Playboy Interview: Malcolm Forbes

Money is a burden

Some of us are willing to shoulder some burdens.

Money's fun

when you have some. Having none, ain't none.

There are more fakers

in business than in jail.

Samples from the little green book called "The Sayings of Chairman Malcolm." Dedicated, in all 13 pages of small type, to 2200 or so of his good friends, it will be a success even by Forbes's standards, he deadpans, if it sells as well as the other Chairman's sayings. The ones in the little red book.

That's typical of Malcolm Forbes, poking as much fun at himself as he does at others, and laughing all the way to the bank, but most of all refusing to feel guilty about his inherited fortune, which he used as the foundation to create a many-times-larger fortune. Malcolm Forbes is undoubtedly one of the wealthiest men in America. Asked how he did it, he replies: "Through sheer ability (spelled i-n-h-e-r-i-t-a-n-c-e.)"

Forbes's father began the business magazine that bears the family name in 1917, and Malcolm now serves as both editor in chief of Forbes magazine and president of Forbes, Inc. The magazine, with its circulation of 670,000--slightly ahead of Time, Inc.'s Fortune--is not a mass publication, but its audience of high-level business executives gives it an influence far beyond its sales figures. According to Forbes's statistics, the magazine's readers have an average net worth of over $550,000; one out of 13 is a millionaire; and altogether they own approximately 140 billion dollars' worth of corporate stocks. A reporter estimated two years ago that the magazine's profit may run in excess of $10,000,000 a year, and Forbes is the sole owner, as he is of all the other properties in the Forbes, Inc., empire. As he says, "Our annual stockholders' meeting tends to be brief."

In the inner circles of big business and Big Government, Forbes is well-known as one of America's most influential businessmen, and probably the most outspoken advocate and defender of the capitalist system. "Malcolm knows more corporation presidents than anybody else," says one of his aides. "Malcolm doesn't talk to vice-presidents."

That may be, but nobody has ever accused Forbes of being stuffy and taking himself too seriously. He has a reputation as an eccentric and flamboyant sportsman who loves fun even more than money. In 1973, only 15 months after he took his first ride in a balloon at the age of 52, Forbes sailed alone across the U.S., from Oregon to Chesapeake Bay. It took him 34 days and he was black-and-blue from head to toe from dozens of rough landings at about 25 m.p.h., but he set six world records for ballooning, won the Harmon Trophy and drew major press attention to ballooning for the first time.

Never satisfied with doing anything on a less-than-grand scale, he then began preparing for what he called "the ultimate trip." He spent more than $1,000,000 on space-age technology and created a spectacular 60-story-high cluster of 13 balloons designed to carry Forbes and a copilot, riding in an Apollolike capsule at a stratospheric altitude, nonstop across the United States and the Atlantic Ocean. But a near-fatal accident caused by a failure in the ground equipment just a few minutes before launch aborted Forbes's attempt to become the Charles Lindbergh of ballooning.

Forbes's other favorite hobby is equally unlikely for an establishment rich man: motorcycling. But a few years ago, when he took his first ride and fell in love with biking, he responded in characteristic fashion. He bought a small motorcycle shop so he could acquire his machines wholesale, then aggressively turned it into one of the largest distributorships on the East Coast. Every year, he manages to crowd into his schedule bike trips through different continents, and his friends shake their heads in bewilderment at the notion that Forbes will lunch in his private dining room at his office--surrounded by Van Gogh and Rubens--with someone such as David Rockefeller, then dash off to ride the hottest new bikes with his young motorcyclist friends.

Forbes sees no paradox in that. Whether it's business or pleasure, all he wants is the best of everything, and he gets it. He claims he's not "Rockefeller rich," but a quick list of just his most publicly visible holdings adds up to a sizable fortune by anybody's standards: Forbes magazine, his motorcycle distributorship, a 40-acre estate in New Jersey, 250 square miles of land in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Colorado, a 20,000-acre cattle ranch in Montana (managed by his wife, Roberta), a 117-foot yacht, a Christopher Wren mansion in London, a palace in Tangier, a 3000-acre island in the Fijis ("Why did I want an island in the South Pacific? Doesn't everybody?"), Zane Grey's old home in Tahiti, a multimillion-dollar collection of Victorian paintings and possibly the world's largest privately owned collections of Fabergé jewelry from czarist Russia. Asked once if he were a defender of the capitalist system, Forbes smiled and replied: "No. I'm a beneficiary."

To find out what the world looks like to such a jaunty centimillionaire, and to get his views on money and capitalism and ballooning and motorcycling, Playboy sent writer Larry DuBois to interview Forbes. His report:

"I rendezvoused with Forbes at the Hyatt Regency in Los Angeles, where he'd rented a ballroom for the evening and invited a couple of hundred of L.A.'s business leaders for dinner and a showing of a documentary film written and produced by two of Forbes's sons. The title of the film is 'Some Call It Greed,' and it turned out to be a slick, sophisticated paean to the capitalist history of America--primarily its triumphs, but acknowledging its failures. Not even Forbes can finesse the Great Depression.

"It was the 13th time in the past few months that Forbes had held this evening for the cream of the cream in big cities across the U.S., plugging, as he always does, Forbes magazine and the capitalist system at the same time. Almost immediately, I saw an example of his versatile personality. During dinner, he sat next to Roy Ash, cofounder of Litton Industries and Director of the Office of Management Budget during parts of the Nixon and Ford Administrations; but as soon as Forbes was free, he jumped up and found his friend, the young editor of Cycle magazine, and spent several minutes talking excitedly about motorcycles.

"He's a friendly, unpretentious man with an engaging sense of humor, especially about himself, and I began learning the next morning how he's been able to build his fortune and still have so much spare time for his hobbies: energy. The man is 59 and he's still hard to keep up with. After 18-hour days in Vancouver, San Francisco and Los Angeles, we were racing off to the airport at 6:30 A.M., and the moment he got settled in his seat, he pulled out his Wall Street Journal and began circling and clipping articles, leaning over his shoulder to discuss his reaction to the news with Jim Dunn, the publisher of Forbes magazine.

"As soon as he finished reading the paper, he said he wanted to start the interview. I turned on the tape recorder as the plane was taxiing and Forbes answered my questions nonstop until the plane touched down five-and-a-half hours later. I didn't even have time to notice my lunch. Reticent, Malcolm Forbes is not. Based on his principle of cramming everything he can into the time available to him, he wanted to do the whole interview in one sitting, get it over with and go on to the next project. It was an impressive performance, even though follow-up questions at a later date were required.

"The next morning, at 8:30, I arrived at the 79th Street Basin in Manhattan and boarded the Forbes yacht for a trip up the Hudson to the West Point football game, and there was Forbes, already lined up with his wife and two of his sons and a daughter-in-law, in a receiving line to greet their guests: the heads of 22 large corporations, their wives--and me. I had been asked to keep the yacht trip off the record, not because it involved anything sinister--I didn't hear a capitalist conspiracy all day--but out of respect for his guests' privacy.

"But I will say that it was a hell of a lot of fun being catered to in such high style--an exquisite luncheon on the way up, an exquisite dinner on the way back. Forbes had told me that he loved using his yacht for these football trips, because after spending 14 hours in such a relaxed environment with such a small group, you have a real feeling about almost everybody by the end of the day. And it was true. It was the perfect way for Forbes president Malcolm to sell the virtues of his magazine as an advertising medium, and at least one way for editor in chief Forbes to size up the corporate leaders he reports on.

"Tired but still buoyant at 10:30 that night, Forbes loaded his family and me into a big station wagon and we drove off to his estate in New Jersey. By now, I was ready to sleep in, but early the next morning Forbes woke me up to show me around the place. I could barely get out of bed.

"The landscape around his home is casually littered with balloon gondolas and one large garage is filled with the most beautiful motorcycles I'd ever seen. After the tour, we had a high-spirited family brunch, with some of the grand-children over to visit, and then Forbes was off again. Along with a 28-year-old friend who pilots his balloons and doubles as a security guard, we drove Forbes's little Honda Accord into Manhattan, where he dropped me off at a friend's apartment and then went straight to Kennedy Airport to take a flight to Casablanca. He was going to spend the next two weeks riding bikes through North Africa and Europe. Like his friends, when we said goodbye, I sort of had to shake my head in bewilderment, too, at this astonishing capitalist tool."

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about capitalism.

