EchoStar founder and chairman Charlie Ergen will take over as president and CEO of EchoStar Corp., putting him in charge of the operations of the pay television and wireless business units. Former EchoStar CEO Hamid Akhavan will head up the new investment arm.

“This is an opportune moment in time for our business to go on the offense as we build upon our 45-year institutional heritage and forge a new path forward for creating and developing opportunities in our strategic expertise domains that will provide attractive value creation for EchoStar and its shareholders,” Akhavan .

The third quarter was a huge one in terms of redefining the company and its future. AT&T agreed to pay $22.65 billion in cash and SpaceX agreed to pay $19 billion for wireless spectrum that the Douglas County company had acquired over the years.

EchoStar had intended to deploy the spectrum to build out its Boost Mobile wireless network and private 5G networks for commercial customers. But the company wasn’t moving fast enough for the Federal Communications Commission, which had put pressure on it to use its spectrum or sell it. EchoStar agreed to to carry most of its wireless traffic going forward.

Although the choicest slices of spectrum have been claimed, the company announced on Thursday that it had reached an agreement to sell additional AWS-3 wireless spectrum to SpaceX for $2.6 billion worth of its shares.

A portion of the spectrum sale proceeds will go to pay down debt, but increasingly it is looking like the company will invest most of it to create future earnings for shareholders, who have seen a more than doubling in the company’s share price this year. EchoStar is one of the top-performing stocks this year, not including AI-related companies.

EchoStar reported $38.2 billion in liabilities at the end of the third quarter, down from $40.7 billion at the end of last year. Analysts said the company is now in a “net cash” position, meaning it has more cash and other liquid assets than it has debt.

That said, the company continues to struggle with declining subscriptions in DISH TV, its core satellite television business, which has lost 12.2% of its customer base over the past year. Sling TV, the over-the-internet alternative, fared better, gaining 159,900 subscribers, bringing the total number of pay television subscribers to 7.17 million.

The wireless side, consisting mostly of Boost Mobile, continued to grow, adding 223,000 new customers in the third quarter and generating $939 million in revenues. Boost Mobile is now larger than the pay-TV side with 7.52 million subscribers, although the monthly bill each subscriber is paying is smaller.

EchoStar took a $16.5 billion one-time charge to account for the impaired value on the portions of its 5G network that it won’t be using as a result of the agreement reached with AT&T. That noncash write-off contributed to a $12.8 billion loss in the third quarter, which compares to a $141.8 million loss in the third quarter of 2024.

Compounding matters, the Federal Communications Commission under the Trump administration has pressured the company to deploy its large and valuable stash of wireless spectrum licenses, built carefully over multiple years, in a case of use it or lose it.

And it didn’t help when a deal to sell the Dish Network to rival DirecTV, an AT&T subsidiary at the time, for the assumption of $9.8 billion in debt plus the payment of $1 fell apart in late November after bondholders balked at the $1.6 billion discount that would be required of them.

AT&T came to EchoStar’s rescue once again on Tuesday, offering to pay $23 billion in cash to purchase a third of the company’s wireless licenses — located in the 3.45 GHz and 600 MHz range and representing a total of 50 MHz of nationwide spectrum.

That spectrum, however, was something EchoStar needed to build out its Boost Mobile wireless network, which was designed to be a competitor to AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. Boost Mobile will now rely on AT&T’s wireless towers rather than its own radio network, making it a hybrid Mobile Network Operator (MNO) rather than an independent wireless carrier.

“EchoStar and Boost Mobile have met all of the FCC’s network buildout milestones. However, this spectrum sale to AT&T and hybrid MNO agreement are critical steps toward resolving the FCC’s spectrum utilization concerns,” said EchoStar chairman Charlie Ergen in a release.

EchoStar remained steadfast in its belief that it could use its wireless licenses, accumulated over multiple years, to build a wireless business, but it has mostly failed to do so, tying up capital and leaving its finances in “tatters,” said Michael Hodel, a , in a research note Tuesday.

“However, the decision to sell licenses to AT&T quickly realizes value for shareholders, dramatically reduces balance sheet risk, and opens a new chapter in EchoStar’s development,” said Hodel, who called the move a “step in the right direction.”

