Okay, let's unpack this. If I say the words eccentric
billionaire genius, who's the first person that
pops into your head? Oh, today. It's probably
Elon Musk, right? Right. For most people listening
right now, it's probably him. Or, you know, if
you're a comic book fan, maybe you're picturing
Tony Stark, Iron Man. Sure. The playboy, the
inventor, the guy who builds flying suits and
dates movie stars. Yeah. It's an archetype we
are all incredibly familiar with in pop culture.
Exactly. But the thing is... When Stan Lee was
creating Tony Stark, he wasn't just pulling him
out of thin air. He was basing him on a very
real person. A man who was, for a massive chunk
of the 20th century, the most famous. And the
richest. And the richest, yeah. And arguably
the most mysterious man in America. We are talking,
of course, about Howard Robard Hughes Jr. Howard
Hughes. The name itself, it just... It has this
weight to it. It really does. And usually when
we think about him, the image is split right
down the middle. On one side, you have the golden
boy, the dashing aviator. The leather jacket,
the gleaming silver plane, the guy Leonardo DiCaprio
played in the aviator. That's the image. That's
the one. And then on the other side, you have
the shadow. The terrifying gaunt figure, long
fingernails, locked in a dark room, wearing tissue
boxes on his feet. The hermit. It's Iron Man
versus the Recluse. And usually when people tell
this story, they treat those as two totally different
lives. Like there was the good Howard and then
suddenly overnight he just flipped. Right. Like
a switch was thrown. Yeah. But that's not really
how human beings work, is it? No, absolutely
not. And that is really our mission for this
deep dive. We've pulled together a massive stack
of biographies, flight logs, business records,
and medical reports to answer one specific question.
How do you go from a ticker tape parade in New
York City? A hero's welcome. To dying of neglect
in the back of a Learjet, weighing only 90 pounds.
Because it wasn't magic. It wasn't a curse. It
was a series of very specific, almost mechanical
pivot points. A drill bit. a plane crash in Beverly
Hills, a hotel suite in Las Vegas. We are going
to trace the trajectory, the rise and the fall
of the 20th century's most complex man, from
the engine of his wealth to the engine of his
destruction. And to understand the destruction,
the movies, the planes, the madness, we have
to start with the fuel. We have to talk about
the money. Because Howard Hughes didn't just
have rich kid money. He had like God mode money,
the kind of money that breaks the rules of reality.
He absolutely did. And to understand where that
money came from and why it was so endless, you
have to understand a little bit about the geology
of Texas in the early 1900s. Okay, geology. Let's
do it. What's the context here? So back then,
the oil boom is just kicking off. Spindletop,
all of that. Everyone is trying to punch holes
in the ground to get to the black gold. Right.
But drilling for oil was incredibly inefficient.
They used what were called fishtail bits. And
you can imagine it's just a flat piece of steel
shaped like a fishtail that just scraped at the
dirt. Like trying to dig a hole with a shovel?
Exactly. It worked fine for soft dirt or clay.
But the moment you hit hard rock, granite, limestone,
the really tough stuff, that fishtail bit would
just grind to a halt. So it would break. You'd
either ruin the bit in a matter of hours or you'd
have to stop. pull up hundreds of feet of pipe,
and change it constantly. It was slow, it was
expensive, it was infuriating. The whole industry
is bottlenecked because they literally can't
punch through the hard layer of the earth. Okay,
so there's a problem that needs solving. Enter
Howard Hughes Sr., our subject's father. He was
a wildcatter, a gambler at heart, and he got
frustrated. So he goes into his workshop and
invents something completely different. He patents
the Sharp Hughes two -cone roller bit. And mechanically,
how is this different? Instead of scraping, it
rolled. Imagine two rotating cones, almost like
little pine cones, covered in hardened steel
teeth. As the drill turned, these cones would
roll over the rock and crush it. They would pulverize
it. Yeah. Rather than trying to scrape it away.
Oh, wow. So it's the difference between trying
to scratch a hole in a brick wall with a knife
versus using a heavy -duty hammer drill. Precisely.