[A] Forbes: Great idea. One of my favorite subjects.

[Q] Playboy: We thought so, since you like to call your magazine a "Capitalist Tool."

[A] Forbes: That's our slogan. Karl Marx probably wouldn't appreciate my sense of humor, but he captured nicely the essence of my function and the function of the magazine. We are a capitalist tool. We are of use to people who want to succeed in a free-enterprise system. We praise success. We blow the whistle on failure. We are constantly needling. It sometimes makes us unpopular even with our own capitalist readers, particularly those who get poor report cards, but it's all based on the premise that if you're going to serve the system, you'd better be successful, and if you're not, somebody better tell on you before you lose your stockholders' money.

[Q] Playboy: It's been said that you probably know more chief executive officers--CEOs in Forbes terminology--of corporations than any other man in America. What's your impression of the quality of top management of American corporations today?

[A] Forbes: You'd expect that the president of a big company should be pretty outstanding, and overall, the caliber of CEOs is top-rate, but there are more mediocrities in top positions than you'd expect. True, they tend not to last long, but how they get there always amazes me.

[Q] Playboy: How do they get there?

[A] Forbes: There's always factionalism and politics in corporations, and very often, you see a CEO who's retiring pick a replacement who's been satisfactory to him and for him, but being a good second man is different from being a good top man. It's funny; sometimes the biggest failure of a CEO is in his choice of his successor. My father used to say that he never bought the stock of a company based on its balance sheet. He always bought management, based on his personal impression of the top man, the guy at the steering wheel. That's the reason I make it a point to know all these guys. If they're capable and have the qualities that fit the company and the era and the industry's needs at the moment, that's of far greater value to a potential investor than whatever reserves a company may have or how long it's been in business. It's easy to forget that the benefit or harm of decisions made today in corporations, particularly large corporations, may not be reaped for four or five years, so what you'd better know is the caliber of the man making those decisions now. Those are enormous chips they're playing with, and if they don't have the ability to make the right decisions now, the company is going to eventually get into trouble. You've seen that happen time and time again.

[Q] Playboy: In your opinion, how successful is the system as a whole these days?

[A] Forbes: The number of jobs is at an all-time high. The average income is the highest it's ever been. A greater percentage of Americans have an equity in this country than ever before--they have a piece of the action. There are more millionaires than ever before. For all its shortcomings, it's providing more freedom and well-being than any other system in history. It sure beats the hell out of the alternative, which is having an economy managed by the Government, producing things to meet the needs of the state, not the people. In short, I'd say that business is doing much better than its general image.

[Q] Playboy: And its general image isn't good, according to most public-opinion polls. Why?

[A] Forbes: I wish more top executives would stop hiding behind their PR departments and speak out publicly. We need more respected spokesmen for the free-enterprise system. The public and business suffer from chief executives' timidity. I mean, there are guys who'll knock in heads in board rooms, but they're afraid to make public statements that might become controversial.

[A] In any case, profits shouldn't be the sole measure of success. It's also making sure that not too many people are getting screwed by the system, and that people understand that the system as a whole is working for the benefit of the most people. I'm not suggesting they do that just to be nice to everybody but to be damned sure the system survives, and it doesn't help if everybody thinks he's getting the short end of the stick.

[Q] Playboy: Surely it's not just a matter of better public relations. Corruption in business also plays a part in the bad image corporations have. How do you react to the broad picture of overseas bribery by American corporations that has come out in the past few years?

[A] Forbes: I think one of the stupidest things we did was to attempt to legislate our morality about bribery abroad. All it's done is cost thousands of Americans jobs and add to the further imbalance of trade. In this country, we're used to paying salesmen's commissions. That's the way it's done. In the Arab countries and in Europe and in much of Asia particularly, you're not dealing with a sales organization. There's no middleman. You pay a commission to the fellow who orders your planes. The salesman is the buyer. He may happen to be the Minister of Aviation and he wants his commission on the sale. But for us to say that if you want to sell planes overseas you can't pay a dollar to a salesman there--who also happens to be the buyer--all we do is lose the order to the French, the Germans or the British, who can pay it. Of course, we don't want to encourage bribery, but for God's sake, when that is the way that countries do business--well, they have to buy their systems from somebody and it's stupid to say we can't pay the same commission that everybody else does. It takes us out of competition.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to be advocating an everybody-does-it approach. And so, based on the example of bribery in Congress by South Korea--Koreagate--wouldn't you guess that other countries are doing the same thing to our officials?

[A] Forbes: I think not. For a simple reason. They expect to get money from our Government, not contribute to the men who run it. They expect it to be handed to them. They don't have to bribe. All they have to do is have a stable government and they get handouts from us. Also, they're too small and too greedy.

[A] It was a damnfool thing for those Congressmen to take money from the Koreans, but Congressmen have to raise campaign money since we don't allot them election funds, which is foolish. Usually, they get money from construction companies and other direct beneficiaries. But at least here, bribery is a serious crime; in those other countries, it may or may not be, but that's the way business is done. When we say no to that, they'll take second best, and all we've done is cut our own throats.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think is the most serious problem facing American business today?

[A] Forbes: Inflation. No doubt about it.

[Q] Playboy: That's certainly what's on people's minds. Why are we suffering this inflation?

[A] Forbes: The cause of inflation is not some complicated piece of gobbledygook that nobody but an economist can understand. Very simply put: You have a Federal Government that for too many decades has spent more than it has taken in in taxes. So what does it do? It prints more dollars. If you print more dollars than you've earned, they become worth less, and that's what we've been doing. When Franklin D. Roosevelt started this Keynesian economic philosophy, Government debt and spending had a genuine and important purpose in bringing us out of the Depression. But here we are, with the economy for the past few years healthier than it's ever been, and the Government is still running record deficits. I don't think Carter understood for a long time the ramifications of that for the economy, and I was nearly ready to give up on him altogether. Fortunately, I think Carter has finally realized the importance of working toward a balanced Federal budget.

[Q] Playboy: Do you expect the devalued dollar to make a comeback?

[A] Forbes: To where it was, no. It will get to the point where it is no longer declining vis-à-vis other currencies, and in effect that will be coming back. But we will no longer lead the toboggan.

[Q] Playboy: What sort of report card would you give Carter at this point?

[A] Forbes: He hasn't failed yet. In the beginning, I was very supportive. We have only one President, and even though I'm a Republican, I couldn't have been happier than to see him successful. But he wasn't. He couldn't get any legislation passed. He couldn't get anything done. After a while, it looked as though he didn't understand who he was and what the Presidency was. I mean, a closed mind belongs in the pulpit, not the White House, and he had to open his mind. He found that hard to do because his values were absolute, as born-again Christians are apt to be. Well, a conviction of righteousness may sustain you as a person, but it won't do much for your Presidency if you carry it too far. He had to learn to settle for part of the loaf, rather than all or none, because there are a lot of guys a President needs, like House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who wants part of that loaf, too.

[A] By the time of the Camp David Summit, I'd become quite critical of Carter. But Camp David was his resurrection. He won't get all he wants--and his mediation efforts with Begin and Sadat may have been a near miss--but from his own new confidence, he's going to be more Presidential, and that will carry over into his efforts to fight inflation. They're going to have more teeth as a result of his new prestige. It's funny, just before Camp David I was ready to grade Carter as a failure. I wrote an editorial predicting that Teddy Kennedy would beat Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980, but I decided in a hurry after the Summit not to publish that. I thought Kennedy would beat the hell out of Ronald Reagan on Election Day, and then everybody in business, including myself, who had ridiculed Carter because he couldn't get things done, would suddenly be regretting a President who could get things done. They'd be yearning for the good old Carter days, when nothing happened. Kennedy would be a disastrously effective President.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean by disastrously effective?

[A] Forbes: I think Teddy Kennedy has a deep conviction that business is greedy, nefarious and undisciplined.

[Q] Playboy: All businessmen are sons of bitches?

