Turning Vision into Numbers Instantly

“work. In his mind’s eye he could see Monte Carlo awakening from the unnatural slumber and reverting to the glory of the past. One of his exciting visions was of a new outer harbor big enough to accom¬ modate the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth and attracting a big international cruising clientele. There was not a port in the Mediter¬ ranean capable of taking big passenger liners without subjecting them to the noise, smoke, and dirt of a commercial harbor, as in Genoa, Naples, Marseilles, or Barcelona. In Villefranche and Cannes the swell was so strong that it was impossible to embark or disembark pas¬ sengers during more than six hours at a time. Onassis visualized oceangoing liners coming in like yachts and staying while their pas¬ sengers flew on quick excursions to Paris, London, Rome, anywhere in Europe. It would put Monte Carlo among the great international harbors of the world and, he reckoned, attract two thousand visitors to Monaco every day. A man whose visions quickly solidify into hard figures, he worked out that even at twenty-five dollars a head a day, even without gambling, this represented a secure income of fifty thou¬ sand dollars a day. The project might require an investment of at least thirty million dollars but this was not an amount to deter Onassis.”

“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.”