Howard Hughes: Eccentric aviator

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It's the 5th of April 1976.

A private plane flies low over the grand vistas of Texas.

Inside, a skeletal figure takes a last look out at the country of his birth, a West that was still just about wild when he was born.

The old man takes in the canyons, the valleys, the plains, and the plateaus.

He's 70, but with white hair down to his waist, a wispy beard and the emaciated appearance of a man weighing just ninety pounds, he could pass for a decade or even two older.

He clasps a Kleenex tissue box close to him.

Inside that is a syringe wrapped in tissue.

The old man has already used it several times in the short time it's taken to fly from Mexico, dosing himself up with Valium.

The plane is due to land in New York, but this passenger will never see that city again.

He's frankly a stinking, filthy figure.

His teeth are rotted, and so is his liver.

But he's also a billionaire, once the richest man in the USA and maybe even the world.

But money can't buy him anything now.

These are his final breaths.

In seconds, he will be dead.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Each episode we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

We take them from zero to their first million, then from a million onto a billion.

My name is Zing Sing and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

My name is Simon Jack and I'm the BBC's business editor.

And on this episode we're talking about Howard Hughes, a man who was honestly larger than life.

Probably one of the most famous eccentrics of all time.

He was a businessman, an inventor, aviator, of course, filmmaker, property tycoon and tool maker and was once the richest person in America.

So when he died on that plane he was worth $2.5 billion, which is about $15 billion adjusted for inflation today.

He's the latest dead billionaire we're covering in this special mini-season about five of the founding billionaires of U.S.

industry.

As much as his wealth, Hughes is known for his incredible life.

He was a playboy beloved of newspaper gossip columns, a world record-breaking aviator, and an obsessive germaphobe who died an eccentric recluse.

But the reason he's on this series is because he made a lot of money.

He had hit films, he owned a studio, developed military planes, and owned a major commercial airline.

And his is a story that is truly extraordinary.

So let us start at the beginning.

So Howard Robard Hughes Jr.

was born on the 24th of December, 1905, in Houston, Texas.

He was an only child, and his mother, Aileen, was just 22 when Howard was born.

Now, Aileen came from one of Texas's first families.

She'd married Howard Hughes Sr.

a year before Howard's birth.

Howard Hughes Sr.

was 14 years older than his wife, and although he was also from a well-respected family, Howard's grandfather, for example, was a Supreme Court judge, Howard Sr.

had been regarded as an underachiever at the time of his marriage.

He'd left a career in law and set out to find himself a foothold in that burgeoning Texas oil boom of the early 20th century.

Now, Howard was especially close to his mother, but she was a hypochondriac who constantly worried about his health.

And over time, as we'll see, Hughes came to share his mother's hypochondria.

He'd go on to suffer from gemophobia throughout his life.

It culminated in an extreme form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

And according to the Hughes biography by Peter Harry Brown and Pat H.

Brosker, a childhood friend said Howard was a strange boy, very shy and very lonely.

But he was also very rich.

And that's because while Howard was just a toddler, his father, metaphorically at least, had struck gold.

Along with a business partner, Hughes Sr.

had invented a cone-shaped drill bit that cut through granite easily.

And that enabled drilling rigs to reach previously untapped oil reserves thousands of feet below the ground.

And it became an essential tool of the booming oil trade.

So by 1910, the Hughes Tool Company was making annual profits of $500,000.

Now, adjusted for inflation, that is around $17 billion a year.

Wow.

And by 1915, he had sole ownership of the company, and his drill bits were in use across 11 US states and 13 countries worldwide.

So life was pretty good.

The Hughes family moved into a lavish Houston mansion, and young Howard was allowed to indulge in his passions as he would for the rest of his life.

So from childhood, Howard was passionate about engineering.

So aged just 11, he built the first wireless broadcasting set in Houston.

He taught himself Morse code and was communicating with ships in the Gulf of Mexico.

I'm not sure how some ships would have responded to it.

Hello, here's a small child just calling in.

What's going on?

What's the weather like?

I must say that this sounds to me like the kind of almost ideal childhood.

You've got enough money to indulge all your passions for pulling pulling things apart, putting them back together.

And as we'll see, you know, just about every toy that any child could ever want.

And some of them are more than toys.

And as a teenager, his experiments became more complex.

He built a motorized bicycle, then an intercon system for his family's mansions.

When he was just 14, he got his father to buy him an early sports car, a machine called a Stutz Bearcat, which cost $7,000.

That's the equivalent of over $120,000 today.

Imagine spending $120,000 on a 14-year-old.

I mean, come on.

Just how far was this guy allowed to indulge his passions when he was a kid?

But in fact, instead of driving it around, he completely disassembled the car, then put it back together again in just a month.

Yeah, that's not bad.

Another lifelong passion was sparked on his 16th birthday when Howard was given a flight in a seaplane.

So he immediately asked his dad for flying lessons, but was refused.

So this was still the early days of aeroplanes.