[A] Forbes: That's what his brother J.F.K. said during his confrontation with the steel companies, and Teddy's the same way: Why, those sons of bitches! It's the kind of attitude that one so often finds in people who inherited a lot of money. They feel guilty about their inheritance, and you've got to remember that Joe Kennedy made much of his money in gambling, in liquor, in areas that kept him from gaining real social acceptance in the WASP world. The boys were of it, at Harvard and Palm Beach, but not yet in it, and there was always a Kennedy chip on the shoulder toward business, particularly big business. If he were in the White House, Teddy would probably succeed where Jack failed in passing punitive measures and taxes, and putting so many restrictions and regulations on the conduct of business that it would jeopardize the whole economy. I think he's a dangerous man. Not by intention; he's a warm human being and his sympathy forthe have-nots is real. But I don't think you accomplish their betterment by hamstringing business, and I do think Teddy Kennedy is motivated partly by some malice in his heart. Look at Hubert Humphrey, by contrast. A liberal, Hubert was popular with businessmen even though he wasn't espousing their cause. I had a good friendship with him, thought the world of him. He would have been a fabulous President. Sometimes he went overboard, but his knowledge, his enthusiasm, his genuineness were refreshing in somebody who aspired to the White House.

[Q] Playboy: Go on with your assessment of Carter.

[A] Forbes: Well, as I said earlier, I think in the aftermath of Camp David his efforts to fight inflation, for instance, are going to have more teeth.

[A] His veto of the defense bill--I thought that was a really smart move. Nobody's ever done it before. But look at that aircraft carrier--how stupid can you get, tying up two billion dollars in a carrier in the age of missiles? One missile could blow the whole damn thing out of the water. They say it's reasonably invulnerable. Sure it's invulnerable--against the Vietnamese. And carriers can be valuable in bringing our power into play in peripheral situations. But against the Russians, it's just a sitting duck, meaningless, a hostage to fortune. About as capable of withstanding a Russian attack as the Seventh Army in Europe. What that represents is a hostage--to overrun it means atomic war with the U.S. So Carter's vetoing of that bill was a good thing.

[A] It was the first glimmer of a gut-felt reaction, whereas before, he didn't know how to compromise. Either he gave in on everything or he tried to sweet-talk or cajole Congressmen. That works to a degree, but only when they realize you'll give them a left hook sometimes. There's a lot of power that he's beginning to learn how to use.

[Q] Playboy: How did you feel about his recognition of China?

[A] Forbes: I was most enthusiastic. It would have happened under Nixon if he hadn't been Watergated. For us to pretend that Taiwan was China is the kind of absurdity we kept up longer with China than with Red Russia after the 1917 Revolution. Pretending that they weren't there wasn't going to make their government go away.

[Q] Playboy: What's your personal relationship with Carter like?

[A] Forbes: Well, he's the only President who ever came to call on us at the office. Obviously, it was long before he was President. Because I'm an old friend of Paul Austin's, the head of Coca-Cola, I was asked if I'd see this ex-governor of Georgia who was running for President. My son Steve and I follow politics closely. He'll inherit 51 percent of the stock and he'll be running the business. Well, he loves politics. He can tell you what I lost each county by in every election. He's a historian of some merit and one of the best economists on our staff. Carter came to see us in November, a few months before New Hampshire. He came with Jody Powell, whose name meant nothing to me then, and a fellow from Wall Street. We agreed to see him, but can you imagine? An ex-governor of Georgia taking himself seriously as a Presidential candidate? It was absurd. I had no editors in to meet him. We didn't take his picture sitting in my office. Everybody and his brother signs my guestbook, and I didn't even have him sign the guest-book, for crying out loud, and I have a big collection of Presidential autographs and letters. So now he's the sitting President and I don't have any autographs, any pictures, anything. I can't imagine the IRS questioning whether he's a deductible visitor. Anyway, he gave us his blueprint, and when he left the office, I said to my son, "Isn't it amazing how a man can delude himself? That's sad, because the guy is sincere and passionate." I warned my son that that was what can happen to you when you become obsessed by politics. I thought it was the perfect example of sincerity and futility marching hand in hand. So my personal relations with him--well, we didn't even get his picture or his autograph.

[Q] Playboy: How about your political ambitions? Having run for the office of governor of New Jersey in 1957 and lost, did you ever aspire to Presidential politics?

[A] Forbes: Let's just say I ran for governor, and if you scratch any governor, you've got a President. Hell, I'm glad I lost. Nothing could get me back into politics. As Carter and every President before him discovered, you can't do what you want to do and you spend 80 percent of your time kissing ass, placating people, listening to opinions, many of which have little value. It's so much more enjoyable to be giving advice than to be taking it.

[Q] Playboy: Whom would you advise the Republicans to run for President in 1980?

[A] Forbes: I don't know. Let's put it this way. I'm not now convinced that Carter is a disaster and that any Republican would be better. In other words, I see hope for Mr. Carter doing the right thing. To me, his Camp David accomplishments cannot be exaggerated and I'm impressed with the way he finally bit the bullet on curbing inflation. If he ends up spending less and brings in a budget that is foreseeably in balance, I think the man may offer far more than some Republican candidates might. Time and again, I've found it hard to swallow a Republican candidate, and in the privacy of the voting booth, I didn't always do it. The majority of people lean to the Democratic Party because it is a party of greater awareness and greater conscience, and the voice of the Republican Party is often the voice of reaction.

[Q] Playboy: Do you by any chance have in mind Ronald Reagan?

[A] Forbes: Depending on how Mr. Reagan defines himself, he may not be the best answer for the country. And I'll tell you that I thought Goldwater's nomination was bad. I thought he was out of step with the times and his election would not have been good for the country. The Republican label is endangered, in my judgment, because often the people who call themselves conservatives are merely using a polite description for reactionary.

[Q] Playboy: How would you label yourself politically?

[A] Forbes: An intelligent conservative, but in the normal sense of the nomenclature, I suppose that would make me a liberal. On social issues, for instance, I think that not legalizing abortion is an abortion. To outlaw that strikes me as a really arrogant political presumption. I can respect the beliefs of those for whom it's a religious conviction, but it doesn't have a place in law. It has a place in conscience. That's a decision for people to make out of personal conviction, not legal necessity. In terms of the Government and the economy, I simply think that the way you conserve what you value is to anticipate change, and if you're not in the vanguard, at least be flexible and open to the nuances. You don't preserve by dropping roadblocks in the path of change. So that's a long-winded definition of what I mean by liberal, which is really intelligent conservatism.

[Q] Playboy: Teddy Kennedy would label himself a liberal, too, yet you fear his approach.

[A] Forbes: A lot of the costly things he advocates are desirable goals. But he would have us do vastly more good things than we can afford to do right now--that's what got us into this inflationary jam we're having right now. His national health-insurance program is an appealing idea until you weigh the costs against the benefits. And the $20,000-a-year wage earner is realizing that he wants to give the Government less, and get less from the Government. Kennedy's health-insurance program, as well as being an administrative mess, would be leading us in exactly the opposite direction.

[Q] Playboy: But in theory, the poor would certainly benefit.

[A] Forbes: That's only in theory, to begin with, and I'm not advocating that the poor be ignored. Kennedy wants to help the poor and so do I, but I don't think making them even more dependent on Government largess and inefficiency is the way to go about it. My concern for the poor is as real as anybody's, if not more so, because when you have so much of this world's goodies and have been blessed with so much of the best that this life has to offer, if you're worth a damn, you'll have heightened awareness of those who don't have it so good. But fortunately, those numbers are getting smaller in this country. The percentage isn't anywhere near as large as it was in Franklin Roosevelt's day, when there literally was an ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed one third of the nation. The system has responded to that, and even though the problems are still real and crying ones in urban areas and among blacks and chicanos and Puerto Ricans, the fact is that today in America, there are more people earning and spending money, and more goods and services available than ever before. The free-enterprise system basically works. And I don't think you accomplish the betterment of those who are not yet sharing in its rewards by crippling the system either by overtaxation or by over-regulation of every move a business makes.

[A] I think the overwhelming majority of people are coming to that same conclusion. They may disdain business, but they recognize that government is the problem. The threat is not the corporate guy; the threat is a government that leaves no income, that hamstrings our productive capacity by taxing away the incentive to develop it even more fully. There's a revolt in this country against government spending, symbolized by what happened with Proposition 13 in California. People don't want to pay as much tax, that's all there is to it.

[Q] Playboy: Still, while most people may feel they are getting screwed by taxes, they also feel that wealthy people and large corporations can manipulate the tax laws--and benefit by them.