It could chew through solid rock at 10 times
the speed of anything else on the market. It
unlocked oil reserves that were previously impossible
to reach. That's a game changer. It's a world
changer. Yeah. But here is the real business
genius. And this is the key takeaway for anyone
interested in business models. Hugh Senior makes
this incredible invention. But he makes a very
specific decision. He decides he is never going
to sell a single bit. He never sold them. Not
one. Never. He only leased them. It was the original
software as a service model, but for heavy industrial
hardware. So it's a subscription. It's a subscription
model. If you wanted to drill for oil efficiently
anywhere on planet Earth, you had to pay the
Hughes Tool Company. And when the teeth wore
down on the bit, You didn't buy a new one. You
paid to lease another one from them. That is
absolutely genius. It's a recurring revenue stream
that just, it's scaled with the entire global
oil industry. As long as the world needs oil,
the Hughes family gets a check. It was a license
to print money, a literal monopoly on a critical
piece of global infrastructure. And when Hughes
Sr. died suddenly, Howard Jr. inherited 75 %
of this machine. And how old was he? He's only
19 years old. Both his parents were dead by that
point. And he suddenly controlled a fortune that
replenished itself every single day. That's a
dangerous amount of freedom for a teenager. I
mean, most 19 -year -olds can't handle the limit
on a credit card, let alone a global industrial
monopoly. And the thing is, Howard wasn't interested
in running a tool company. He didn't care about
the board meetings or the accountants. He left
all that to the suits. Howard was, at his core,
an engineer. He was always a builder. Even as
a kid, before the money, he was brilliant. The
stories are pretty incredible. Tell me about
the radio. At 11 years old, he built Houston's
first wireless radio transmitter from scratch.
He was ham radioing before it was cool. At 12,
he was in the local newspaper because he built
a motorized bicycle using parts from his father's
steam engine. A motorized bike at 12, that's...
That's seriously impressive. It shows that he
understood mechanics intuitively. He liked systems.
He liked things he could control, tune, and optimize.
If you gave him a machine, he could make it sing.
Which makes his move to Hollywood so fascinating.
Because Hollywood is the opposite of a machine.
It's chaotic. It's emotional. It's all about
people. It's all about variables you can't control.
Right. But he takes that drill bit money, moves
to Los Angeles, marries Ella Rice, they divorce
four years later, and decides... I'm going to
be a movie producer. And typical Hughes, he doesn't
start small. He doesn't, you know, do an indie
film. He goes straight for the biggest thing
imaginable. He decides to make Hell's Angels.
This movie is legendary. Released in 1930. It
is. The production is legendary for its excess.
He spent $3 .5 million on it. In today's money,
that is an astronomical risk for a private individual
to put up. It's a staggering amount. He wanted
to make the ultimate aviation epic. So he actually
bought his own private Air Force 87 vintage World
War I planes. It's up with camels, Fokkers, you
name it. He had more planes than most small countries.
And this is where we see the first cracks of
that obsession showing up. The perfectionism
that goes beyond just, you know, good work and
into something pathological. Oh, yeah. The cloud
story is the famous one. He had all these planes,
all these pilots on payroll, costing him thousands
and thousands of dollars a day. And he stalled
production for months. Why? Because the sky was
too blue. Too blue. He felt that against a perfectly
blue sky, you couldn't tell how fast the planes
were moving. There was no frame of reference.
It looked static. So he needed something for
them to fly past. He needed depth. So he grounded
the entire production, just burning money every
single day, waiting for the right kind of clouds.
ominous, fluffy cloud formations to give the
shot a sense of speed and scale. He was trying
to direct the weather. In a way, yes. And he
was willing to put lives at risk for his vision.
Three pilots actually died during the filming
of Hell's Angels. That's insane. Hughes himself
crashed a plane during the shoot and fractured
his skull. It was a chaotic war zone, all driven
by his will. But the movie was a hit. It was
a massive hit. And that's the problem, isn't
it? It validated him. It taught him the wrong
lesson. If I spend enough money and if I obsess
enough over the tiniest details, I win. And that
obsession with detail, sometimes it was artistic,
like the clouds, but sometimes it was just bizarre.
