I was at his place for a fund raiser a while back. It is a truly awesome place, hundreds of tanks in huge metal buildings around a courtyard. My favorite was a scud missile launcher complete with scud from Yugoslavia (not Iraq). You would expect that a missile would be bright and shiny, like a new car, but no, this thing looked it had been beaten with sledge hammers. I am not sure whether it was the assembly process or whether it had just had a hard life.
It was an amazing collection, and he had a team of people who really understood those machines. My favorite was a Russian radar system with giant water-cooled vacuum tubes that emitted radar pulses at some absurdly high power. That or the mobile bridge.
I'm always amazed by people who can go to school for ~16 years, work for five years, and then spend the rest of their lives to "managing investments", sitting on various boards, and collecting tanks.
I've seen his collection on TV a few times. They used two of his tanks in an episode of Mythbusters, and the restoration of the Panzer tank mentioned in the above article was chronicled on a program called "Tank Overhaul":
that sucks, I saw a special about him on CNBC and he seemed like a nice guy.
+ he was an actual gear head and knew how to work on his stuff + drove it...instead of being one of those collectors who goes to an auction and buys a completed project that someone else poured thousands of hours into