[A] Forbes: It's not a matter of manipulating the tax laws. It isn't evasion of taxes by the rich. It's that the rich can minimize their taxes by doing things they shouldn't be discouraged from doing, even though it results in their paying, on a huge income, proportionately far less tax than what somebody pays on $20,000 a year. But that isn't a result of machination or iniquity. There are sound social reasons for the deductions available to the wealthy, and let's face it: Who the hell wants to pay more taxes than he has to? Only an ass. If you have money, you can give it away, for instance, to socially worthwhile causes, instead of having the government take it. You wouldn't want to change the law on that, would you?

[Q] Playboy: Charitable contributions weren't what we meant. We were referring to that feeling among the public that Carter captured in his attacks on the deductible "three-martini lunch."

[A] Forbes: There's a social purpose behind any deductible expense. It furthers the purpose of the business. To knock out deductions that help a business grow is just grabbing the short-term buck, and nobody could succeed in business very long grabbing the short-term buck the way the IRS would like to. It's a dumb approach. They say, "Gee, if you couldn't deduct this and that, you'd pay more taxes." Sure, but your business might be half as big next year and everybody's worse off.

[A] Don't ever think the IRS is out to make it easy on the rich. It's my experience that those guys are out to get you for every nickel they can. They go over my returns every year with a fine-tooth comb. It's a constant battle in big business, even small business, and it's reached the point where the amount of time spent in figuring out how to best structure your business, given the complexity of the tax laws, is probably greater than that spent in conducting basic business.

[A] When the decisions made in a big company employing tens of thousands of people and involving the investment of huge amounts of capital are all related to the tax laws, then it's almost self-defeating. It warps the whole economy. That's why the reduction in capital-gains taxes was a good thing. Congress understood something that Mr. Carter didn't, which is that this wasn't strictly a rich man's ploy.

[Q] Playboy: Would you agree, though, that most of the benefits certainly accrue to the rich, since they're the ones with the capital earnings now being taxed at a lower rate?

[A] Forbes: Substantial benefits will accrue to the rich and to those with the money to invest even if they are not really wealthy. But under the old law, people stopped selling something in which they had a profit coming because the tax was so high. That was warping the economy and knocking out some of our entrepreneurial drive. So it's true that people of means get the most benefits. But the impetus to reduce the capital-gains tax came from middle-class groups--older people with small portfolios, home sellers--discovering their profit was taxed as normal income. A lot of smaller people wanted the law changed so that they could receive a return commensurate with the extra risk involved in their investments, rather than leaving their money sitting in banks. In short, the rich have very little clout on a popular issue in Congress, and Congress passed this despite the President's flag-waving about the bill benefiting only the rich. And the reason Congress did that is because it discovered that the bulk of its constituents wanted it that way.

[Q] Playboy: The IRS statistics say that the majority of wealth in this country is controlled by about two percent of the population. Just as a matter of simple economic efficiency, don't you feel the wealth in this capitalist system is too concentrated?

[A] Forbes: That's totally asinine. It was more concentrated back when you had a few men controlling the big outfits like U.S.Steel. Jesus! Who owns all the stocks in this country? Pension funds are the biggest stock-owning institutions. The concentration is not in the hands of individuals today; it's in the hands of institutions. It's nothing like it was at the turn of the century, when you had a few rich people, and through them interlocking boards of directors and a few key industrial concerns, such as the J. P. Morgan firm.

[Q] Playboy: The wealth may be in the hands of institutions, but that doesn't answer the question about undue concentration of wealth.

[A] Forbes: Insurance companies and trustees of pension funds and the like--these people control the bulk of stocks, but they're not allowed to control the companies they invest in. They are only allowed to concern themselves with the soundness of the investment itself, and most of these trustees are not rich. They're high-salaried but not wealthy in the old turn-of-the-century sense. It isn't their money involved. It's the money of millions of others.

[Q] Playboy: But the Rockefellers, the Du Ponts, the Mellons, the Hunts--you take a half-dozen families like that and wouldn't you guess that they own or control many, many billions in assets?

[A] Forbes: That's no longer true. Those very families you've named no longer control a significant or appreciable percentage of the nation's wealth. The foundations and special funds they set up to avoid confiscatory taxes changed all that. For instance, these foundations can no longer hold substantial equity in the stock of the company they were founded with. Under law, they have to decontrol. Take David and Nelson Rockefeller: Their prestige vastly, vastly exceeds any direct control that they or all the Rockefellers have. David may have more control than other wealthy people because he's the head of a major bank. But he doesn't get to go into the trustee department and tell them to buy and sell this and that. Most of the families you mentioned are not interlocked, not interrelated. They are often preying on one another when it comes to investments and control of companies. Remember, those families have now passed through two or three generations of inheritance taxes, and the only way any really big hunks of their money have survived is through trusts and foundations, and those are rigorously controlled by the Federal Government. Henry Ford is a perfect example. He doesn't even agree with the direction of the Ford Foundation, but he can't do anything about it. In short, this whole idea is a tribute more to a myth than to the facts.

[Q] Playboy: The image of capitalism, as ambivalent as it is today, has at least softened somewhat by comparison with what young people were saying about it in the Sixties. Why?

[A] Forbes: During the Twenties, when everybody, including the shoeshine boys, was making money in the stock market, businessmen were seen as magicians. Before that, when they were "robber barons," everybody was in awe of them. What they accomplished. Senators were elected by legislators in many states, and they could buy seats for their favorites.

[Q] Playboy: The best government money could buy.

[A] Forbes: Right. Businessmen had the power. Then in 1929, all that collapsed because businessmen were largely blamed for unemployment, for the factories closing, for the policies--such as economic isolation--that contributed to the Depression. Businessmen never recovered from that plunge. During World War Two, our productive accomplishments gave them a new status, particularly when the production men were the heads of companies because they could organize the line that produced 7000 airplanes a month. So businessmen's reputations were somewhat rehabilitated. But then, during the late Forties and Fifties, there was a lot of sleight of hand that went on in the business world. Instead of the expected recession, there was growth, and the feeling that a businessman was, by definition, an exploiter grew, too. Profit was seen as something wrung from the sweat of workers. This sort of thing has been a prevailing philosophy of many people, especially those who teach. In the academic world, there was a great degree of mutual disrespect. A businessman was a grubby exploiter; the academician was the one who couldn't earn a living, so he taught.

[A] True to some degree in both cases, but what's changed in the past few years is that more people are going to college, and with the growth of Federal education programs that made possible these new colleges, the administrators and professors suddenly discovered what businessmen had been talking about with regard to Government overregulation and interference. Academics suddenly discovered the merits of free enterprise, as it pertained to education. With this vast funding, Princeton could have its cyclotrons and Harvard could have a new department and city colleges could have scholarship funds. But it wasn't long before some bureaucrat came along, saying, "Now, do you have equal facilities? Are you discriminating against blacks? What's your minority mix?" All legitimate questions, but putting your subsidy program in danger unless you spend your energy worrying about this and that and every other thing. Strings follow money. And there's nothing like curbing a department head's freedom to make decisions to suddenly turn him into an advocate of free enterprise. Lots of guys moved right-ward on the spectrum after that happened.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to be suggesting it may almost be chic for young businessmen to quote General Motors president Charles Wilson, who once said, "What's right for General Motors is right for the country."

[A] Forbes: Engine Charley was right; he just should have reversed the sequence. But now people understand better what he was trying to say. This great mass of professors, instead of deploring the obvious shortcomings and injustices of the system--and those are a percent of the whole--discovered the alternative, which has to be Government supervision, redistribution of wealth, socialism. I don't mean socialism as a generic condemnation. It isn't. There are some things that are properly public-owned. The Postal Service is a bad example, but the Government supposedly has to take the mails to the rural areas.

[A] But more education gave people more faculties to dispute a professor's ideas. That helped. And the biggest single thing that happened is that a greater percentage of Americans do have an equity in the country now. They have a piece of the action. The average income in this country is higher than it ever was. The number at the poverty level is smaller than it ever was. The number of jobs is greater than it ever was. The number of millionaires is greater than ever before. And there's been publicity given to new overnight millionaires by such publications as Playboy, writing up the successful young guys, even the rock stars who are making more money than the president of Ajax Corporation ever did. What is it? It's free enterprise. It's incentive. It's reward. It's fun. It's exciting. So every kid has a chance. He doesn't have to be interested in business. He doesn't have to want to step on all the feet and climb up the ladder to the top of a corporation. He couldn't care less. But Jesus, he does like the idea that the music he's listening to has made guys rich. He's turned on by freedoms as never before. And he's aware of his power and the importance of his freedom. The threat to him is not the corporate guy he deplores. The threat is a Government that leaves him no income, or says 80 percent of America has to be a public park and nobody can motorcycle in 79 percent of those parks. Jesus, this is his lifestyle they're talking about.

