I left the hotel in the back of a panel truck and drove out to the airport and flew down to Nassau. I had done that twenty times in the previous five years, although not to Nassau. Only this time the newspapers found out because my people moved out too. And they made a fuss beyond belief.
You wonder why I’ve cut myself off from people? Why I live the way I live? There’s your answer. I fear people because they’re empty-headed and therefore dangerous. How is it possible that I’ve become like a specimen in the zoo when I’m deliberately not living in the zoo? That intrigues me. What an age we live in. I can tell you, I wouldn’t mind getting out of it for awhile, and I’m not talking about using the cryogenic process to deep-freeze my body. With all the fine research facilities I’ve had at my command I should have stolen a page from H.G. Wells and had my people develop a time machine, a time traveler. I suppose if I sunk my entire fortune into it they’d be bound to come up with something that worked.
Where would you go if you had your choice?
I’d go back to China when they were building the Great Wall, and I’d be an engineer and help to build it, and I’d live a quiet life and die in my sleep. Have my Chinese sons bury me. Or out of curiosity I’d go back to America in 1870, to Texas, to see what the real West was like. That would fascinate me. Two-gun Howard, the Yoakum Kid.
But if I had just one choice, one trip, I’d go forward to the year 3000 and see what was going on then. See if there’s anything left.
You don’t regret your life, do you?
No, that would be a useless emotion. All that I really regret is that I was orphaned young, that I was rich much too soon to be able to deal with it properly, and that I couldn’t have lived a more simple life among simpler people.
And what does it mean to you now to be one of the three richest men in the world?
I’ll bet you or anyone else, including Paul Getty, that I’m not one of the three richest men in the world – I’m the richest. Every one of those Nevada properties which everyone thinks are such a bust is going to pay – and what do you think is going to happen when the United States, as it absolutely must, within the next five years, devalues the dollar by letting the price of gold float to its proper level? Do you know how much gold I’ve got, in the ground and out of it?
You have no idea. Well, plenty. And nobody knows how much real estate I’ve got. Not even me. But I can tell you it’s worth a fortune. I have other investments where nobody knows I’ve got them. I put money into Indonesian oil a few years ago. I’m riding that one out, but it’s a handsome profit so far. Getty’s got an oil company and a collection of paintings. Big deal. The Sultan of Brunei is an out-and-out liar about what he owns. I can tell you, the most conservative estimate I can make of what I own – right now, this minute – is two billion nine hundred million dollars. That’s conservative, that’s on the shallow side.
What’s the top?
Three billion one. And if I wanted to use an optimum figure, including my Indonesian oil, it’s pushing three and a half billion. That makes me nearly twice as rich as Getty. The others, Hunt and the Mellons and Bob Smith, don’t even come close. The one who’s creeping up is Ludwig, the shipping guy. And of course one day someone’s going to invent a computer that the average citizen can use in his home, and a way to write and pay your bills with it and communicate with other computers, and that man or woman will automatically make $10 billion and be on top of the heap. And it will be some twenty-five-year old whiz kid, because the computer industry is a young man’s game.
I’ll change my question. What does it mean to you to be the richest man in the world?
Not a damned thing. Money is of no interest to me anymore. All I care about is that I have a little peace in the rest of my days, and freedom from the seven internal foes of humankind. You remember?
Not offhand, but I’ll look it up. Who are you leaving all that money to that doesn’t interest you anymore?
That’s in my will. Of course I won’t have it published before I die. Nobody knows the contents of my will but me, not even the people who helped me draw it up.
I worked out all the variations, the ways in which I planned to divide my property on my death, and had a dozen typists type them up. I’ve done this several times. I had different sets of different bequests, all sorts of possibilities – I threw in a batch of red herrings. I had each of the secretaries type up a different version of the will, with each clause on a separate page. It was like taking a deck of cards and shuffling them. They couldn’t possibly know the eventual outcome. In one paragraph I’d leave Toolco to the Hughes Medical Institute. In another I’d leave Hughes Aircraft to the United States government, ha ha ha. And in another to my cousins in Houston, or a dog pound in Las Vegas, or a guy who once gave me a lift in the desert when I ran out of gas. When I got all these pages back I threw out what I didn’t want and arranged the right ones in the correct final order, and I had the last page, with my signature, witnessed by people in my organization. They saw only the last page.
The secretaries couldn’t figure it out by seeing which pages were discarded, because I personally burned them and flushed the ashes down the toilet. You can reconstruct the writing on paper that’s been burned, you know. But I doubted that anyone was going to climb down into the cesspools under Los Angeles or Las Vegas to find the ashes.
And I have one more question, if you don’t mind. A naive one.
I know your naive questions pretty well by now. What’s this one: how many people have I murdered in my lifetime?
I just wanted to ask you, after all you’ve gone through, in a long life with many achievements and many sorrows, what you believe in. Do you have a philosophy of life now? A guiding principle?
That certainly is a naive question, but I’ll answer it. I can put it in one sentence. Live and let live. Privacy is all we’ve got – you, me, anybody. You can take any road in this world and if there are other people on it, no matter how crooked that road is, no one will pay serious attention to you except to flatter you and get things they want from you. But people will think you’re ‘normal.’
If you cut your own road, go your own way without inviting anyone along, then everyone in the world will say you’re crazy, you took the wrong road. Because it is your own. You made it. People can’t stand that, unless of course you invite them along – in which case it’s not yours anymore and you might as well cut your losses and start all over again.
Did it ever occur to you that it doesn’t make any difference what road you take, even if there are other people on it, as long as you’re independent? ‘If you are alone, you are your own man’ – according to Leonardo da Vinci.
I like that. It could serve as a motto on my nonexistent family crest. You’ve said something intelligent. Now, why don’t you ask me an intelligent question instead of things like, ‘What’s your philosophy of life?’ and ‘How does it feel to be the richest man in the world?’
What would you consider an intelligent question?