a few months, come back for a few days to see if his career in Hollywood is still running effectively and accurately, and then disappear again. No one knows where he went. If someone asked him, he would just say, "Oh, I went on a trip."
In fact, this amazingly curious person is busy learning more about airplanes. He secretly went to Texas and got a job as a co-pilot in an airline.
At that time, the salary of airlines was very low, and what young millionaires needed was certainly not money. Because his growing business earns more money every day than he does in a year as a co-pilot. Although he never explained his motives to anyone, it is obvious that he accepted the secret job for only one reason: he needed knowledge.
He felt that he had learned enough and left. In the following years, he bought himself several private jets. He opened a small repair shop in California to keep his plane in good flying condition. But the basic mechanism is not interesting enough for Hugh. He is a man who keeps moving forward. He must improve his plane, increase the power of the engine and test aerodynamics. The repair shop quickly developed into an airplane factory, flying airplanes by itself, and athletes began to win in air competitions. A modified Lockheed plane, which will fly around the world in the control room, made the headline of 1938. His factory, from a repair shop to a manufacturing factory, has now developed into a husky aircraft company.
When these changes happened, it was in the late thirties that Hughes looked around the aviation industry again, looking for a possible new investment point. This industry is still young and not fully developed. The Great Depression slowed down the growth of this industry, and in fact it has reached a standstill. Most airlines are seriously short of customers and cash flow. If someone is stupid enough to buy an airline, he may choose at random on the trading desk.
Hughes firmly believes that one day he will make a lot of money from interstate aviation services. He thought it might be him. Therefore, he spent100000 to150000 to buy about three-quarters of the common stock of a company called Transcontinental Western Airlines.
The name may have attracted him. Later, it was renamed "TransWold" to reflect the new realm of this small company's future expansion. However, TWA, the company's original abbreviation, has been retained, making it one of the most famous trademarks in the world. (When he sold his TWA stock on 1966, the stock * * * brought him more than 500 million dollars, and after deducting the long-term capital income tax, his profit in this transaction was close to 400 million yuan).
Compared with World War II, howard hughes has been constantly shuttling through many of its own business adventures, and it will be unbearable for others to run around.
At this moment, his career may have been too scattered. Many people in the American federal government complain about his decentralization. Haschi Aircraft Company has accepted many contracts for designing and developing various types of aircraft. It cost the government millions, and as a result, a plane conducive to combat was not built. The frustrated officer growled that the main reason was Hugh's capricious and ghostly habits.
Whenever the manager and engineer of the aircraft company need Hugh to approve an important decision or sign a document, no one can find him. Call his headquarters in Hollywood or Hughes Machine Tool Company in Texas urgently, and this cheerful young lady will tell you that she will tell him your news. In a few days or weeks, Hugh may call back from new york, Toronto or some distant town he has never heard of. By this time, the work of aircraft manufacturing may have stopped completely. Military procurement officials may be angry and anxious.
Business in Hollywood is very good. After the amazing success of Hell's Angels in the early 1930s, Hughes made an equally successful gangster film Scarface. This film was made when Hugh started to participate in the radio manufacturing industry. In the following years, Hugh's business in Hollywood came to a standstill for a while. Then, when World War II was in full swing, when everyone thought he would be busy with his plane problem and the international contract of his machine tool company, he suddenly devoted himself to his production work in Hollywood.
Like most airlines in the world, TWA experienced a difficult period after the war. Hughes hopes to become a major intercontinental airline, and Pan Am, another growing airline, has the same ambition. The two companies compete fiercely for routes. They kept the ticket prices down to ridiculous levels and offered various financial concessions to many governments and municipal governments. TWA lost so much money at 1946, and its stock fell from more than 50 dollars in wartime to less than 4 dollars.
At this time, Hugh was injured in a plane crash and was recuperating in the hospital. He was suggested to sell TWA (he bought the company's shares for less than two dollars) before the cards were completely unveiled, but he refused. He can enjoy the comfort of decentralized management, although this adventure has made him suffer. He is also very aware of the very interesting position TWA was in. Because he owns 78% of the shares, not many people can buy and sell in the open market. As long as TWA can recover from its financial difficulties, as long as it can start to show some benefits (Hughes is sure this will happen eventually), many people will be eager to buy this rare stock, and the price will soar.