[Q] Playboy: And your lifestyle, too. Although you don't fit most people's image of a devoted biker.

[A] Forbes: I wasn't until I was 50. It happened just by coincidence. One of the guys who worked for me, a chauffeur, a neat guy, wanted to buy a motorcycle and asked if he could borrow the money from me. Well, I told him what most people would have told him, that motorcycling is dangerous and foolish and that he shouldn't do it. Being a sensible man, I tried to talk him out of it. But he went ahead and bought one anyway and he gave me a ride one day, and the next thing I knew, I was buying so many motorcycles for myself and my sons, I decided I'd better find a way to get them wholesale. So I bought a shop in New Jersey and, as well as saving me money on my own bikes, it's become a sizable distributorship. So now I've got the best of both worlds. I sell them and I ride them. I love motorcycles.

[Q] Playboy: What is it you love about them?

[A] Forbes: Traveling on a bike is invariably a delight. I love the exposure to the elements, being part of them instead of boxed off from them, the way you are in a car. It heightens every one of your senses. Your vision is better. Your concentration is better. You're taking more in every moment. It's terrifically invigorating. Your mind is working on a different beam--all your awarenesses are heightened in a way they aren't in an office, at the desk, on the job. You're like somebody skiing down a slope: totally turned on. I've done some of my best thinking on a motorcycle. The one problem, I've discovered, is that it's rather difficult to jot down your thoughts on a note pad at 70 miles an hour, so the terrific new ideas you get are usually gone with the wind by the time you stop, but some of them stay. The people who work for me know they'll be flooded with memos and queries about my brain storms--or brainless storms, as some of them would say--from my bike trips.

[Q] Playboy: How many miles did you cover on your last bike trip?

[A] Forbes: Just about a thousand. I had two of my favorite bikes stored at my place in Tangier, and I wanted them moved up to my office in Munich for a trip I'm planning this spring, and I decided I'd just take a friend and move them on up ourselves. So we flew to Casablanca, picked up the bikes in Tangier and rode across Morocco and through Algeria. I especially wanted to drive through Algeria because I'd never been there before, and it's a fascinating country, not connected to the Western world and not friendly with its neighbors. It's like they're suspended in time between what they have been and what they want to become. You get a greater sense of poverty there than in the rest of North Africa, because Algeria, having gone through a long and bloody revolution to get its independence and having a government that is virtually Communist, has less trade with the rest of the world. The shops are threadbare, with little in them other than necessities. There are very little of the luxury items we tend to take for granted. As in the Iron Curtain countries, production isn't things for people; it's things for the state.

[Q] Playboy: How did people react to a rich American motorcyclist?

[A] Forbes: There don't happen to be many Forbes magazine subscribers in Algeria, so my name doesn't mean anything. The reaction I got was to being an American, not to which American I am, and their premise was that all Americans are suspect capitalists. Fortunately, most of us are. We're accused of being what we're happy to be. But the people were exceptionally friendly anyway. The bikes were a big turn-on for them because they're big street bikes, and that's a sight they rarely see. What motorcycles they do have there tend to be of low c.c.s.

[Q] Playboy: What were you riding?

[A] Forbes: I had a big nifty black Harley--without saddlebags--running 1200 c.c.s, a real hog. But cool. Mag wheels, all the latest.

[Q] Playboy: What do those bikes cost?

[A] Forbes: Oh, I've got bikes that run up-wards of $12,000.

[Q] Playboy: To most people, that would seem like a lot of money for a motorcycle.

[A] Forbes: It is. But it's not just rich old goats like myself who have those wonderful machines. People who are into bikes are like people who are into rock music. They may not have much else, but they'll have the top-of-the-line speakers, even if it means laying out a month's wages. They'll pay anything they can get their hands on for tickets to the best concerts. So the top-of-the-line bikes are bought, just as often as not, by people whose incomes are small, but this is their dream and their determination, and if you're determined to get something, you do. You just pay the price.

[Q] Playboy: How fast do you travel?

[A] Forbes: On the Harley, when you get over about 70, the magic fingers start beating you to pieces. It just vibrates like hell. At the end of the day, you're not about ready to put a quarter in the hotel bed to get some shakes. You've been shaking all day. So as a practical matter, I had the Harley ceiling on me this last trip--just hanging on over 70, the vibes were such that I didn't stay there long. But on the Gold Wing, which was the other bike we had, you can occasionally go in bursts of 110, 115 miles an hour. There's no speed law in Germany and not much of one anywhere else in Europe, so it's legal, it's tempting and you do it from time to time.

[Q] Playboy: We heard you hit 130 once.

[A] Forbes: That was on the Van Veen, the new twin rotary bike from Germany. I got it last summer and my son and I took it out on its first run with Cook Neilson, the editor of Cycle magazine, and I wanted to see what its limits were. Well, I got to the bottom of me before I got to the top of the bike, because when I finally worked up the courage to look down at the speedometer and saw what it said, I started getting nervous. And when that happens, you begin to think of little things like blowouts, and you begin to think that this is damned foolishness. Which, of course, it is. At that speed, being careful doesn't do any good. If you have a blowout, you've had it. I didn't stay at 130 very long and I'll promise you and my insurance people right here and now that I'll never do it again.

[Q] Playboy: Your motorcycling and ballooning have given you something of a reputation of a daredevil who likes to flirt with danger. Why do you do it?

[A] Forbes: For the sense of the challenge and for the enjoyment. I'm not seeking danger. Sure, it exists, but you minimize it as much as possible, and that's not hard to do. Some people say I must have a death wish, doing these crazy things, but I don't. I'll be the saddest man at my funeral. The last thing I want to do is die; the next time around I can't possibly have it as good as I do this time, so what the hell would I want to check out for? I've got the best this world has to offer. I have no interest in leaving it. I'd never make a good racing-car driver because high speed per se isn't even a source of great satisfaction to me. I don't get that big a kick out of it, except, I'll admit, that it is fun to say, "Gee, I did once go...that fast." But not for any length of time. It's just an occasional temptation. You look down that open road. There's virtually no traffic. You're trying to cover a long distance. You're exhilarated. And you just find that speedometer creeping up and up. Speed grows on you.

[Q] Playboy: That's ironic, because your other main hobby is one of the slowest forms of transportation known to man--balloons.

[A] Forbes: The ballooning happened by coincidence, too. I just happened to read in the local newspaper where I live in New Jersey that there was a fellow offering balloon rides for a price. I had never seen a balloon or been in one, but it sounded like fun and it was right on the way to work, so one morning when we were driving in, I asked my chauffeur if he'd like to stop for an hour and go for a balloon ride. He said that sounded like a good idea, so we floated around the countryside for an hour and I was in the office by 8:30.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you do it?

[A] Forbes: It was en route, it wasn't going to interfere with the day's activities and it sounded intriguing. I just wanted the experience. I wanted to see if I liked it. Vaguely, I thought it sounded like something I might be interested in pursuing, but only vaguely.

[Q] Playboy: How did you react to your first balloon ride?

[A] Forbes: It was such a novel experience, a kind of Peter Pan thing. It's so different from flying; it's not flying. You're right in the wind and the air and the clouds--all those forces in nature that come together and have an impact on you and the balloon. You're floating and you're never sure where you're going. In a plane, you gun the engine and flip your flippers and you go up or down and right or left, and it's an immediate response. In a balloon, your sole source of power is a blast of heat, and there's a 15-second interval between the blast and when the heat reaches the top of the balloon and you float up. If you stop to think about it, it's like driving a car that doesn't accelerate until 15 seconds after you hit the gas. Try that sometime. Getting the feeling of the timing in a balloon is one of the extraordinary challenges, and one that captivated me that first day.

[A] You have absolutely no control over your direction. As the wind goes, so go you. It's a unique feeling, combined with the fact that you're seeing a view of the landscape floating slowly beneath you that is different from any view you've ever seen. The whole thing is such a huge turn-on that I have not, with rare exceptions, found anybody who's done it who doesn't love it. You can float just above the treetops, everybody waves at you and yells up, wanting to know where you're going. Well, you don't know where you're going, and even that's an unusual sensation in itself.

