He learned to trade while serving in the United States Army in Shanghai and on his return to the US bought and sold small newspapers, 13 in all.
He managed to accumulate enough for a down-payment on a weekly newspaper in Palm Springs, California, which he turned into a daily and sold to The Sun.
Readers were said by The Times in 1968 to include Enoch Powell and Richard Nixon,[1] while New Internationalist magazine in 1981 named Margaret Thatcher, Sir Keith Joseph, South African finance minister Owen Horwood and Saudi Arabian oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani as readers.
He is credited with inventing the Three Flags Theory which proposes that everyone should have a second passport, an address in a tax haven and that their assets should be kept outside their home country.
According to New Internationalist magazine, he was one of the trustees of the Phoenix Foundation which unsuccessfully attempted to establish small libertarian states in the 1970s.