And although flying was becoming a popular pastime for the rich, it was still incredibly dangerous.

But, you know, Hughes senior was trying to soften the blow here so he increased Howard's monthly allowance to five thousand dollars a sum which still seems incredible by today's standards but at that time was actually well above the annual income for a middle-class family that is amazing five thousand dollars a month in the early 20th century for a kid that's insane you've got no excuses if this kid turns out to be a bit spoiled exactly so you know from his position things are looking pretty good for the young 16 year old howard hughes but then tragedy struck not once but twice.

First, his mother, Aileen, died suddenly from an ectopic pregnancy.

Young Howard seemed to cope with this bereavement, and it was even noted that he became less shy at his boarding school.

But his dad struggled with the loneliness.

He pulled Howard out of school and moved them to Pasadena in California.

And it was there that Howard Sr.

bribed the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech for short, to accept Howard, who was at this point yet to even take his high school diploma.

Ah,

He'd go to his local cinema and watch silent movies all night.

But then in 1924, just two years after his mother's death, a heart attack killed off Howard Hughes Sr.

Inevitably, the death of both his parents took a toll on 18-year-old Howard Hughes, but it's difficult to actually quite say how.

Later in life, he was described as cold and emotionless, but while he was certainly always an unusual child, it's hard to say if that was a response to being orphaned or if he was always that way.

You just think that a combination of great wealth, being orphaned and being all alone and being quite shy and nerdy.

It's quite a volatile cocktail of things, you know, I would say.

You know, it's not a normal childhood.

It's certainly a toxic chemical combination, I think, for a life that would later be led in quite an odd, idiosyncratic way.

Yeah, what we can say for certain is that after his father's death, Hughes acted swiftly and decisively to secure his hold on the family fortune.

Now, the estate was valued at $860,000,

probably an intentional undervaluation for tax avoidance reasons, we think.

But his father's will left Howard 75% of the shares in the Hughes tool company.

The other 25% went to Howard's grandparents and one of his dad's brothers.

Technically, although he was 18, Howard was still considered a minor, and the will specified a guardian had to ensure he completed university before inheriting that at 21.

Like many of our billionaires, he was impatient and didn't want to wait for that.

He told a friend he wanted his family out of his life and that he finds someone to run this goddamn tool company too.

So then, with the help of his father's attorney, he found a legal precedent that 18-year-olds could be declared adult by convincing a court that they were responsible.

So, Howard went to court to prove his maturity.

And there in front of the judge he stated his case and the judge overseeing it said that he was unable to ask Howard any questions he couldn't answer and declared Howard Hughes an adult just two days after his 19th birthday.

And with that inheritance confirmed, Howard set about using the company's $325,000 in cash reserves to buy out his relatives' shares.

And his uncle and grandparents reluctantly agreed.

In fact, his grandparents found talk of money that soon after his father's death so distasteful, they actually only took $10.

His uncle, however, did take the full amount.

He took the full amount.

There we go.

So at 19, Howard Hughes is now the sole owner of his father's company, mansion, and all other assets.

And in the coming year, the Hughes Tool Company would deliver profits of $5,000 a day.

or $1.8 million a year.

And these are big numbers for the early 20th century.

So it's safe to say that at this point, aged 19, Howard Hughes is a millionaire.

Not only that, he was also in control of his own company, his finances, his destiny.

All at this young age, he had no one to tell him what he could or couldn't do, and he never would ever again.

What could possibly go wrong with that setup?

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So let's take him from a million to a billion.

Yes, having moved back to Houston to confirm his inheritance, Howard Hughes now wanted to get back to California, but he had no intention of completing his degree as his father had wanted.

Instead, he wanted to head to the bright lights of Hollywood.

However, at this point, Howard still felt the need to abide by the social mores of society and got himself married.

So marriages of convenience were actually commonplace in Texan high society at the time and Hughes newer wife would kind of give him this front of maturity, of respectability and it would also allow him to get rid of the attentions of overly concerned aunts and gossipmongers and let him pursue his Hollywood dreams.

Yep, so he wed local debutante Ella Rice on the 1st of June 1925.

The couple immediately moved to a suite of rooms in the Ambassador Hotel in Hollywood.

This would not be the last time that Hughes took up residence in a hotel.

And actually, that's actually quite common amongst, for example, the rich or famous.

They would take a suite of rooms at a hotel because you kind of get built-in security.

You have everything on tap.

You have cleaning.

You have a fleet of people to do what your bidding is.

So it seems crazy now, but it was actually not that uncommon back then.

Now, around this time, Howard Hughes reportedly said he had four aims in life.

To be, in his words, the greatest golfer in the world.

the finest film producer in Hollywood, the greatest pilot in the world, and the richest man in the world, but not in that order.

At that time, the one at the top of his list seemed to be becoming the finest film producer in Hollywood.

So it's probably worth just thinking about Hollywood in 1925.

That was the year that Hughes moved there.

So this is just two years after the famous Hollywood sign had been put up.