[A] On a motorcycle, you sense that not everybody is happy to see you and your mode of transportation going by, but a balloon turns everybody on, with no exceptions. It's a happy thing. People on the ground enjoy seeing this beautiful, unusual thing floating by. What is it? The fact is, it makes no sense. It isn't something to go anyplace in. You get in it and go no place in particular. With a balloon, getting there isn't half the fun; it's all the fun. The trip is the whole trip. The vehicle itself is the thing, the end in itself, not the means of getting somewhere. And all those sensations happen to you the first time you're in one.

[Q] Playboy: Less than a year and a half after your first balloon ride, you set six world records in your cross-country flight. Obviously, you plunged into it.

[A] Forbes: Sure. Once I got into it, I wanted to do the things that hadn't been done. It wasn't just competitive zest. I thought that if you're going to do it at all, you might as well mobilize your resources and have more fun doing what nobody else has done. To keep flying day in and day out you have to have a lot of ground support. You don't know where you're going to land. You fly until you're out of fuel, then you have to have trucks that can get to you. I was dropping tanks to reduce weight--they weigh 20 pounds even empty--and somebody had to retrieve those with a helicopter. Amazing lot of logistics. People can do it on a less expensive scale, but it's harder and takes longer. And what we were doing was taking off from where we landed. That hadn't been done before. You can say you're going to go from West to East, but you can't say you're going from Milwaukee to St. Louis. You can't pick your towns.

[Q] Playboy: How did your family react to what you were doing?

[A] Forbes: Enthusiastically. It was an exciting adventure and everybody was in on putting the logistics together. Two of my boys filmed it. A guy named Tracy Barnes had gone cross-country over the period of a year, but it really hadn't been done as a consecutive trip. It was pioneering. I decided it would be fun to try doing it and had the balloon built. The thing got a lot of press coverage because it excited people, and it was the kind of thing where day by day you could follow the progress, or the lack of it, and it did a whole lot to make people aware of the sport.

[A] Wherever we were, large crowds would come out of the bushes and watch us land, or watch us launch. The most dramatic moment just happened to be when Jack Perkins from NBC News was there and they put it on TV. He was interviewing me at the midway point in some little town in Nebraska. My God, the kids came in their school buses, the whole town came out to watch us launch. We were behind some trees in a field and heating to take off. I'd forgotten a very simple thing: When the wind is rushing over a barrier--such as trees--it creates a false lift, so the balloon would lift before it's hot enough to go, and you're supposed to know that. I passed the question on the exam, but not in the field. I was launching from behind some trees, so we had this lift, saying goodbye to everybody as we rose up so gracefully; then we got up in the cold wind and we weren't hot enough and it began coming down. And all this was recorded by NBC. We smashed into one car, bounced, smashed into another car and destroyed five automobiles before we finally lifted off. So Perkins ended up the commentary by saying, "And here are five people who are going to have to tell their insurance companies their cars were smashed by a hit-and-run balloon." God, it was funny and it happened to be captured on film. All this sort of stuff brought a lot of publicity to ballooning. It created a lot of awareness and increased interest in the sport and the drama of it. I got the Harmon Trophy and all these awards that were not in any sense deserved on the merits or the significance; it's just that balloons are such a turn-on.

[Q] Playboy: Your next big adventure was your project to float across the Atlantic. You put $1,200,000 into your equipment, didn't you?

[A] Forbes: Yeah. The key to making it across the Atlantic, as far as I was concerned, was to get above the weather, which was what aborted all the earlier attempts. We built a cluster of 13 balloons, sealed and pressurized, and a space capsule not unlike what the astronauts had, and we were going to climb straight to 40,000 feet and get into the jet stream, which at certain times of the year is narrow, swift and intensely reliable. It blows. And it blows where you want it to go. The jet stream really moves. I mean, it would have been a trip to end all trips. And it was all going to be up there in the stratosphere. We could have made it from California to the East Coast in two days and across the Atlantic in another two or three days, and I'll tell you something I haven't said before. I didn't even tell my copilot, Tom Heinsheimer, because I thought he might have different thoughts on the subject, but once we got over France, if all the systems were functioning properly, I was ready to just keep on going, all the way around the world, if possible. What the hell's the point of coming down if you don't have to? I had this great fantasy of the meetings in the Kremlin when we got over Russia. There would be this capitalist-tool balloon floating over, and they'd have to decide whether or not to shoot us down. Then I ended up making the shortest voyage of all the attempted ocean crossings: about 20 feet. I should have known I was in trouble when I read my horoscope that morning. It said, "Find cheaper and faster forms of transportation."

[Q] Playboy: Obviously, you can laugh about it now, but the accident at your launch that aborted the flight almost killed you. What happened?

[A] Forbes: It's the old thing about for want of a shoe nail. The whole launch scene was spectacular. It was the middle of the night at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in California and the 13 balloons filled this immense hangar. The hangar was ringed with powerful searchlights, and the doors slid open and a crew of volunteers, including two of my sons, began rolling out the balloons in clusters of three. Each cluster was attached to a separate launching platform and had its own release mechanism holding the balloons down and preventing the balloons that had already been launched from jerking everything else up at once. Seven balloons were already in the air and the ring that held down the third cluster couldn't take the pressure and it broke, and that cluster suddenly jumped up with this incredible premature lift, and the jerk ripped our gondola off its launching platform and started dragging it across the tarmac. Another few moments and the liquid-oxygen tanks would have ruptured and we'd have gone up in flames. We'd have made a trip, but it wouldn't have been in a balloon. Thank God, our launch director had the presence of mind to act immediately, and he jumped on the side of the gondola and pulled the emergency release switch, and we rolled a few feet and stopped and the balloons shot off into the sky. They came down sometime later in the desert. Without the weight of the capsule, when they hit 40,000 feet they just kept on climbing until they burst and fell. The whole thing was fantastic, and to have the denouement to be dragged 20 feet across some cement was a heartbreaker. Unparalleled. It happened ten minutes before launch time. Another ten minutes and we'd have been on our way to one of the most totally spectacular trips in history. I really did think we might go around the world. That was one of the biggest disappointments of my life.

[Q] Playboy: Will you ever try it again?

[A] Forbes: What's the point now? It's already been done. The guys from New Mexico made the trip and who wants to be second? Besides, I can't try it again. I had hoped to make a second attempt once I was out of owning and running my business, but now, my life-insurance policies all have a clause in them saying they are inoperable if I die ballooning across any large bodies of water, and the company carries many millions of dollars of insurance on my life so they can pay the inheritance taxes on my estate. The insurance people decided that the risks of ballooning across the Atlantic contradict the longevity tables they use for insuring such high amounts.

[Q] Playboy: That brings us to the obvious question. With your magazine, and all your land, and your fishing camp, and your Moroccan palace, and your English mansion, and your French château, and your American estate, and your Fabergé collection, and your art, and your motorcycles, and your balloons, and your stock portfolio, and your money, and everything else, what does it all add up to? How much are you worth?

[A] Forbes: Plenty! And happily, more so almost every day. I assume, of course, that you're asking about money, not intrinsic value as a person.

[Q] Playboy: Yes.

[A] Forbes: Good. Because that's a whole different thing and I suspect that the definitive reaction to the latter is: very little. [Laughs] But I really don't want to be on the record saying that I'm worth some far-out amount because I assure you that the people who collect death taxes will read this article and stick it into their dossiers. So if I claim that I'm worth some-odd hundreds of millions of dollars, then they'll come around later and want to know why my estate lawyers claim that I died practically penniless. [Laughs] It would leave me with what you might call a credibility gap. Up until the day Howard Hughes died, he was worth billions of dollars, and then everybody was astonished when Merrill Lynch and the executors came in and said his estate was worth less than $200,000,000. You could say the executors and the estate-tax people were approaching their estimates from two different points of view.

[Q] Playboy: Let's try that question another way. If there were no such thing as estate taxes, how much would you be worth?

[A] Forbes: I can honestly say I don't know. How do you place a value on Forbes magazine? There are so many different ways you could measure just that one asset. Ten times earnings? One or two times gross sales? At best, those are crude yardsticks. As for my land: We sold 30 percent of the land we own in Colorado and that's $50,000,000 worth as it turned out. But from that you can't say that the rest of it, therefore, must be worth a quarter of a billion, or that all the other land I own must be worth that much an acre. There's no way to place a value on all these things. All I can say is: Thank the Lord, I'm solvent!

