Hughes Gets Two Offers Right Out of Left Field

The owners of Hughes Aircraft Co. have received at least two outright offers of $6 billion to buy the aerospace firm, but the bids didn’t come from such industrial titans as General Motors, Ford Motor or Boeing, which proffered serious money for Hughes on Thursday.

As the deadline for bidding passed Thursday, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, sole owner of Hughes Aircraft, received offers from two savvy investor groups who apparently have sharpened their bargaining skills at Saturday garage sales.

A $6-billion bid in the form of a check submitted to the medical institute came from the residents of Harvey Mudd College’s West Dorm, who explained in an accompanying letter that Hughes would be “a valuable addition to our usual curriculum.”

Indeed, Harvey Mudd future engineers Karl Kaufman and Robin Burke, who submitted the offer, even see some potential pecuniary benefit in owning Hughes, which last year posted $4.9 billion in sales and increased its book value to about $1 billion.

In the letter of offer to medical institute President Donald Fredrickson, the Harvey Mudd students suggested that profits from Hughes would “fund various activities such as our annual Tequila Night party.”

The Harvey Mudd offer isn’t the only unconventional bid that the medical institute has received.

Federal Express delivered to the institute’s Maryland offices a $6-billion letter of offer, a spokesman said. The institute’s officials would understandably be interested in such a large sum, but the bidder overlooked one detail--he failed to identify himself.

“We have gotten some pretty bizarre bids,” the institute spokesman said.

Of course, the institute also received several legitimate bids, which were opened Thursday during a 2 1/2-hour trustees meeting in New York. Ford, General Motors and Boeing submitted bids, according to informed sources, but spokesmen for the firms and the institute declined to comment.

The trustees reviewed the bids in a “lengthy discussion” before turning them over to representatives of Morgan Stanley & Co., the institute’s investment banker, for evaluation, according to a source close to the board. A decision on the winning bid is not expected until early June.