We have to talk about The Outlaw. Ah, yes. 1943,
the Jane Russell movie, famous for all the battles
with the Hays Code censors. Exactly. It was all
about Jane Russell's... Well, her costumes. But
looking at the source material, there's an engineering
story here that I find simultaneously hilarious
and disturbing. The blouse memo. It is pure Howard
Hughes. During production, he became fixated
on a flaw in a blouse Jane Russell was wearing.
He claimed the fabric bunched up along a seam
in a way that, to him, made it look like her
nipples were showing. And nobody else saw this.
Everyone else on set looked at it and said, Howard,
it's fine. It's just a seam. But Hughes couldn't
let it go. It was a problem he had to solve.
So he didn't just tell the costume designer to,
you know, stitch it differently. No, of course
not. He wrote a multi -page technical memorandum
to the crew. He applied the principles of structural
engineering and aerodynamics to a blouse. You're
kidding me. He designed a cantilevered underwire
support system, essentially a specialized heavy
-duty bra to lift and separate the fabric so
the scene would lay perfectly flat under tension.
He drew diagrams. He is engineering a bra like
it's a suspension bridge. It's that hyper focus.
When he locked onto a problem, he couldn't distinguish
between a major issue, like the script being
bad, and a minor issue, like a seam on a dress.
To him, every variable had to be controlled.
So did she wear it? Jane Russell later said she
never even wore the contraption. She thought
it was ridiculous and uncomfortable. She just
stuffed her own bra with tissue, told him it
worked perfectly, and he believed her. Which
proves it was never about the result. It was
about the control. It was about him imposing
his solution on the problem. Exactly. And that
need for control works when you're building a
radio at age 11. It even works when you're tweaking
a trill bit. But it does not work when you're
running a massive organization full of creative
people. And that became painfully clear when
he bought RKO. The RKO disaster is a case study
in management by Paranoia. In 1948, he buys RKO
Pictures. This was one of the big five studios,
a massive institution. And he effectively destroys
it. How bad was it, really? He fired 700 employees
almost immediately. But not because of budget
cuts or efficiency. This was the McCarthy era,
the Red Scare. Hughes was virulently anti -communist.
He shut down production for six months to personally
vet the political leanings of the stagehands,
the writers, the lighting guys. He turned a creative
factory into a security state. Absolutely. Production
just plummeted. They went from making 30 films
a year to just nine. He was micromanaging everything
from his hotel room, but he was also completely
absent. He would disappear for weeks, leaving
executives terrified to make a single decision
without him. So the whole studio just ground
to a halt. total paralysis he eventually became
the sole owner the first person to solely own
a major studio since the silent era and then
he sold it amazingly he made a profit on the
sale but he just wrecked the studio's legacy
in the process again the drill bit money covers
a multitude of sins he can run a studio into
the ground and walk away richer but while he
was playing tycoon in hollywood he was doing
something else that he was actually undeniably
good at? Aviation. He was flying. Aviation was
his true love. And honestly, we have to give
him his due here. He wasn't just a rich guy buying
planes to look cool. He was a legitimately gifted
pilot and a visionary aeronautical engineer.
He founded Hughes Aircraft in a rented hangar
in Glendale. And the planes he built. I mean,
let's talk about the H -1 Racer. That thing is
beautiful. It's a work of art. And technologically,
it was years ahead of its time. He insisted on
flush rivets, smoothing out every single bump
on the wings to reduce drag. Every detail. He
introduced retractable landing gear when most
planes were still fixed gear biplanes. In 1935,
he flew that plane to a new world speed record,
352 miles per hour. And then, the big one, the
round -the -world flight in 1938. This was his
moment. That was his apex. He flew a Lockheed
Super Electra around the globe in 91 hours. And
he didn't just beat the record, he smashed it.
The previous record was nearly eight days. Hughes
did it in less than four. Imagine the stamina
required for that. Just sitting in a vibrating,
loud cockpit for four days straight with minimal
sleep. It was grueling. But he came back a national
hero. Ticker tape parade in the Candy of Heroes
in New York City. He was the Lindbergh of his
day, but richer, more dashing, and less controversial,
at least at that point. He won all the awards,
the Harmon Trophy, the Collier Trophy. The Congressional
Gold Medal. But even then, at the height of all
the applause, he was pulling away. He didn't
even go to the White House to collect the medal.
