Rolls-Royce

"In his mind’s eye he visualized a ship with a capacity of half a mil¬ lion cubic feet of grain, which might have cost one million dollars to build in 1919 or 1920, that is, ten years earlier. Now, in the year 1930, such a ship could be bought for thirty thousand dollars, al¬ though it had run less than half its life span. As an importer always concerned with storage, he calculated that it would cost six or seven times that amount—at least two hundred thousand dollars—to build an open-storage hangar, just a roof without walls, not counting the price of the land. A ten-year-old ship good for another decade would be a floating warehouse for the price of a Rolls-Royce. To Onassis, recalling his reasoning, it had a sound built-in safety factor. Even if his arithmetic proved faulty, nothing was lost, because at that time the ships could have been sold for scrap and would have fetched twice the amount invested."

"YOU started from nothing, you conquered everything you could dream of: you climbed to the top of the world in the sector you had entered as the last of the workers, you rang the bell at Wall Street, you bought Ray-Ban – all of Ray-Ban –, you're the richest man in Italy, you have a Rolls-Royce, a Ferrari, a yacht in Monte Carlo, a villa on the French Riviera, buildings across half of Europe, a charming villa in typical Caribbean style in Antigua, you have a new partner – the third –, you have a newborn child with her and another on the way, in addition to a child of not even ten years from your previous wife and three grown children who are living their lives. You are approaching your seventies."

"He spends his money "like all wealthy people. I have a villa on the French Riviera, a boat, an airplane to travel quickly," reports Repubblica. "And a Rolls-Royce, but I only drive it when I am on vacation in France: in seven years, it has only done 11,000 kilometers.""

"2. We must continue to be alert for scams and con artists. We must watch for unusual behavior by the people we work with. What is unusual behavior? Something subtle like somebody who drives a Rolls-Royce on a salary that can barely support roller skates."

"Stanley and Bea Tollman owned three hotels in Johannesburg: the Tollman Towers and the Rand International downtown, and the newly opened Tollman Airport Hotel. To complete the airport building, their finances had been severely stretched and they had filed for bankruptcy. (Not that anyone would have guessed this, as Stanley still drove around town in a new Rolls-Royce, always puffing on a Cuban cigar, and Bea’s finger sported one of the largest diamonds that Sol and I had ever seen.)"

"Then, Lockheed foolishly decided to return to the commercial aviation business. It announced that it would manufacture the Tri-Star, a three-engine commercial jet. Its partner would be Rolls-Royce, which agreed to develop a new type of engine for the plane. The timing of the venture was terrible; the oil embargo and the Vietnam War had wreaked financial havoc on the airline business. Rolls-Royce went bankrupt, and in the ensuing chaos it seemed inevitable that it would drag its Tri-Star partner down, too."

"Rayner notes drily that ‘private enterprise entrepreneurs were a scarce commodity in the national capital’, which was bulging with bureaucrats and their political masters. The tycoon who drove a Rolls-Royce but spoke Holden-ute English intrigued people. He was easy to meet and hard to categorise."