Tissue of truth

摘要

Unlike the steel and railroad barons of an earlier American era, Howard Hughes was a strictly 20th-century billionaire. He inherited some money-the fruits of the Hughes Drill Bit which was invented and patented by his father and became widely used in the oil industry-but his real money he made out of flying, the movies and Las Vegas, none of which existed, at least not as we know them, before 1900.rnHughes Aircraft, the aeroplane design business that grew out of his family company, expanded quickly after the second world war into military electronics. By the end of 1946, Hughes's personal fortune had risen to $520m. But it was the takeover of TWA that thrust him into the billionaire bracket, and then, because of his increasingly bizarre way of doing business, into the lunatic twilight of his later years.