Suddenly, everyone is discovering, or rediscovering, the seamier side of business. That’s too bad, in part because it’s an old story. It also obscures the amazing achievements that are possible in America, as nowhere else.
In this month’s cover story, “EchoStar Spins into Orbit,” Staff Writer Jenny Anderson and Senior Editor Steven Brull chronicle the classic American rise to fame and fortune of satellite TV entrepreneur Charlie Ergen. Bored with work as a 20-something financial analyst in Dallas in the late 1970s, Ergen quit his job and took a flier on the fast-changing world of television. Last fall, in a stunning coup, the upstart defeated media mogul Rupert Murdoch in the battle for Hughes Electronics Corp., the General Motors Corp.-owned parent of his main rival, DirecTV. Now he must persuade the government that the merger should be allowed despite its monopolistic overtones.
For Brull, who joined us last year as our West Coast writer, covering technology and corporate finance from Los Angeles, the story was a reprise of sorts. As a BusinessWeek correspondent, Brull reported from Tokyo in 1997 about Hughes’s struggle to launch a direct broadcast satellite service in Japan. He interviewed Ergen in Colorado later that year, when EchoStar was still the industry pipsqueak. Now a media mogul, Ergen rarely grants interviews to the press.
By contrast, the assignment sent Anderson, who covers Wall Street and corporate finance in New York, into an entirely new world of transponders, Ku bands and orbital slots. It turned out to be quite an education. This month, in a rare feat, Anderson also pens the cover story in our European edition, on Telefonica, the Spanish telecommunications company that has become a powerful player on the global scene. In both stories she has had to grapple with complex issues and technologies and find a way to simplify them for the rest of us. (You can read her Telefonica story on www.iiplatinum.com.)
“It was a seemingly endless lesson in finance, technology and the personalities of media moguls,” says Anderson of her experience in writing about the EchoStar-Hughes deal.
One other lesson: Genuine success stories in business are still possible.