Investors breathed a huge sigh of relief, pushing shares of EchoStar from just under $30 to above $55, before the price settled back down to $50.87 at the end of trading. The final gain was 70.25% and the stock, which dipped below $15 a share in June, is now at levels last seen in early 2018.

Even more important, the company’s bonds, which were deeply discounted to allow for a possible default, rebounded strongly as well. Fears of a default have diminished, and the company has bought itself more time.

“This transaction puts our business on a solid financial path, further facilitating EchoStar’s long-term success, and enhancing our ability to innovate and compete as a hybrid network operator. The proceeds of this transaction will be used for, among other things, retiring certain debt obligations and funding EchoStar’s continued operations and growth initiatives,” said Hamid Akhavan, EchoStar CEO and president in a release.

Potential Boost Mobile subscribers who wanted to try the company’s state-of-the-art network but feared coverage gaps or a financial collapse will have more certainty. But they likely won’t get all the bells and whistles that Boost Mobile had hoped to provide as part of a larger deal that paved the way for T-Mobile to acquire Sprint.

“EchoStar’s move from being the 4th independent network operator to a hybrid MNO effectively ends the government’s post-Sprint merger mandate to create a new national competitor. It’ll be up to the cable MSOs (multiple system operators) like Comcast and Charter to take up the mantle as the challengers to the Big Three in the market,” said Roy Chua, founder of AVIDThink, a research and advisory firm specializing in telecom infrastructure technologies.

Chua said the AT&T agreement provides a much-needed cash infusion and gets the FCC off the company’s back. But it marks a setback for market diversity and innovation in Open RAN, a newer and more flexible wireless technology that Boost Mobile was deploying.

“It’s possible that the additional spectrum provides AT&T with enhanced capacity to deploy its Open RAN strategy. However, the large ecosystem of vendors that Boost/DISH had brought together to build its nationwide cloud-native multi-vendor Open RAN network will lose a lighthouse customer,” Chua said.

Some of the Boost partner vendors who could be left out in the cold include Samsung, Mavenir, AWS, VMware/Broadcom, Dell and Cisco.

AT&T has been spending heavily to build out its fiber-to-the-home network and improve 5G wireless access for customers. The company reached an agreement in May with Lumen Technologies, the successor of Qwest Communications International and owner of CenturyLink, to purchase Lumen’s Quantum Fiber business for $5.75 billion in cash.

“This acquisition bolsters and expands our spectrum portfolio while enhancing customers’ 5G wireless and home internet experience in even more markets,” AT&T CEO John Stankey said in a release. ”We’re adding fuel to our winning strategy of investing in valuable wireless and broadband assets to become America’s best connectivity provider.”

Ergen’s willingness to sell off wireless spectrum licenses has raised speculation that other deals may be coming, according to .

T-Mobile, which was also believed to have been interested in EchoStar’s licenses, may pick up the pieces it considers useful that AT&T didn’t claim. And Elon Musk’s Starlink reportedly wants its mid-band and S-band spectrum that could work with a low-Earth orbit satellite network and in connecting devices to the internet.

Starlink has complained to the FCC that EchoStar’s spectrum was “chronically underused.” Analysts estimate the spectrum it wants could be worth around $30 billion, according to Semafor.

On Tuesday, the Douglas County-based company, a subsidiary of EchoStar Corp., informed the state that it will cut another 53 jobs, bringing the tally of workers let go since November to 718.

It has also failed twice this year to refinance nearly $5 billion in upcoming debt obligations with creditors, some of whom are threatening to sue over what they allege are violations of their original loan agreements.

On Wednesday, the company confirmed that Mike Kelly, the executive overseeing retail wireless strategy, has resigned and will depart at the end of the month.

“We appreciate his hard work and commitment to our business. While we conduct a search for his successor, Hamid Akhavan, president and CEO of EchoStar, will lead strategy and key day-to-day operations for the retail wireless brands,” company spokesman Ted Wietecha said in an email.

Employees at 9601 S. Meridian Blvd. and 5701 S. Santa Fe Drive were told Tuesday that they would lose their jobs effective April 20, according to a the company filed with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.