Back then it actually said Hollywood land.

Great pub quiz question.

Very good.

Stole that away in the back of your mind.

But Hollywood already had all the glamour and allure it's famous for today.

So film was a brand new industry, but the business was already huge.

It was estimated to be the USA's fifth largest industry.

And Hollywood is already at its center.

Yeah, but remember, in 1925, motion pictures are still silent, black and white, but the sound and colour eras are just around the corner.

And our teenage millionaire wants in.

So he uses a fraction of his vast cash reserves and finances a movie.

He invests $80,000 to produce a sentimental comedy called Swell Hogan.

Have you seen Swell Hogan?

I honestly do not think anybody has seen it.

I I think that's probably right.

The film apparently was so awful that Hughes didn't even let it become a box office flop.

After a series of test audience laughed at how bad it was, he refused to release it and apparently ordered all copies to be destroyed.

So, if anyone's got a copy of Swell Hogan out there, you're sitting on potential gold mine.

Now, despite the initial failure of Swell Hogan, Hughes kept going.

He actually launched his own film company in 1926, and his next two films actually did a lot better.

So, Everybody's Acting turned a $70,000 investment into a $160,000 return and two Arabian Nights cost $500,000 but ended up taking home $800,000.

So that film would actually also win an Oscar at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929.

But Hughes' next film was his most ambitious yet.

It was a First World War epic filled with incredible airplane stunts.

Important that.

And this time he wasn't just producing, he directed two.

It starred upcoming starlight Gene Harlow and was called Hell's Angels.

And when it came out, it was regarded as a pretty good film.

It actually got some Oscar nominations and it was lauded for its groundbreaking dogfight scenes which used real aircrafts and daring stunts and it did really well at the box office.

But there was a problem.

It may have been a hit but it cost a fortune.

And guess what?

Howard Hughes, the director, is said to have been demanding.

Hell's Angels had started out filming in 1927 as a silent movie, but was reshot as a sound movie after the first talkie, the sound film, The Jazz Singer, became a hit that year.

Hughes also had custom-built planes made for the movie, and having finally got his pilot's license, he'd even flown and crashed them in some sequences himself.

And there were even colour sequences, which were incredibly expensive at the time.

In all, the film took three years to make, had cost $2.8 million at a time when films often shot in a month and budgets rarely topped 400,000.

So it was expensive.

And despite the success, the film would never recover its costs.

And although Howard was incredibly rich, you know, that wealth was not bottomless.

This sounds like the sort of water world of its time.

By 1930, he'd spent about $6 million on movies, but it wasn't just films Hughes had thrown money at.

As soon as he'd arrived in Hollywood, he'd spent in a way his father had never allowed.

He had to spend $100,000 on luxury cars, $20,000 on furs and jewelry.

He's a kind of real-life Jay Gatsby in a way.

Yeah, he really is.

And, you know, at one point, he'd become obsessed with creating a steam-powered car and had actually actually invested $550,000 in its development but then he just seemed to lose interest.

He'd also put a lot of money into speculating on Wall Street.

He once lost $4 million in an hour after he got a bad tip from a guy on a golf course and those lavish living expenses were racking up.

In 1929 he'd had an expensive divorce from wife Ella.

He had to give her a settlement of $1.2 million.

Meanwhile, he spent $1.5 million on his new girlfriend, an actress called Billie Dove.

He bought her out of her existing film studio contract, remodeled a yacht for her, oh, and he also gave money to her husband to divorce her.

Lucky Billy Dove.

So all in all, some $20 million had been spent.

Now, when he'd moved to Hollywood, he put a man called Noah Dietrich in charge of his tool company.

Dietrich was a former prize fighter turned accountant who had kept things on track.

But in the winter of 1930, he had to warn Hughes that he'd spent all the cash reserves and was nearly broke.

The executives of the company, though, had a plan.

They proposed Hughes hand over the company to them in exchange for a guaranteed annual payment of $500,000.

But Hughes already had five more films in production and needed $2 million right away.

He also understood the true value of his father's company.

He said, this is a cash cow and it will eventually make me one of the richest men in the world.

So while he's throwing money away on things that most of us wouldn't spend money on, he's still kind of got that now for business.

And in fact, this is the point where Howard Hughes starts to take his business quite seriously.

First, he takes out a bank loan against the company to pay for those film productions he's got in train.

Then he begins to rein in his spending.

That must have been a shock.

And he no longer ignores the reports he has sent from the Hughes Tool Company.

In fact, he studies them in detail and sends Dietrich out to Houston to assess where cuts and improvements can be made.

And over the next five years, he doubled the company's research staff, modernized its factory, and had hundreds of new drill bits added to its catalogue.

So he's really zeroing in on the source of his wealth here.

And after all these investments, profits begin to rise.

6 million in 1935, 9 million in 1936 and 13 million in 1937.

So the company certainly proved itself a cash cow throughout Howard Hughes's life, but let's face it, it's not like he was ever fully focused on his tool company.

