From Yahoo Finance, April 20:
Satellite cable pioneer Charlie Ergen made a big bet on spectrum and eventually found a buyer in SpaceX. The stock portion of that deal could be huge.
By the end of 2013, satellite TV operator Dish Network had a nice business going, with just over 14 million subscribers.
Dish and its sister company EchoStar (SATS) at the time represented the big bet that Charlie Ergen, a onetime professional gambler, made on the satellite TV business in the early 1980s. By 2015, Ergen was on the Forbes 400 list and was worth over $20 billion.
But then cord-cutting came along and slowly ate into those subscribers. Ergen, sensing the changing tide even before then, started buying up wireless spectrum as a means to eventually provide a wireless service, but he also saw hoarding the spectrum as an opportunity.
He spent billions on it and didn’t do much to develop it, other than offering prepaid carrier service through Boost Mobile (which he acquired from Sprint’s collapse).
Dish’s stock tumbled in the years that followed. Eventually, Ergen merged it with EchoStar in 2023, but the damage was done; Ergen’s net worth had dipped below $1 billion by then.
But EchoStar held potentially billions of dollars’ worth of spectrum. This is what actually saved the company from a possible bankruptcy — and SpaceX is a big part of it.
A calculated move
In early 2025, Ergen tried a last-ditch move to merge EchoStar with its competitor DirecTV, but the deal fell through. With its heavy debt load, concern grew that EchoStar would have to file for bankruptcy.
But a lifeline emerged in an unexpected way. In May of last year, in the midst of EchoStar’s troubles, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr questioned whether EchoStar had truly met its network build-out obligations to develop productive uses of the spectrum as required by law. The FCC under the Biden administration granted EchoStar more time to deploy a 5G network, but Carr was not pleased with EchoStar’s progress....
....MUCH MORE