The bulk of layoffs, about 49, involve members of the sales associates or sales account executives, according to the letter filed by Dish General Counsel Kaylee Hyman.

“After a thorough review of our operations and consideration of a changing business environment, we made the difficult decision to remove 53 positions in our company,” Wietecha said. “Today’s decision reflects our focus on improving company performance in an evolving marketplace, and we will continue to make strategic hires and investments to support our growth.”

Last month the company announced it would let go of 157 workers and then another nine workers in two separate reductions. And in November, the company told the state it would cut 499 workers after a disappointing earnings report.

After years of acquiring wireless spectrum, Dish launched the nation’s fourth wireless network in 2020 with its acquisition of Boost Mobile, which it acquired as a condition of the approval of the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint.

Dish built and launched a cutting-edge 5G cellular network at a record clip, meeting federal deadlines, but amassing $21 billion in debt doing so.

But with customers continuing to leave its legacy pay-television business, and new customers signing up more slowly than expected for its wireless business, Dish has struggled to find the money needed to complete its network buildout while also servicing its debt.

The company has until June 2025 set by the Federal Communications Commission to cover 75% of the U.S. population. Although it reached 70% of the population last summer, getting that extra 5% will require a significant investment in the months ahead.

At the end of last year, Dish Network and EchoStar, both founded by Charlie Ergen, merged so Dish could access EchoStar’s stronger balance sheet and find more favorable terms from creditors.

EchoStar, however, has had to cancel two debt exchange offerings on close to $5 billion in Dish convertible notes after investors pushed back on the terms being offered. An exchange would have bought the company more time, until 2030, to deal with a heavy wall of debt that is coming due in 2025 and 2026, but the company so far has failed to find common ground with its creditors.

A group of creditors holding a large portion of the debt have even after the company moved some of its unencumbered wireless spectrum licenses into a .

The transfer reduces the amount of collateral creditors could access in the event of a default. EchoStar also said it would shift 3 million of its pay-TV subscribers into a new subsidiary, meaning the cash they generated would not be available to current creditors. The price of Dish bonds, already distressed, fell even further.

Craig Moffett, an analyst with MoffettNathanson, said in a research note earlier this month that the way EchoStar has behaved towards its bondholders since combining with Dish Network shows it is “willing to ride roughshod over the interests of its creditors” or that it may be facing imminent bankruptcy.

Wietecha said he has no additional information to share at this time regarding potential legal action by creditors against the company.

“The first employee separations are expected to occur during the 14-day period starting Jan. 7, 2024,” Kaylee Hyman, a senior corporate counsel with the company, wrote the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment in what is known as a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification ACT, or WARN, letter.

Of the employees being laid off, 566 will be dismissed starting Jan. 7 and another 33 starting Jan.8, according to the two letters filed with the state.

Among the positions being let go are 19 account executives, 17 staff accountants, 16 business intelligence agents, 13 social media associates and five assistant corporate counsels, according to the letters.

DISH had roughly 6,000 employees in Colorado as of August, with about 2,000 of those focused on wireless. At the time, the company said it had 700 open positions, of which 250 were on the wireless side.

Shares of DISH Network plunged to a 25-year low on Monday after the company announced an unanticipated loss in the third quarter and the resignation of CEO Erik Carlson effective Nov. 12, which was earlier than expected.

DISH shares fell from $5.49 at the close of trading on Friday to $3.44 at the end of the day on Monday, a decline of 37%. After rebounding on Tuesday, they closed again at $3.44 on Thursday.

DISH reported a loss of $0.26 a share, down from the $0.65 a share gain reported a year earlier and badly missing estimates of a profit.  Revenues also missed estimates, falling nearly 10% to $3.7 billion versus $4.10 billion a year earlier.

Pay-TV subscribers decreased by about 64,000 in the third quarter, compared to a net increase of approximately 30,000 in the quarter a year ago. The company had 8.84 million pay-TV subscribers at the end of the quarter, with 6.72 million at DISH TV and 2.12 million at SLING TV.

The company also lost 225,000 wireless subscribers in the third quarter, despite a big push this summer to market its Boost Infinite cellular plan to Amazon Prime customers, ending the quarter with 7.5 million subscribers.