No, he didn't. He was already deeply uncomfortable
with the public eye. But the real turning point,
the moment that broke him physically and arguably
started the real mental decline. was the crash.
The XF -11. July 7, 1946. This is the moment
the golden boy dies and the reckless is born.
Set the scene for us. What happened that day?
He's flying a prototype spy plane, the XF -11,
over Los Angeles. It's a massive aircraft with
these huge experimental counter -rotating propellers.
It's fast. It's powerful. It's dangerous. And
typical Hughes. He stays in the air too long.
He's pushing the equipment, ignoring the flight
plan, just feeling the machine out and then the
machine fails. What went wrong? An oil leak causes
the rear propeller on the right engine to reverse
its pitch. Now, for the non -pilots listening,
imagine you're driving a car at 100 miles an
hour and suddenly the wheels on the right side
start spinning backward at full power. It would
just wrench you sideways. The drag is immense.
The plane yaws violently to the right. He's dropping
out of the sky. And he's over Beverly Hills.
This isn't an open field. He tries to aim for
the Los Angeles Country Club golf course, but
he's losing altitude too fast. He clips the roof
of one house. He slices right through a second
house. And finally, he crashes into a third and
the fuel tanks explode. The entire neighborhood
is in flames. It's a miracle he survived. A Marine
sergeant actually pulled him out of the fire,
right? Yeah. With a guy named William Durkin.
Yes. But the injuries were horrific. I mean,
just catastrophic. Yeah. His collarbone was crushed,
multiple cracked ribs, his left lung collapsed.
The impact was so severe that his heart was literally
shifted to the right side of his chest cavity.
Unbelievable. And crucially, he had third -degree
burns over a huge percentage of his body. And
this is where the pain comes in. This is where
the chemistry changes forever. The opiates. This
is the pivotal moment. To manage the excruciating
pain of the burns and the broken bones, the doctors
gave him codeine, lots of it, administered by
injection. And frankly, he never stopped taking
it. This is the beginning of a lifelong debilitating
addiction. A pain never really went away. The
pain never went away, and the drugs became his
only way of coping with it. But even in the hospital,
smashed up and burned, the engineer brain was
still working. I love this detail. He didn't
like... The hospital bed. No, he found it uncomfortable.
The standard issue springs were putting pressure
on his burns. So while lying there in critical
condition, he calls in his plant engineers from
Hughes Aircraft. He designed the bed. Of course
he did. A burn bed, he called it. It was equipped
with 30 separate electric motors and push -button
adjustments to distribute his weight perfectly
and alleviate the pressure points. He wanted
to articulate it in sections. Did he ever use
it? No. By the time they booked the prototype,
he was already recovering. But it shows his coping
mechanism for everything, even physical agony,
was engineering. I can build a better dead. I
can build a way out of this pain. And speaking
of building things, we can't talk about Hughes
without talking about the spruce goose, the H4
Hercules. The biggest plane ever built at the
time. A flying boat with a wingspan larger than
a football field. And it wasn't even made of
spruce. No, it was birch. But the birch goose
doesn't have the same ring to it, does it? It
was designed to carry troops and equipment over
U -boat infested waters in World War II. But
the war ended before it was finished. So everyone
called it Hughes Folly. They said it was a boondoggle,
a waste of taxpayer money. The Senate even held
hearings. They said it wouldn't fly. So Hughes,
to prove them wrong, takes it out into Long Beach
Harbor, November 2nd, 1947. And he's just supposed
to taxi it, just test the engines on the water.
That was the plan. But Hughes, being Hughes,
with... Reporters and senators watching from
the shore. He throttles up. He lifts it off the
water. It flew for one mile, about 70 feet in
the air. Just to say, I told you so. Essentially.
He proved the concept. It flew once and then
nothing. He put it in a massive climate -controlled
hangar. He paid millions of dollars a year to
keep it pristine. He kept a full crew on payroll
to maintain the engines, just waiting for orders
that never came. It just sat there for decades.
