They'll show you the money; behind the scenes of media's biggest deals are the money mavens who shuffle billions.(The Deal Makers: media investment banking)

Broadcasting & Cable, December, 1997 by Higgins, John

Charlie Ergen isn't exactly a household name on Wall Street today, he certainly wasn't in 1993. The chairman of EchoStar Communications Corp., Ergen was cruising along in obscurity, manufacturing Cband satellite receivers largely for rural TV junkies with enough land for giant backyard dishes.

But Ergen had bigger ambitions. He wanted to jump into direct broadcast satellite, a high-power service that, with its much smaller 18-inch dishes, would open satellite to millions of suburban and city dwellers soured on their cable operators. He needed enormous amounts of cash. Building and launching satellites, marketing a new service and supporting debt eventually would require more than $1.5 billion. But even a poker sharp like Ergen wasn't accustomed...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.