“Are we doing a great job of marketing?” DISH Chairman Charlie Ergen asked on a call with analysts Monday. “The answer is no. The messaging didn’t have quite the desired effect. … We’re not hitting on all cylinders there.”

The company is in a tight spot financially as it tries to switch its dependence on the fading satellite TV business over to wireless. It recently sold some of its wireless assets in the Caribbean to raise cash and is merging with its sister company EchoStar, which has a stronger balance sheet.

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Littleton-based DISH shares fell from $5.49 at the close of trading on Friday to $3.44 at the end of the day on Monday, a decline of 37%. Shares climbed 2.3% on Tuesday to close at $3.51. Over the past year, DISH shares have lost three-quarters of their value.

Analysts had expected the company to report positive results in the third quarter, but DISH instead reported a loss of $0.26 a share, down from the $0.65 a share gain reported a year earlier. Revenues also missed estimates, falling nearly 10% to $3.7 billion versus $4.10 billion a year earlier.

Pay-TV subscribers decreased by about 64,000 in the third quarter, compared to a net increase of approximately 30,000 in the quarter a year ago. The company had 8.84 million pay-TV subscribers at the end of the quarter, with 6.72 million at DISH TV and 2.12 million at SLING TV.

The company also lost 225,000 wireless subscribers in the third quarter, despite a big push this summer to market its Boost Infinite cellular plan to Amazon Prime customers, ending the quarter with 7.5 million subscribers.

“Are we doing a great job of marketing?” DISH Chairman Charlie Ergen asked on a call with analysts Monday. “The answer is no. The messaging didn’t have quite the desired effect. … We’re not hitting on all cylinders there.”

DISH continues to search for ways to fund the build-out of its 5G network and recently sold assets for its Spectrum network in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, as well as accounts for 120,000 mobile subscribers in that area, to Liberty America for $256 million.

Another way the company is trying to make itself more attractive to investors is via a merger with its satellite communications sister company Echostar, a deal that is expected to be completed on Nov. 13. The departure of Carlson, a longtime veteran of the company, will allow EchoStar CEO Hamid Akhavan to oversee the combined companies.

DISH earnings weren’t the only ones that disappointed investors. EchoStar saw its . Shares of the company fell from $15.44 on Friday to $10.61 at the close of trading on Monday and they stayed at that same level on Tuesday.

A depressed stock value will make it more difficult for DISH Network to raise capital as it tries to complete its buildout of a new 5G network which it is counting on to attract new customers and cash streams as the satellite-TV business fades in popularity.

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Whether Project Genesis, as the network is called, succeeds or fails will determine the fate of one of Colorado’s largest public companies, and could weigh heavily on Denver’s future as a center of telecommunications innovation, a legacy that goes back decades to the early days of cable television.

“Through DISH’s efforts, Denver is becoming a wireless hub,” said John Swieringa, president and chief operating officer of DISH Wireless. “Our partners are coming here, too, and investing in people and resources in this market. We expect Denver to become a leader in 5G.”

DISH Wireless has hired more than 1,600 workers in the past 18 months and is looking to add 500 more, Swieringa said. DISH, the parent company, already employs 6,000 people along the Front Range. A successful launch of the new network could provide a big boost to the region economically for years to come. Failure could cost thousands of jobs.

5G stands for fifth-generation mobile network. The technology can move larger bundles of data at much faster speeds and lower lag times than 4G. That added capacity promises to open up a host of uses such as self-driving cars, smart cities, remote surgery, and enhanced virtual reality. It also allows wireless carriers to better compete in providing home and business broadband service and makes possible multiple new commercial applications.

The big three carriers — AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile — have built their 5G networks on top of existing and proprietary 4G networks, which in turn were built on top of 3G networks. DISH, by contrast, is building a 5G network from scratch, using something called Open Radio Access Networks or OPEN-RAN. That approach is software-focused, cloud-based and flexible in terms of using technologies from outside partners.

“One of the biggest advantages is that the cost of upgrading and maintaining the network is far lower. We will more readily adapt to evolving technologies and standards. We are relying heavily on automation. Our network is forward-looking,” Swieringa said.