Control. He couldn't let it go. Exactly. It's
hoarding. Just on a gigantic industrial scale.
Now, while he's building these one -off marvels,
he's also dominating the commercial skies. This
is part four, the TWA era. Right. He quietly
bought up stock until he owned 78 % of TWA. He
effectively owned the airline. And he used it
to push for the Lockheed constellation, the Connie.
The most beautiful airliner ever built, maybe.
It's gorgeous. If you picture a glamorous 1950s
airliner... With the triple tail and the dolphin
-shaped fuselage, you were picturing the Constellation.
Hughes dictated the specs. He made TWA a global
competitor to Pan Am. But then the Gen Age hits,
Boeing comes out with the 707, and Hughes...
He freezes. He hesitated. He was obsessed with
the idea that he could build a better jet himself
at Hughes Aircraft. Or he wanted to negotiate
better terms from the manufacturers. He just
waited too long. And TWA needed jets to compete.
They were getting killed by the competition.
And Hughes wouldn't sign the checks. He eventually
ordered some, but then he didn't have the cash
on hand to pay for them because he refused to
sell any of his TWA stock to raise the capital.
It's that indecision, the OCD, making it impossible
to pull the trigger on a big decision. The banks
finally had enough. They sued him. They forced
him out of management in 1960. It was a huge,
drawn -out legal battle. And in 1966, he was
forced by the courts to sell his shares. But
this failure resulted in one of the biggest paydays
in history. Oh, absolutely. Because the stock
market was booming, He walked away with a check
for roughly $546 million. In cash? In cash. In
1966. That is an unimaginable amount of liquid
cash. It's like having tens of billions in your
checking account today. And he takes that money
and he goes to the one place in America where
an eccentric guy with half a billion in his pocket
fits right in. Las Vegas. Part 5. The Penthouse
Hermit. He arrives on a train. Yeah, in a private
rail car on Thanksgiving Day, 1966. He moves
into the Desert Inn. He takes over the entire
top two floors. And the hotel is happy at first.
I mean, who wouldn't be? But then New Year's
Eve is coming up. Right. They need those suites.
They want those high roller suites back for the
whales, the big gamblers. So they ask him to
leave. And he says. No, I'm not leaving. The
insist? And he just refuses. So finally he calls
the owner, Moe Dalitz, a famous former mobster,
and he just buys the hotel. I'll just buy the
hotel. That is the ultimate power move. And he
didn't stop there. He looked out the window of
his penthouse and saw the sands. So he bought
the sands. Then the frontier, the castaways,
the silver slipper, the landmark. He went on
a buying spree. He effectively bought the Las
Vegas Strip. And he had this vision, right? He
wanted to change Vegas. He did. He wanted to
get the mob out. He saw Vegas not as this gritty
mob -run gambling den, but as a cosmopolitan
metropolis, a place for the well -dressed man
in a dinner jacket, as he put it. And in a way,
he really did start the corporatization of Las
Vegas that we see today. But while he's buying
the town, he's disappearing. He's surrounded
by this group of aides called the Mormon Mafia.
What was that about? Well, it wasn't a criminal
mafia, of course. Yeah. It was his inner circle
of personal aides, and almost all of them were
members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter
-day Saints. Why them specifically? Jews preferred
them because they didn't drink, they didn't smoke,
and they were culturally raised to respect authority
and privacy. They were known for being trustworthy
and absolutely loyal. They controlled all access
to him. They were the gatekeepers to the void.
And they had to deal with some insane requests.
The ice cream story is my favorite because it
just sums up the absurdity of his life at that
point. It's a classic. Hughes decided he loved
Baskin -Robbins banana nut ice cream. That was
his flavor. He had to have it every single day.
So his aides find out that Baskin -Robbins has
discontinued it. Panic ensues. Naturally. You
can't tell the billionaire, no, it's out of stock.
Exactly. So they contact Baskin -Robbins corporate.