[Q] Playboy: You sure are. But it sounds as if you could reasonably say that the rest of the land in Colorado must be worth about a quarter of a billion.

[A] Forbes: But so often it depends on what you do with what you have as to what you're worth. At least as far as money is concerned. When we bought that land in Colorado, I planned to turn it into a game preserve that would have been the greatest game preserve in the U.S. So its value in money terms would have been negligible. The university people, the game-commission people in Colorado were very enthusiastic. I ordered a million dollars' worth of fencing, but then the state attorney general ruled that the game on the land belonged to everybody, and that the only way we could do it would be to drive all the game off the property first, then stock it with our own. After a long and terribly disappointing struggle, we finally gave up and went into the real-estate business, selling the land in subdivisions. So it was a result of not being able to do what I set out to do, and being forced to do something else, that the land became worth many millions of dollars in sales.

[Q] Playboy: The attorney general forced you into all that profit, eh?

[A] Forbes: [Laughs] I really should have cut him in for a commission, I guess. I should beatify him. At the time, I just wanted to beat him. But you see the complications in trying to evaluate my worth, and besides, its hardly the most important measurement. It happens to be one that Americans are fascinated by: How much money does this guy have? We're a money-oriented nation. The idea used to be that if you've got bread, you must be good. But I think we've gotten over that silly notion. We know that a lot of bums get bread, and there are many nefarious means of getting it. Money doesn't make the man.

[Q] Playboy: It helps.

[A] Forbes: No question. Money is independence.

[Q] Playboy: You remember what Fitzgerald said to Hemingway: "The rich are different than us." Do you agree?

[A] Forbes: Of course. "They have more money," Hemingway replied. But the thing is that money doesn't make you different. It makes your circumstances different. Money enables you either to do more with your life or to insulate yourself more from life. Look at Howard Hughes, again. He had more money than damn near anybody and what'd he do? Locked himself up in hotel rooms and shot dope. His money didn't make him different by protecting him from addiction to drugs; it just allowed him to get away with it and keep people from finding out. He's the classic example of what I believe: that it's not the money that's important in a person's life. It's an immense facilitator if you allow it to be, but it still comes down to your capacity to enjoy: to eat, to love, to read, to see, to feel. All those things are no greater for a rich man than for a poor man.

[Q] Playboy: Easy for a rich man to say.

[A] Forbes: Well, the variety might be greater for a rich man. The opulence might be greater. But my eyes can't enjoy the view of my land in Colorado any more than the eyes of the guy who just bought five acres of it. He's got exactly the same view and he's standing on his own turf. It's like the old saying: How much do you want to own? I don't want to own anything except the land next to me. The land adjacent to mine, that's all I want.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned what you think is Teddy Kennedy's guilt about his inherited wealth. Did you ever go through that guilt?

[A] Forbes: No, no, no! I can never remember feeling guilty. I can remember feeling greedy. My father was a relatively wealthy man. We lived comfortably but not a Rockefeller-rich life. We lived near Bernarr Macfadden and I can remember complaining to my father that they had a swimming pool and we didn't. Pools were very rare in the Thirties. I said, "They must be rich, they've got a pool." My father said: "If they've spent the money, they don't have it. It doesn't prove they're rich; it proves they're spendthrifts."

[A] Inherited money is harder to make something of. Lots tougher. You have to overcome its disadvantages. But I didn't inherit that much money myself. I inherited a piece of a well-founded business. It was only a fraction of the size it is today, but I did inherit the opportunity. And why should I feel guilty about that? Look at how much of my life I've put into getting the business thriving and running right. I could have made a success of myself without my father's start; it just would have taken more time. I wouldn't have had as much time to do the other things I wanted to do. But one thing about the capitalist system: If money is what you're after, and the only thing you're after, you can get it. It's not difficult. But you can't get it and still have time to do all the other things you may want to do.

[Q] Playboy: What about the Rockefellers? Would you say they've used their money well?

[A] Forbes: The ones I know reasonably well--Laurance, Nelson and David--are each very admirable, industrious, hard-working guys who have a genuine sense of public service. They haven't used their money with malice. They haven't pulled a Stewart Mott, the G.M. inheritor who figures he has to espouse--and buy--every left-wing cause that comes along. The Rockefellers have supported very liberal causes; they have a deep social, public awareness, without thinking the system is lousy or needs destruction or total stifling or redirecting. They have supported the system and worked within it, but they have used what was once incomprehensible wealth--it's less so now because as always these things get split up. But they have pioneered and supported early causes: population control; ecology; health, before governments got into the problem; so many areas that are so fruitful and so worth while. These guys, in my judgment and my experience with them, are more laudable than generally they're given credit for. David, for instance, is a guy spending a lot of time with heads of states and governments on behalf of the broadest possible aspects of our national policy. He doesn't always come away with a deposit for his bank, but the point is that his contribution is very real and it's so easy to sneer at it and not give these guys credit for an extraordinary public life. Laurence was probably one of the earliest environmentalists and ecologists, before they even used those words and brand names. And very productively active. In short, I think these guys are a very good lot.

[Q] Playboy: You got off a snide remark about Stewart Mott, who espouses leftist causes. What makes people like him so contemptible to someone like you?

[A] Forbes: Their motivations are so patent. They're guilty about their money and they think that instead of giving it away, they'll use it to change the system that gave them an inordinate amount of money. I just simply think that those guys ought to be preachers and back left-wing causes. I don't think they do a lot of harm, because usually, a lot of what they put their money up for doesn't reach anybody except those who are already converted. How do you explain those anarchists in Germany? The Weathermen here? You always have groups of radicals and it has nothing to do with economic strata; they act from conviction.

[Q] Playboy: So what's wrong with convictions?

[A] Forbes: In these cases, their motives usually make fanatics out of them. But there'll always be fanatics, and whether you call them left or right, I see little difference in them. The fact that some of the very rich spend their money fanning flames that would destroy what gave them the money, that's OK. They're offset by people who came up from nowhere economically and had a ball and made it big. I think their contribution ends up being greater. And usually, those fellows don't shed their awareness. In the old days of the robber barons, you found them endowing Carnegie libraries, the first extensive public libraries in this country. They recognized the needs and necessities and they responded. If it hadn't been for wealthy men who expressed their gratitude--endowed scholarships, the arts--hell, you wouldn't have public universities in this country. I think it's a very important thing that there are liberal-arts universities in this country that are not totally dependent on the state for handouts. That came from people with money with their own views and conscience.

[Q] Playboy: Kurt Vonnegut once said that the trouble with getting rich was that suddenly he had all this money he had to baby-sit. You're baby-sitting a hell of a lot more money than he--or almost anybody else--is. What's it like?

[A] Forbes: That's a great phrase, baby-sitting the money. There are people who make lucrative careers out of baby-sitting money. That's what Morgan Guaranty Trust is doing. That's what estate lawyers are doing. They're baby-sitting money for people who had it and had to leave it behind. But personally, I prefer to do as little baby-sitting as possible. My interest is in not managing my money. My interest is in having enough of it to go on doing the things I want to do. My son Malcolm, Jr., is a brilliant money man and he looks after much of the management, and I have an executive vice-president who, I always say, is in charge of keeping us solvent. Because I'll take care of the reaping and the spending. Somebody else better make sure we don't get too far ahead in either direction.

[Q] Playboy: Are you more, shall we say, cautious about keeping your financial empire solvent than your love of motorcycles and ballooning might seem to indicate? Do you drive Forbes at 110? Fly it off into the sky?

[A] Forbes: Enjoying life is the only solvency, and in business as in life, the biggest risk is too much caution. That's always the danger in business: when you stop charging. When you stop moving.

[A] As soon as a business decides, this is how we used to do it and it worked so we'll keep on without changing, that's when it loses its momentum. Safety doesn't lie in that. Just ask the Pennsylvania Railroad and the people who owned the Erie Canal bonds. Sure, I consider staying solvent important, but I believe it comes from keeping money moving. You know, planting money doesn't do you any good. It doesn't grow. So stashing it is not safety. Keeping it is not safety. Moving it, putting it to work, is safety.

[Q] Playboy: As one of the small number of people with the greatest vested interest in the safety of the capitalist system, do you ever worry about----

[A] Forbes: Come the revolution?

