#Father-and-Son Double Act #Building Wealth Through Industry #Riding the Wave of the Times #Rise of a Great Nation #Nonstop Payoffs
When Liu Bufan returned to 1990, he thought he'd been handed the wrong rich playboy script:
His father was a decorated veteran with access to a large number of freight train cars, and his mother was capable and shrewd. The family wanted for nothing.
Then, on New Year's Eve, the power went out, and the old vacuum-tube radio on the table suddenly started talking on its own:
“I'm you, thirty-five years from now. Stop studying and take your dad to buy airplanes!”
And so, this eccentric father-and-son duo completely changed the business world's tune.
His father had only wanted to run a modest trading business, but he couldn't resist his fourteen-year-old son's daily barrage of advice, all under the pretense of “reading the papers and listening to the radio”:
“Dad, Shuhang wants to buy Tu-154s. Let's haul over a whole trainload of instant noodles to trade for them. We can make four hundred million when we resell them!”
“Dad, that scrap metal from the old big brother has a nine-axis, five-link strategic machine tool in it. Sell it to an aircraft factory for eighty million, and we'll get three thousand mu of industrial land in exchange!”
“Dad, the ruble's about to collapse and become worthless. Let's borrow five billion rubles in the name of revitalizing the automobile industry, convert them to dollars, and put them in Switzerland!”
By the time his father somehow owned 3.2 billion dollars in cash and had become an internationally renowned industrial mogul, he looked at his son, utterly bewildered:
“Son, level with me. Is there a god or a bodhisattva hiding in that busted old radio of yours?!”