They negotiate a special production run. But
the minimum order is 350 gallons. That is a lot
of ice cream. They ship it from L .A. to Vegas
in special refrigerated trucks. They clear out
the walk -in freezers at the Desert Inn. They
are ready to serve Howard Hughes banana nut for
the rest of his life. And then? And the very
next day, a memo comes out from Hughes. I'm tired
of banana nut. From now on, I only want French
vanilla. Oh, man. So the hotel staff is eating
free banana nut for a year. They had to give
it away to guests for free just to get rid of
it. But it shows the capriciousness. His whims
were law. There was no feedback loop, no one
to say, Howard, that's crazy. He also tried to
stop the government from testing nukes, right?
He did. The Nevada test site was nearby. When
they set off an underground nuclear test, the
shockwaves would shake the desert in. It rattled
his windows. It disturbed his solitude. You didn't
like that. So he tried to bribe both President
Lyndon Johnson and then President Nixon. He authorized
his aides to offer them $1 million each in cash
to stop the testing. He thought he could bribe
the President of the United States to stop the
Cold War because his windows were rattling. When
you have never heard the word no for 40 years,
you start to believe everything has a price.
You completely lose touch with reality. Speaking
of the Cold War, this leads us to one of the
wildest chapters in this whole story. The CIA,
part six. This sounds like a Tom Clancy novel.
It really does. In 1968, a Soviet submarine,
the K -129, sank in the Pacific Ocean. It had
nuclear missiles and, more importantly, code
books on board. The CIA found it, but it was
three miles deep. Way too deep for any normal
salvage operation. Right. They needed a way to
build a massive one -of -a -kind salvage ship
and bring the sub up without the Russians knowing
what they were doing. So they need a cover story,
a plausible reason for a gigantic ship to be
sitting in the middle of the ocean doing something.
Exactly. And who is the only person on Earth?
crazy enough and rich enough to plausibly fund
a multi -billion dollar deep sea mining expedition
for manganese nodules, a resource that might
not even be valuable. Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes.
It was the perfect disguise. Oh, it's just Hughes
doing another weird project. Precisely. The CIA
built the ship, the Glomar Explorer. Hughes lent
his name to the project to give it legitimacy.
He wasn't actually running the operation, but
his reputation for eccentric, massive projects
provided the perfect cloak of invisibility. And
it worked. They actually recovered part of the
sub because the Russians bought the story. They
thought, it's just that crazy American billionaire
again. His insanity became a strategic asset
for national security. That is a profound way
to put it, yes. His madness was the perfect camouflage.
But while the CIA is using his name, the man
himself, he's fading. Part 7. The tragic decline.
We need to go into the dark room now. This is
the hard part. The OCD we saw with the blouse
memo in the 40s. By the late 60s and 70s, it
had completely consumed him. He was pathologically
terrified of germs. What did that look like day
to day? He had these incredibly elaborate rituals.
He would eat the same dinner every night. A specific
cut of steak, a salad, and peas. But he would
spend hours sorting the peas by size with a fork.
He wouldn't eat the large pea. Sorting peas for
hours. He also stored his urine in glass bottles
and jars, stacking them in his room. Why? It's
a hoarding compulsion. A fear of letting anything
of himself go, perhaps. Or simply the inability
to make the decision to dispose of it. And of
course, he stopped cutting his hair and fingernails.
And this wasn't just laziness. This goes back
to the crash, right? The pain. Yes. Medical experts
believe he suffered from allodynia, a condition
where normal touch, even light touch, causes
severe pain. This was likely nerve damage from
the crash and the burns. So cutting his fingernails
hurt. Wearing clothes hurt. So he just sat naked.
He sat naked, often in the dark, watching movies
on a loop. There was the famous screening room
incident in 1957, even before Vegas. He went
into a screening room and didn't come out for
four months. Four months. Eating only chocolate
and chicken, drinking only milk, and he was surrounded
by stacks of Kleenex boxes. The Kleenex boxes.
That's the iconic image. He used them to touch
things. Yes. Insulation. He wouldn't touch a
doorknob or a spoon without using a tissue as
a barrier. He was trying to insulate himself
from a world he viewed as dirty and dangerous.