No, he's got much better things to do because during the 1930s he solidified his reputation as a playboy.

Remember that starlet Billy Dove, the one whose husband husband Hughes paid to divorce her?

Well, she became his fiancée, but she was just one of many film stars he's romantically linked to.

There were also rumours of an on-and-off on-set romance with Jean Harlow, the star of Hell's Angels, and then came Hedy Lamar, the leading lady who had a parallel career as an inventor.

He was actually inadvertently helped that second career by introducing her to numerous engineers at his company.

Through the 30s, 40s, and 50s, Howard Hughes dated some of the most famous women in the world.

This is quite a list.

Check this out.

Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Catherine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, who apparently wants smashed and ashtravery's head, Jane Russell, Gina Lolla Bridgeta, Ida Lupino, and Gene Turney.

That is quite a list.

I mean, that's like a who's who of Hollywood, isn't it?

Limey.

And while Hughes maintained friendships with a few of the women in his life, I assume Ava Gardner wasn't one of them, he was also notorious for using his money and position to control.

control people.

So his controlling treatment of actresses he put under contract was an open secret in Hollywood.

They'd be assigned a furnished flat and an encore driver, but the driver was also doubling up as a spy for Hughes, and every moment of their days and nights was scheduled by Hughes.

I don't think this would pass muster after the Me Too era, do you?

Absolutely not.

So one example I think came in 1941 with an upcoming star called Faith Domergue.

Hughes gave her an engagement ring and bought her out of her contract with Warner Brothers.

She later said, suddenly my professional and emotional future were completely in his hands.

He kept her isolated, blocked her career all the time carrying on with other women.

When she read gossip column reports of his relationships with other actresses, he'd pay the papers to write new reports saying the first reports were publicity stunts.

And of course, he had no intention of marrying her and he never did.

Another example comes in 1953 with a 19-year-old called Renee Rossu.

She actually attempted suicide a few months after arriving in Hollywood, saying that Hughes keeping her from working was partly to blame.

She survived, but her career didn't.

Pretty horrific stories these.

It's fair to say we could have done a whole programme on Hughes's romantic entanglements.

But on Good Bad Billionaire, we need to focus on the business side of things.

Martin Scorsese did actually make a two-hour 50-minute movie you may have seen called The Aviator, which is mainly about Hughes' relationship with Catherine Hepburn.

And as the title suggests, it's also about his passion for flight.

And that is the next business venture we'll discuss.

In 1932, Hughes had purchased a military pursuit plane from Boeing.

Although the plane was restricted for Air Force use, Hughes had made special arrangements with the Department of Commerce to own one.

He then formed the Hughes Aircraft Company as a subsidiary of the Hughes Tool Company to improve the Boeing plane for racing.

And he'd go on to use the tool company as a kind of, you know, holding company for all his other business interests.

A bit like, if you remember, Warren Buffett bought this old company called Berkshire Hathaway as the huge kind of holding company, central investment company, even though, for example, Berkshire Hathaway was originally a textile company and ended up being the biggest shareholder in Apple, for example.

Now, after Hughes won a race in his upgraded plane, aviation becomes more than just a hobby.

He hired engineers and mechanics to build the fastest plane in the world, in his words, and planned to sell his new plane to the Army Air Corps as a military pursuit vehicle.

At a cost of $120,000, he creates the Hughes H1 and sets the world record speed for land planes at the then unheard of 352 miles per hour.

He then broke another record in the H1 flying across across the USA in seven hours 28 minutes.

That cut two hours off the previous record, which by the way was also set by Hughes.

And in 1938, he set another record flying around the world in 91 hours, this time in a plane built by another company, Lockheed.

But by now, he's this famous aviator.

But despite these record-breaking feats, when Hughes pitched the H1 plane to the US Air Force, they actually turned him down.

So in 1939, he decided to refocus and buy into commercial airlines instead.

Welcome to Trans World Airlines or TWA, which older listeners will remember as a brand name on the tail fin of many planes.

It was a major passenger airline of the era that had been undervalued since the Great Depression.

He was able to buy 21% of the company for $1.6 million.

He later upped his stake to 45% and would ultimately hold over three-quarters of the shares by 1963.

But way back in 1939, Hughes came in with a 10-year plan for TWA, which included making it the leader in US coast-to-coast flights, his record-breaking route.

So their planes were made by Lockheed, so he has worked with their engineers there to design a plane with transcontinental range that fitted 20 sleeper compartments and flew 100 miles per hour faster and 10,000 feet higher than the then market leader.

Now under his guidance, TWA doubled its income by 1940 and increased passengers by 57% in 1941.

He went on to make TWA the first American airline to provide non-stop transcontinental flights to the public and oh yeah also the first to provide freshly brewed coffee and in-flight movies things that we all take for granted today for sure yeah the in-flight movie of course he's a big movie buff himself but for every success Hughes seemed to have a failure and Hughes's next aeronautical venture was a giant literally giant dud when the USA entered World War II in 1942 German U-boats were sinking Allied ships at a very alarming rate and there was a desperate need for aircraft that could transport goods and troops over long distances without relying on those vulnerable sea routes across the Atlantic.

