Can Bill Gates broadband satellite bet beat re-entry burnout?
Analysis Thanks to more than a thousand pages of regulatory filing with the SEC, we now know the business plan for broadband satellite ventures Teledesic and New ICO. The companies are to be merged later this year as a result of a rescue bid by Craig McCaw London-based ICO Global Communications. McCaw injected $1.2 billion into the bankrupt company. Bill Gates personally, rather than Microsoft, is a significant investor in Teledesic, but McCaw has some 64 per cent of the voting power of the to-be-merged companies. His wealth came from the sale of McCaw Cellular to AT&T for $11.5 billion in 1994.