In fact, this situation did happen. By the middle of 1966, when Tish sold the shares of Universal Pictures, it was about 100 USD per share.
People will think that Hugh had a lot to do in the late 1970s. He is busy reorganizing TWA, testing new planes, negotiating new contracts for his machinery company, making more movies, and planning to make more investments, such as buying RKO studios and cinemas. But these are obviously not enough to satisfy him, because he suddenly stepped into another new field: electronics.
Husky Aircraft Manufacturing Company and Husky Machine Tool Company have started to enter the edge of the electronic industry. Hughes suspects that this industry will definitely develop greatly in the next few decades. Now he has set up an electronics subsidiary as a subsidiary of Hughes Aircraft Manufacturing Company. He once again proved that he has an amazing talent for recognizing people. Among the senior managers he selected for this company, the shrewd management talent Chrie B. Thorn-ton was the main founder of the huge industrial portfolio that was later called "Lin-Tony Industry".
Under the management of its young and promising managers, this fledgling electronic company immediately attracted the attention of the outside world. The Army, Air Force and later NASA all bought their products to develop weapon aiming devices, radars, missile navigation systems and various exquisite space designs. By the mid-1950s, the company's sales had reached an astonishing profit of $500 million a year.
At the same time, howard hughes fell in love with another adventure, and he became interested in Las Vegas. Even after the event, the reason why he was fascinated by the city is still unclear. Hugh has been hiding his behavior. Maybe he became interested in the population mobility of this gambling capital. A small number of Las Vegas people are permanent residents, and the rest are people from other places. Hugh is a man of no fixed abode. Maybe he feels particularly comfortable in this society where drifters gather. In any case, he began to buy hotels, casinos and large real estate in and out of the city.
This may be the last factor that makes it go wrong-a step that makes its "decentralized" operation finally fall into chaos. Because all of a sudden, Hugh's huge and changeable kingdom began to collapse. His managers, employees and important customers of the company began to complain that he had become more unstable than before. No one knows where to find him. He has an appointment with someone and can't keep it. He doesn't have the phone number of anyone who goes home. What happened in Tiger Aircraft Manufacturing Company during the war is now happening in the whole Tiger Aircraft Manufacturing Company: because the boss is absent, he can't sign a contract, or authorize the purchase, or can't make a decision, and the plans come to a standstill one by one.
The protest caused by TWA was so great that Hugh finally had to sell his stock: RKO suffered the same fate. Hugh's newly established electronics company also began to betray others, and senior managers left one after another-first Thornton, then Lamor and woodridge, two excellent doctoral engineers.
Hugh has now disappeared into a barren wilderness. He still owns huge shares in Hu's Machine Tool Company and Hu's Aircraft Manufacturing Company (now there is almost only one electronics subsidiary), and also owns some smaller shares in other businesses, but he no longer tries to control those companies with those shares. He still owns his land hotel in Las Vegas, and he still has a lot of money.
Estimates of the known property value of Hugh range from 900 million yuan to 654.38+0.5 billion yuan. Let's make it 654.38+0 billion yuan. We have as many opportunities as others to make a correct estimate.
Of course, this is just a guess. Everything people can say to this ghostly man must be a guess, because Hughes rarely proves or denies any reports about him, which often increases the mystery around him.
1972, two publishers in new york proposed to publish an autobiography that they claimed was about Hugh-it is said that most of the contents were dictated by the1000000000000 rich man himself. Hugh, or a self-proclaimed athlete, arranged a telephone press conference, at which he denied that he authorized the publication of this autobiographical book and accused it of being forged.
Is this book true or not? Is that Hugh's voice on the phone? No one knows except Hugh himself or his close assistant.
Perhaps the most vivid description of howard hughes we can find is "Nobody knows".
Throughout the history of howard hughes's struggle and development, we can draw a conclusion that he can become a billionaire of 654.38 billion yuan, largely thanks to his extensive entrepreneurship. He did not invest blindly, but made a profit.