[Q] Playboy: No, not the revolution but, rather, a serious collapse of the economic system, a sort of crash of '79, of the type Paul Erdman wrote about in his best-selling novel.

[A] Forbes: There was a crash of '29.

[Q] Playboy: So you've already lived through one. Do you ever worry about that kind of thing happening again?

[A] Forbes: Of course, it's a concern. But I don't see it happening. If you keep a historical perspective, we've had fiscal panics, crashes, quick rich and quick poor in our history. We've had boom and bust periodically. The Depression following the stock-market panic of 1929 was one of the greatest economic wrenches in modern history. Change and turbulence is not confined to warfare and borders, and turbulence is just another word for the sharp ups and downs. So it's silly to assume that we've discovered perpetual prosperity. We've had setbacks of a year or more and we probably will again, but overall, the health of the system has been burgeoning. It's better now in this country than it ever has been.

[A] The biggest threat of this year may turn out to be that things don't slow down enough for inflation to be bridled. The consumer is still racing to run up his credit-card charges--so there's more danger of short-term, unbridled growth than there is of a serious recession.

[Q] Playboy: But what about the potential weak link: energy? The Depression of 1929 was about the management and distribution of resources. It was systemic, thus subject to correction. What happens in ten years when we start running out of the resources themselves, such as petroleum?

[A] Forbes: Energy is finite, that's for sure. And it's going to be one of our most pressing problems in the next decade. But every decade has had tough problems, and some that started off abysmally turned out to be all right. We've been through decades of hard times before, and you're right, in due course, we'll run out of oil. Maybe not for 50 years, and by then we'll have harnessed other forms of energy. The world literally is energy.

[Q] Playboy: But that's not much of an answer. Are you satisfied with how the governmental and corporate leadership in this country has responded to the energy situation?

[A] Forbes: Oh, they've been clumsy and inept, but business has discovered that when energy is expensive, they can save a lot of money by using it more efficiently. And what motivated them? Trying to make a buck, and that same motivation is going to lead us to new and exciting solutions to our energy problems. The oil companies are already putting a lot of money into developing solar energy. If you can find the break-through in solar energy, it would be like inventing the electric light bulb.

[Q] Playboy: All right, so where does that leave us? Ralph Nader once said that the reason we don't already have a significant solar-energy system is simple: Exxon doesn't own the sun.

[A] Forbes: To digress for a moment on the subject of Ralph Nader, I think he's suffering from overkill on his own part. He's diluted his influence because he's tackled too much and shot from the hip. He has overstated his case on safety and ecology to the point where some of the things he's pushed for would substantially inflate costs without a commensurate increase in lives saved or incidence of disease lowered. In short, he helped--by banging the drum and leading us into a new and terribly important area--but by now, he's lost some of his heft because of exaggeration as to who the villains are and underestimation of the cost of total purity.

[Q] Playboy: Getting back to Nader's accusation on oil companies and solarenergy----

[A] Forbes: All people are human, including the heads of companies, so there's always an element of truth in any accusation.

[Q] Playboy: But only an element?

[A] Forbes: An element. It's well and good to say they don't own the sun. Funny line. But nowadays, they don't own most of the oil resources that used to give them their clout, either.

[Q] Playboy: But they control the production and distribution enough to make it amount to pretty much the same thing.

[A] Forbes: Sure. But they'll come along because they know one thing for sure: Their profit isn't going to go up if they don't find some way to provide the energy to keep the system moving. They won't make much bread if we're all living in huts again. And we shouldn't knock the potential of atomic energy. It's so cheap and so available. The resistance is largely psychological--it's the atomic bomb, it's atomic explosions.

[Q] Playboy: It's more than that. It presents the problem of storing the wastes safely for about 20,000 years.

[A] Forbes: That's a helluva problem, I agree. Maybe we should put it in the fault out in California.

[Q] Playboy: That sounds like what got Barry Goldwater into trouble in 1964, when he suggested we saw off New York and float it out to sea.

[A] Forbes: [Laughing] It was just a joke. Honest. But as to the dangers of atomic waste, the thing is, they haven't solved the problem of storage, though it is solvable. In our lifetime--what I call the short view, the older I get--I don't think that our problems are any greater, and are probably fewer, than in the preceding centuries. We have tremendous, exciting, wild things going on today. The world is as full of exciting solutions as it is of problems, and that's not a Pollyanna view. Based on our accumulating knowledge and the rapidity of it, I personally feel that our short-run position is more hopeful than that of any generation ever before. And as somebody said, if you take the long view, in a hundred million years, nobody's going to be here anyhow.

[Q] Playboy: Since you've got a lot more to lose than most people, it's reassuring to hear that you're comfortable with our economic hopes.

[A] Forbes: Not comfortable, just optimistic.

[Q] Playboy: You always describe capitalism in very upbeat terms; in fact, you're almost a cheerleader. But what would you say is capitalism's worst excess right now?

[A] Forbes: That's a good question. [Pause] It has so many. I would say its worst excess right now [long pause] oh, God [pause] I guess it's the large number of business people who are still trying to rip off the consumer, the employee or the stockholder. There are still a lot of guys out to grab the quick buck, and some of them get to pretty high positions, at least for a while. So I'd say capitalism's worst excess is in the large number of crooks and tinhorns who get too much of the action. Incidentally, that's what brings on Federal overregulation and thus inflation: the sins of some committed under the mantle of free enterprise.

[Q] Playboy: Now that you've got your empire running smoothly and you've got Malcolm, Jr., groomed to take over--

[A] Forbes: I have no plans for early retirement.

[Q] Playboy: That's where we were going.

[A] Forbes: My son says he's eager to give me a gold watch on retirement day, but he'll have a long wait.

[Q] Playboy: But what keeps you from walking away from a job well done and having more of your time free for the bikes and the balloons and maybe other new adventures, rather than working as hard as you do for Forbes, Inc.?

[A] Forbes: Because I'm doing what I want to be doing. I couldn't get more pleasure out of the so-called pleasurable things than I do from running this business. I love writing my editorials. I love reviewing books. I love getting out around the country with my procapitalist film and enthusing people about a different understanding of our history. That's exciting to me. There are times at the end of the day when I'm a little limp, but hell, I do get to motorcycle a lot. I've got probably five major trips planned for this year. I had four great ones last year. I can balloon on most weekends. When you have to squeeze them into a tight schedule, you do them with a greater enjoyment and a fuller intensity than if you were just trying to fill up a bunch of your spare time.

[A] In other words, everybody needs a change of pace. But that's not the same thing as quitting. The hardest work in the world, in my own observation, is no work. I think the toughest thing to deal with, and what kills more people than anything else in the corporate world, is retirement. If you can't handle the hypertension, OK, get out of the kitchen. But if you've got your health--and I'm knocking on wood, who knows what can trip that up?--then you get your kicks doing what you get your kicks doing, and I get my kicks running this business and seeing it grow and fanning the flame and doing all those other things, too. Retirement, for me, would represent a challenge, all right, and one I'd dread facing.

[Q] Playboy: The press has called you "The Happiest Millionaire. "Are you?

[A] Forbes: My kids are grown up now and they live nearby, two of them are in the business, the grandchildren are around and I've taken care of a smooth succession--which can be a big problem in a family business. So I guess you could say that I'm having a pretty...good...time. Nobody can have it all, but I've certainly had my fair share, and my attitude is simple: While you're alive, live! Because who's sure of the next trip? I'm not. As I say, I'm an optimist, because I'm not sure there is a life after death, and if there is, I'm not sure what my reward will be. But I can tell you that I'd like to be buried with a long extension cord to my air conditioner.

"We are of use to people who want to succeed in a free-enterprise system. We praise success. We blow the whistle on failure."

"There are top executives who'll knock in heads in board rooms, but they're afraid to make public statements that might become controversial."

"Teddy Kennedy is a dangerous man. Not by intention; he's a warm human being, but he is motivated partly by some malice."

"Some people say I must have a death wish, doing these crazy things, but I don't. I'll be the saddest man at my funeral."

"Ballooning is such a novel experience, a kind of Peter Pan thing. It's so different from flying. You're right in the wind and the air and the clouds."

"My interest is in not managing my money. My interest is in having enough of it to go on doing the things I want to do."

"I'd say capitalism's worst excess is in the large number of crooks and tinhorns who get too much of the action."