Meanwhile, he was injecting codeine intramuscularly
all day. And because of the constant needle usage.
When they did the autopsy later, they found broken
hypodermic needles embedded in his arms. The
glass syringes would break or the needles would
snap off because his hands were shaking or his
vision was bad. He would just leave them there.
That is horrific. It's a level of self -neglect
that is hard to reconcile with the man who built
the constellation. And while he's in this state,
people start trying to take advantage of the
autobiography hoax. Clifford Irving. In 1972,
this author, Irving, claimed he was co -writing
Hughes's authorized autobiography. He produced
handwritten letters from Hughes. The publishing
world went nuts. Everyone believed it because
Hughes had been silent for so long. But Hughes
was listening. He was. And it forced him to break
his silence. He arranged a teleconference with
seven reporters he had known from the old days.
And they broadcast his voice. He denounced Irving.
He said, I don't know this man. It was a voice
from the void. It was the last time the public
really heard from him. And then? The end comes.
Part 8, April 5, 1976. He is on a Learjet, flying
from his penthouse in Acapulco to Houston for
medical treatment. He dies mid -flight. And the
description of his body, it's just heartbreaking.
It's tragic. He weighed 90 pounds. He was 6 '4".
He was completely unrecognizable. The FBI had
to use fingerprints from his pilot's license
application in the 1940s to officially identify
him because his face had changed so much from
malnutrition and neglect. And the cause of death.
Kidney failure. His body just gave up. In typical
Hughes, even his death was chaotic. No will.
He died intestate, which for a billionaire is
an absolute disaster. It triggered a circus.
Dozens of wills popped up. The most famous was
the Mormon will, which was found on a desk. in
an LDS church office. This is the one that left
money to the gas station attendant. Right. It
left millions to a gas station attendant named
Melvin Dumar, who claimed he once gave a hitchhiking
Howard Hughes a ride in the Nevada desert. Which
turned out to be a forgery. It was ruled a forgery,
yes. The estate was eventually split among 22
cousins he'd never met. But the real legacy,
and this is the ultimate irony, is the Howard
Hughes Medical Institute. HHI. They are huge
today. A giant in medical research. They are
a titan. But Hughes created the Institute in
1953 primarily as a tax shelter. He gave all
his Hughes Aircraft stock to the Institute to
avoid paying capital gains taxes on it. He parked
his money there to keep the government away.
So he did it to stiff the IRS. Yeah, he did.
But that tax shelter held onto the stock. And
when Hughes Aircraft was sold to General Motors
in 1985, the Institute got a check for $5 .2
billion. It instantly became the largest private
endowment for medical research in the world.
So the man who died of self -neglect with broken
needles in his arms, terrified of germs, inadvertently
funded the research that cures diseases and saves
millions of lives. That is the ultimate paradox
of Howard Hughes. So what does this all mean?
When we look at the drill bit, the planes, the
movies, the Kleenex boxes, what's the big takeaway
from this life? I think if we connect this to
the bigger picture, it's a story about control.
Howard Hughes spent his entire life trying to
control everything, the airflow over a wing,
the seams on a blouse, the skyline of Las Vegas.
But he completely and utterly lost control of
his own mind and his own body. It's like the
money from the drill bit removed all the guardrails,
all the feedback. Exactly. Most of us have boundaries.
We run out of money, or our friends intervene,
or we have to go to work in the morning. Hughes
had infinite resources. The drill bit money allowed
him to live without boundaries. And living without
boundaries ultimately meant there was no one
to stop his self -destruction. He could afford
to indulge every paranoia until it consumed him
entirely. It's a tragic lesson. Limitless freedom
can become the tightest prison. And here's a
final provocative thought for you to chew on.
Hughes died a recluse, seen by almost no one
for decades, a man who fled from the world. But
today, if you take a certain life -saving medication,
or if you benefit from a breakthrough in genetics,
there's a very good chance that the fundamental
research was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute. So was his greatest contribution to
humanity the one thing he did just to avoid paying
his taxes? That is something to think about.
From the spruce goose to the microscope. Thanks
for listening to this deep dive into the life
of Howard Hughes. We'll see you next time.