It's called the Battle of the Atlantic, the whole thing, U-boats everywhere.

An industrialist called Henry Kaiser had the idea of building a flying boat, a massive plane that could land on water.

Kaiser approached Hughes and thanks to Hughes's aviation reputation, they won a government commission to build the plane in 1942.

The H-4 Hercules, an A-engine, 200-ton, 750-person plane, this thing is huge, was the world's largest aeroplane with a wingspan of 320 feet.

And it was nicknamed the Spruce Goose because it was built mostly from wood due to wartime restrictions on aluminium and other metals.

Can you imagine having a 200-ton plane which can fit 750 people made of wood?

It sounds like a cruise ship.

Have you seen it?

I mean, the pictures of it are actually amazing.

This thing is giant.

And if you look at it, you think, how on earth did that ever get off the ground?

And actually, in a way, it didn't.

Yep, two years into the project, Kaiser actually left, didn't he?

Yeah, he was frustrated the plane was still not completed.

The delays were largely due to Hughes' micromanagement of the project.

By the time the plane was complete in 1946, the war it was designed to be a part of was over.

Oops.

So Hughes was placed under investigation by the Senate Special Committee to investigate the National Defence Programme, as well as the Spruce Goose.

Hughes had also failed to complete another plane for the government.

Now, Hughes himself nearly died in a crash on a test flight for that second plane in 1946.

He was left with serious injuries and the high doses of morphine he was given in hospital left him with an addiction to painkillers many believe directly or indirectly caused his death.

But in August 1947, still in recovery from multiple fractures and third degree burns, Hughes was brought in to testify at a Senate committee investigating war profiteering.

So the government had spent $40 million of taxpayers' money and Hughes hadn't delivered a single working plane.

The Spruce Goose alone was estimated to have cost $25 million,

$18 million from the government, and $7 million from Hughes' own funds.

Defence procurement is a famously risky game, but Hughes still wanted to prove his enormous plane could work.

So during a break in the hearings, he flew back from Washington to California for a publicity stunt to test the plane.

29 passengers on board, mostly journalists.

The plane lifted 70 feet into the air and flew for 30 seconds at 100 miles an hour.

It was never flown again, and Hughes ended up paying $1 million a year to keep it in a climate-controlled aircraft hangar.

The danger of making a plane out of wood.

As a journalist, would you get onto the Spruce Goose?

Do you know what?

I think it depends what point in my career it was.

Now, no way.

As a young journalist, I think that if I didn't go, there would be plenty of hungry journalists like yourself who would have taken my place.

Oh, I don't know.

As a nervous flyer, I don't think I could handle the idea of being on a plane that big.

Maybe I would have gotten onto the Spruce Goose.

You would have done.

But nervously.

I wouldn't be happy about it.

Well, that 30-second flight, which did not end in tragedy, it's important to say, was shown on newsreels across the country.

And that was enough because Hughes came out of the Senate hearings victorious in the most important court of all, the Court of Public Opinion.

So his testimony was broadcast nationally.

He appeared calm and charismatic.

He often used humour and plain language.

You know, this really contrasted with the way the Senate committee worked, you know, dry, bureaucratic, boring, in other words.

Yeah, and despite his wealth, Hughes positioned himself as, if you like, the underdog being being unfairly targeted by political elites and framed the investigation as a politically motivated attack.

Does this remind you of anyone?

Anyway, as I say, he framed this investigation saying it was a politically motivated attack rather than a legitimate inquiry into wartime profiteering.

Now, the Senate hearings themselves were essentially inconclusive, and the lead investigator, a senator called Orwin Brewster, actually suffered more reputational damage than Hughes himself.

But beating Brewster wasn't enough for Hughes, who pursued a vendetta against the Senator.

When Brewster came up for re-election five years later, Hughes secretly funded his opponent to the tune of $60,000 in a primary campaign that saw Brewster beaten and his political career brought to an end.

Take that, Brewster.

Talk about vindictive.

But even while Hughes was pouring money away on vendettas and unsuccessful airplanes, money was pouring in from other parts of his empire.

So the Hughes II Company's annual profits grew from 33 million in 1942 to 55 million in 1948.

A subsidiary company, the Gulf Brewing Company, boomed during the war, selling 483,000 barrels of beer for a profit of 2.3 million.

And in 1943, Hughes had returned to film production with a Western called The Outlaw, starring Jane Russell, with whom, of course, he was having an affair.

Of course.

I think I've heard of The Outlaw.

It's quite a famous film, isn't it?

Yeah.

Well, you'll be interested to know that Hughes famously designed a special bra of all things.

Using his engineering skills to great effect.

Yeah, she maybe should have worked for Triumph, actually.

