Money from Thin Air: The Story of Craig McCaw, the Visionary who Invented the Cell Phone Industry, and His Next...

Money from Thin Air: The Story of Craig McCaw, the Visionary who Invented the Cell Phone Industry, and His Next...
ISBN-10
0812926978
ISBN-13
9780812926972
Category
Biography & Autobiography / General
Pages
310
Language
English
Published
2000
Publisher
Crown Business
Author
O. Casey Corr

Description

Annotation Rarely does a family make and remake a fortune. Craig McCaw's father literally ran his multimillion-dollar radio and television business out of his hat, and when he died suddenly at an early age, the family's bank declared the estate insolvent. McCaw, then only twenty years old, rejected the advice of more experienced businessmen and began investing the money he got from his father's life insurance in a series of businesses most thought worthless or, at best, extremely risky. By using a patchwork of borrowed money, tight spending policies, sheer guts, and non-stop work and travel, McCaw ultimately managed to create an exciting new industry literally out of thin air: cellular communications. AT & T had been an early participant in the cellular business but dropped out because it failed to see the long-term potential. McCaw was the visionary who pulled together a national cellular network, and when AT & T finally saw the error of its ways, he sold them McCaw Communications for $12.6 billion. Most people with a multibillion-dollar fortune in the bank would be tempted to retire and live like a rajah. Not McCaw. He started an even bolder business: Teledesic, a $9 billion-dollar effort to create an "Internet-in-the-sky, " a satellite network that would provide fast, cheap access to the Internet and other telecommunications services from anywhere in the world. While some thought the success of Teledesic improbable, it has attracted equity investments from Bill Gates and from Motorola. Teledesic's potential becomes even clearer when one realizes that half of the world's population has yet to make a telephone call. AT & T thought the number of cellular telephone users would be no more than 900,000 by the mid-nineties; the actual number turned out to be over 20 million. McCaw's new gamble could create a new empire even more valuable than his first.

Get the book

Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Search the book
eBay.com
eBay.com
Search the book

Similar books