And Ergen and Dish were supposed to be out of business less than a year after launch of the DBS service because every other competitor to DirecTV SOLD their Sat biz assets and left the industry even before starting their planned DBS services. Ergen was CRAZY, by their estimation, to continue and launch his Dish DBS. I'm certain DirecTV of the period just ignored Dish. DirecTV did NOTHING to counter Dish's continued growth and innovation until Rupert Murdoch purchased DTV and put Chase Carey as CEO and take some of the wind from Dish's sails and made DirecTV a more aggressive competitor and even a better run company than it had ever been.
The problem for Wall Street--and Charlie--is that Dish has always been secretive and never revealed their full hand until virtually the last moment, and that makes investors nervous when a company is a new entrant to a competitive industry. Considering Ergen's history, I expect there are other players working with Dish, some large, obvious companies (with famous CEO's) who may find this they only way the can get in with regards to wireless spectrum--without footing the entire bill and risk--for their products and services, while others not so obvious who all want secrecy, as well, but if it is one thing Ergen has demonstrated, it is that he and his companies can be quite secretive, and they have to be be because they are a smaller company than their competitors. It has only been the last few months--if not weeks--that Ergen has laid out his plan, but if there was no good plan, he would have sold his spectrum long ago, but I think he already had a vision of what he wanted to do with it. Considering he was clearly the first with Virtual MVPD (SlingTV), he was easily the ONLY one who was harping for years to all the content owners/channels about such as service and successfully persuaded them that it was good business move for them, as well. Now, every other virtual MVPD is playing catch-up, but even if the others surpass SlingTV as having more subscribers, Ergen and Dish are doing well enough because he was tight-lipped about SlingTV for a very long time and was, again, ahead and placing the right bets.
One thing is that, with all his human flaws, he is a smart enough business man to have gotten admiration from titans of business from Rupert Murdoch to Bob Iger to name a few, and Charlie would have sold the entire Dish side of the business yesterday, for even a fire sale, if he didn't believe he had a real chance at entering wireless or felt Dish was in a non-recoverable nose dive. This move into wireless is NOT necessarily providing smart phone as some secret partners might want to use Dish's spectrum, but really for the 5G tech and the Internet of Things real money making future and NEW services (broadband ISP, driver-less vehicles of all types including ride share services, medical, industrial, etc.) of what we know today as "wireless."
I've also found Moffett to be a strange bird of analysts who has not impressed me with his tea leaves not being so accurate. Also, those publicity dog "analysts" and companies for whom they work are often, in my estimation, paid mouth pieces for the companies who want to create bad Market news for their competitors. These "analysts" can say things that have some impact positive or negative, and right now the big wireless companies don't want any new entrants and, in fact, are trying to merge to further decrease the competition. Anytime any of these far too often quoted "analysts" speak, you often have to wonder whose payroll they are on to say what is in the interest of their real masters, and why is the press so often directed to or, to some extent by their parent companies, always make way toward those particular "analysts" for quotes. There is a cadre of such analysts from different firms who are likely being told what to say to the press, and even make ratings based on firms and analysts at those firms being hired mouth pieces.