He actually wanted to emphasise Russell's figure, and he fought with the sensors to retain scenes highlighting her chest.

That battle actually delayed the film's release until 1946.

But when it finally came out, The Outlaw was actually a big box office hit.

Then in 1948, Hughes became a studio owner himself when he paid nearly $9 million for a controlling stake in RKO, very famous name in film history.

He soon, though, cut staff from 2,500 to just 600.

But his micromanagement of the studio and egocentric decisions destroyed this once great studio.

And this is a moment when we start to see his germaphobia becoming a real issue.

Apparently he would do insanely expensive things like shutting down the whole studio lot for weeks at a time to try to control dust.

Slimey.

In 1955 Hughes finally sold RKO for $25 million.

Now that may look like he made a bit of a profit, but it's thought he lost three to four million dollars every year that he owned the company and RKO closed for good in 1959.

So while he did have a lot of hits, film is not the industry that made Howard Hughes a billionaire.

And in the late 1940s, it seemed unlikely that the airplane industry would either.

The Hughes Aircraft Company had shrunk down from 6,000 employees to just 800, but Hughes was desperate to keep it going.

So when an engineer suggested they pivot into electronics, Hughes agreed.

And this is a smart move.

Despite his run-in with the Senate committee, Hughes now planned again to secure government contracts.

He would make Hughes aircraft an unofficial test lab for the U.S.

Air Force and begin to employ research scientists.

Soon the company had 3,000 scientists on staff.

They also had a near monopoly on Air Force electronic systems.

Noah Dietrich, who remember was kind of Howard Hughes' right-hand man in business, had to take out a $35 million bank loan to help with the expansion, but the company was soon grossing $1.7 million.

million dollars a day.

Then US President Harry Truman even described Hughes as the human linchpin of America's air defenses.

So he's come a long way from being hauled up before a Senate committee.

By 1953, Hughes Aircraft was employing 17,000 people and had a backlog of $600 million in federal contracts to provide radar, missiles and other advanced electronics to the Air Force, while the CIA ordered $250,000 in espionage equipment.

And back then, while the company were no longer making planes, in 1948, they'd started making helicopters.

Their first designs in the early 50s weren't that successful, but the 1956 Model 300 with a clear, bubbling closed cockpit design, you can see that in your mind's eye, was successfully marketed to television crews, police departments, and private owners.

The company would go on to provide the military helicopter central to the US's operations during the Vietnam War.

I think, in fact, you know, being a bit of a nerd about this stuff, I think those Vietnam helicopters were called Hueys, and I'm pretty sure that is because of the Hughes influence.

Wow.

So Hughes actually had a dastardly plan to undercut his competitors' bids by building these Huey helicopters at a significant loss and thus become the Army's sole supplier of helicopters and then hike up the price.

That actually backfired on him.

He delivered about 1,500 helicopters to the Army at a loss of millions of dollars and he still never got that exclusive deal.

So he's making mistakes in business nonetheless.

But even when things were going well financially, Hughes himself was the problem.

In 1953, Hughes aircraft was booming, but staff staff were leaving.

They often cited working with Hughes as the reason they quit.

The Secretary of the Air Force issued an ultimatum.

Hughes had 90 days to reorganise the company so he would not be actively involved in its management or Air Force contracts would be cancelled.

That is quite the ultimatum.

I mean, yeah, it's quite something that the U.S.

Air Force saying, either you get lost or the contracts are out.

Well, on the 90th day, Hughes extracted the aircraft division from the Hughes Tool Company umbrella and he made Hughes Aircraft a standalone company and then he established the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as a non-profit medical research organization and assigned all of the aircraft stocks to the institute and finally he made himself the institute's sole trustee so doing quite a lot of behind the scenes work making some moves here and this sleight of hand seemed to appease the air force it also created a tax shelter because by transferring ownership to this non-profit institute he shielded its profits from corporate income tax because at that point non-profit companies were tax exempt.

So, while the new arrangement saved Hughes a lot in taxes, it actually didn't help those working for him.

In 1957, Noah Dietrich, remember, Hughes' right-hand guy, finally quit.

The pair fell out over money, and after an aggressive phone call, Hughes had the locks changed at the corporate headquarters and fired all of Dietrich's associates.

Dietrich didn't forget this.

He wrote a biography of Hughes in which he said that Howard Hughes's, in his words, arteries pumped ice water, and that he never knew a man who was so totally devoid of emotion.

Well, I'll talk about a takedown.

Now, that same year, when he was 51, he was married to 30-year-old actress Jean Peters.

The pair wed under fake names, and they didn't live in the same house initially.

And when they did, they only saw each other for just 20 minutes each day.

They eventually divorced in 1971, having not seen each other for nearly four years.

That will sound to some like the perfect marriage, and

not a marriage at all.

But after losing Dietrich, Hughes had effectively become a recluse.

He gave his last in-person interview in 1958 and began conducting all of his business by telephone.

Well, a real work-from-home pioneer, you might say.

