The New York Times lavished 1,262 words on the country’s current favorite mad genius, Nathan Myhrvold, and his high-tech kitchen last month. He’s got an industrial food dehydrator where he makes freeze-dried lobster tail and a 100-ton hydraulic press, for beef jerky, the Gray Lady reports.
But, of course, anyone excelling at that iconic American pastime of inventing things is also probably pretty good at that other iconic American thing: making money. And Myhrvold’s recipe for revenue — as we’ve recounted over the years, using way more than 1,262 words — is Intellectual Ventures, a patent-hoarding organization that’s taken in billions of dollars in investments, bought thousands of patents, and extracted more than a billion in licensing fees from the biggest tech companies like Cisco Systems Inc., Verizon and Intuit Inc., all without filing a lawsuit.