Yes.

Now, Hughes may have been hiding his appearance, also fearing it would reveal his mental and physical health struggles.

So, Hughes had suffered serious head injuries in three separate plane crashes and, as discussed, was becoming increasingly addicted to various painkillers.

And soon, his erratic behaviour would cost him TWA2.

He bought the company great success, but a series of overblown purchases, a refusal to cooperate with regulators, his erratic management style led to increasing tension with the airline's board and government authority.

In fact, although Hughes had been essentially running the company since the 1930s, he'd never attended a single board meeting, he'd never had an office at TWA, and was never officially an officer or director of the company.

So when he entered into various legal battles with TWA's trustees, they actually had the upper hand.

And in 1966, Hughes was forced to sell his shares for just over $500 million,

ending his direct involvement with the company.

But for our purposes, that sale did confirm one thing: Howard Hughes was a billionaire.

The 500 million he made, added to the value of Hughes tools and its subsidiaries, meant he was worth at least a billion.

And just two years later, Fortune magazine declared Hughes to be the richest man in America with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion.

Now, beyond a billion is where Hughes' story gets really weird.

And to be honest, where better to get weird than Las Vegas, Nevada?

Hughes moved there to avoid California state taxes on the money he got from selling TWA.

Get this, he traveled by private train in blue pajamas and was carried by stretcher into a service elevator of the Desert Inn Hotel Casino to the ninth floor penthouse suite.

That's how I get to work every morning.

He was meant to stay just 10 days, but when staff asked him to leave after four months, he bought the whole hotel and ended up living in that room for four years.

Plus, he went on a shopping spree.

He spent $65 million in one year acquiring various properties, businesses, four large casinos, real estate to build more casinos, the North Las Vegas airport, several luxury ranches, 200 Nevada mining claims and the local television station.

Apparently he bought the TV station because he was an insomniac who wanted to watch TV all night and it actually stopped broadcasting at 11 p.m.

So talk about molding the world in your image.

All of this made Hughes the state of Nevada's biggest private landowner with almost 2,000 hotel rooms and 20% of the Las Vegas Strip under his control.

In fact, a researcher from the University of Nevada credits Hughes with changing the perception of gambling in Las Vegas, saying Hughes bought a new respectability that encouraged public corporations to buy or invest in Nevada casinos as they never had done before.

But Hughes's mental health was deteriorating during his time at the Desert Inn.

He had the windows darkened.

He often sat naked in the dark.

He used layers of tissues to touch doorknobs and demanded his aides pass him items wrapped in tissue and paper towel.

For months, he refused to bathe and would only have his hair or nails cut once a year.

This is the gross bit.

In two years, his bed sheets were only changed five times.

The carpet in his bedroom wasn't vacuumed, the room wasn't dusted, the bathroom never cleaned.

Worse still, he filled his closet with jars in which he had urinated, and the room stank of his rotting teeth and fungus-contorted nails.

You're forgiven if you want a wretch at this point.

In 1970, exactly four years after he entered the Desert Inn, he left for the Bahamas, where he spent the next few years on and off, still conducting business via telephone.

We go back to the scene at the beginning.

He was 70 years old when he died on that plane.

It was headed to a New York hospital where he was being taken for emergency medical treatment.

He died of kidney failure, almost certainly caused by his extensive use of painkillers, and it was a matter of chance that he died flying over Texas.

Remember, the state where he was born.

But possibly fitting that the famous aviator died as he lived on a plane.

At the time of Howard Hughes's death, his estate was estimated to be worth two and a half billion dollars, but he had no children or wife, and there was no will.

Now, we could do a whole show about all the false claims to his estate.

It actually took 34 years before the last payment was settled in the year 2000.

So what an incredible story.

No wonder they made a film out of him and he became so famous.

But now it's time to judge him.

This is where we go through a bunch of categories.

So we're going to give him a ranking out of 10 on those categories.

Let's start with wealth.

Two and a half billion, barely entry level for these days, but he was the richest man in America at the time.

But to be fair, he did inherit quite a lot from his dad.

He did.

But sometimes we we in this look at how he spent it and there's no flies on him when it comes to this.

Oh yeah he loved to spend money.

I mean you know fast cars, planes, movies, movies, movie starlets, you name it.

I mean I feel exhausted just reading this story.

Do you a little bit?

He certainly had quite a life.

And also the thing I keep coming back to is paying a man to divorce his wife so that he could get with the woman.

Buying at the local TV station because it used to stop playing movies at 11.

Buying a hotel.

basically whatever happened whatever resistance he ran into he would buy his way out of so I think he would score quite highly for me he's a nine out of ten for sure nine yes definitely nine I agree controversy terrible treatment of women

the worst I mean even though he seemed to just attract women non-stop you know all these Hollywood stars that's the thing that attracted you to the richest man in America yeah I mean also putting aside his treatment of women sounds like he wasn't a great person to work for either let's face it I think he he's definitely more than eccentric.

Yeah, he's not a harmless eccentric by any means.

And there seems to be no limit to what he would buy his way out of.

Apparently, in the 1930s, he ran over and killed a pedestrian, bought his way out of that situation.

Wow, so he really has a score pretty highly, I think.

Controversy.

I mean, they've made films about how weird he was.

I think it's a 10.

Yeah, I would say...

Or maybe a 9.

Yeah, I would say probably a 9 out of 10.

9 out of 10.

Yeah.

So giving back, this is like philanthropy, stuff like that.

He set up this non-profit Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

But the IRS, the tax man in the US, investigated it for years as congressmen accused it of channeling only a small fraction of its earnings from Hughes aircraft into medical research.

Yeah, apparently during its first full year, it actually spent less than $45,000 on research.

By the end of 1963, its 10 years of charitable donations totaled less than $5 million, which is actually not very much.

Since then, it's been a center of excellence.

28 current and former scientists who have worked at hughes medical research institute have been awarded nobel prizes so some good came of it yeah but i have to say it's probably not anything that howard hughes did himself other than setting it up i'm gonna give it a three out of ten yeah i'm gonna give it a two out of ten even though it is doing good work today I feel like Howard Hughes had nothing to do with it.

More by accident than design, I reckon.

Okay, so two for you, three for me.

Power and legacy.

This is an interesting quote from him.

He once said, You just remember that every man I can buy.

I, Howard Hughes, can buy any man in the world or I can destroy him.

God, talk about ego.

Oh, blimey.

That's kind of like the Roman Emperor type ego, isn't it?

Yeah.

I mean, he gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to politicians.

He gave to President Nixon.

He had a relentless drive for political influence.

He was even, get this, indirectly linked to the Watergate scandal through his secretive contributions to Nixon's associates.

But interestingly, his right-hand man, Noah Dietrich, said he manipulated politicians but never voted.

I mean his legacy is probably as one of the world's most famous eccentrics, I would say.

That's his legacy.

Although his company's helicopters were absolutely instrumental in the Vietnam War, for good or ill, and his passion for aviation, probably through his mistakes, people learned from them.

It's an interesting one because it almost feels like he had so much energy that he put towards so many different things that if he'd just focused all of them on a single thing, he could have actually just absolutely dominated a certain industry.

But he had a scattergun mind.

Yeah, well, let's face it, he's pretty weird.

So I think almost sort of culturally, he's an important

person because he personifies the crazy billionaire who can do whatever they like because they've got limitless financial resources and it doesn't stop them.

They can buy and sell their way out of just about anything and indulge their every whim, fantasy and failing.

So, for that, as the world's weirdest billionaire possibly, I'm going to give him a seven.

Oh, I feel like I'd go higher than that.

Right, okay.

Yeah, I mean, if he basically created the archetype of the eccentric billionaire who spends his money as he wants and just changes the world in his wake because he's got the cash, I feel like that created a real mold for other billionaires to avoid, to avoid, to try to avoid.

So, I think I would give him him an A out of 10.

Okay.

Seven for me, eight for you.

So we know he's weird.

We know he's dead.

But is he good, bad, or just another billionaire?

So we want to hear from you.

Email goodbadbillionaire at bbc.com or drop us a text or WhatsApp to 001-917-686-1176 to let us know what you think.

And I've got a message here, which is on the Good Bad Billionaire phone, the dedicated bat phone, if you like, to the program.

This is from Hebber.

She says, hey, Hebber Mohsin Wase here, a 19-year-old listener and student from India.

Amazing episodes.

Loved your episode on George Soros.

Great presentation, amazing narration.

Thank you.

I often used to hear your podcast all throughout my preparation.

I really appreciate your efforts.

Well, we really appreciate you getting in touch, Heba.

Thanks very much for that.

And we've also got one from Jonathan Onsarigo, a proud listener.

He describes himself from Kenya.

He says, Dear, the good, the bad, and the billionaire team.

I like that.

Hope this message finds you well.

Huge fan of the podcast.

Thank you.

Truly appreciate the balanced, in-depth storytelling you bring to each billionaire's journey.

The episode on Alico Dangote, Nigerian billionaire, particularly stood out to me not only because of the insight into his business empire, but also because of how fairly and comprehensively you portrayed his story within the broader African context.

I appreciate that because it often this is about context.

Often these billionaires are ways of telling wider stories about what's going on in the society, in the world, definitely.

And Jonathan has given us an idea for a Kenyan billionaire.

We will have a look into that and we may well do that.

And thanks in the meantime, Jonathan, for getting in touch with us.

So email goodbadbillionaire at bbc.com or drop us a text or WhatsApp to 001-917-686-1176.

That is goodbadbillionaire or one word at bbc.com or 001-917-686-1176.

And don't forget to include your name and your message may be featured on a future programme.

Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast.

It's produced by Mark Ward with additional production by Tams and Curry.

Paul Smith is the editor and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins and the commissioning editor is John Minnell.

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