Genesis cell sites have a much smaller footprint than those of older carriers, and much of the signal processing is pushed out to centralized server centers.

Favoring software over hardware lowers overall costs, provides more flexibility and allows for a more open and automated network. Established technology players such as Amazon Web Services, Dell and VMware, to name a few, are actively involved in Project Genesis, contributing resources and development expertise to ensure its success.

“They (DISH) are leveraging the desire of multiple vendors to participate in the only new national wireless network being built. Their vendors are contributing in the form of development and assets,” said Roy Chua, principal at AvidThink, an independent telecom and technology research firm in San Jose, Calif.

DISH has invested more than $30 billion in wireless spectrum and expects to spend about $10 billion to build out and launch the network, Swieringa said.

Compared to what legacy carriers have invested and continue to spend to maintain their more equipment-intensive networks, that is a bargain price, analysts said. Those savings should eventually translate into lower costs for cellular service once the network is built out and customers added.

After meeting the 20% milestone, Project Genesis has a year to ramp up to 70% national coverage, which will be no easy task, given labor and supply-chain shortages. In the interim, DISH has signed deals with AT&T and T-Mobile to carry wireless traffic in areas where it doesn’t have service.

Some people were skeptical DISH could even reach 20% coverage on schedule, but the company did, said Roger Entner, founder of Recon Analytics, in a podcast on Monday.

Putting up antennas on towers is not the difficult part of rolling out a new wireless network, Entner said. The “hard birth” came in creating new software to take on tasks previously handled by hardware and could take fuller advantage of 5G.

“In the end they got it to run. You have to give them a lot of credit for it. There are a lot of firsts that they did,” he said.

Reinvention or extinction

DISH, based in Englewood, traces its roots back to 1980 and a company called Echostar. Charlie Ergen, his wife Candy and Jim DeFranco, distributed C-band satellite television systems to customers in mostly rural areas.

In 1995, the company launched its own satellite using lower-cost but untested Chinese rocket technology. Charlie Ergen, speaking in May to analysts gathered in Las Vegas to learn about Project Genesis, described how that launch, if it had failed, could have ended everything. But the gamble paid off for Ergen, known for his skills as a poker player.

“As I sat there, I knew that we had everything to be a Fortune 500 company 20 minutes after that launch,” Ergen said.

Over the past decade, the company has acquired billions of dollars worth of wireless spectrum at government auctions and sat on it, raising complaints it wasn’t getting a return on its capital and “hoarding” valuable bandwidth.

But the company was waiting for the right opportunity to come along. Ergen said in 2018 he thought that creating a 4G LTE network was the way to go, but realized that waiting for 5G would offer more potential, given the more abundant applications and demand the new technology would create.

In late April 2018, wireless carriers T-Mobile and Sprint announced they would merge in a $26 billion deal, but federal and state regulators were wary the combination would reduce consumer choice and result in higher costs.

DISH saw the opportunity it had been waiting for, one where it could restore a fourth national cellular network, alleviate regulatory concerns, and leverage that to get a good deal from T-Mobile and Sprint on the assets that regulators wanted spun off.

Dish Network paid $1.4 billion for Sprint’s Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, and prepaid business, making it a cellular player with 9 million customers. It paid $3.6 billion for 800 MHZ spectrum, filling in gaps in its coverage. T-Mobile also agreed to allow DISH paid access to its network until it built out its own, although that agreement soured when T-Mobile shut down 3G CDMA services earlier than DISH wanted, impacting some Boost Mobile customers.

For its new network, DISH followed a model pioneered by a Japanese company called Rakuten, which built the world’s first cloud-based wireless network using OPEN-RAN. Project Genesis represents the first network in the U.S. to use that architecture.

“We have built the most modern network in telecommunications today. The DISH Network will be at the center of where technology is going,” Ergen told analysts.

Ergen acknowledged that the patience of stock investors in DISH has been severely tested waiting for a payoff from the wireless spectrum investments. The company’s stock has moved up and down over the years, but it is now back down to where it was two decades ago after accounting for adjustments.

Even though the company got ahead of the cord-cutting trend in cable and satellite television in 2015 by rolling out Sling TV, a package of streaming television channels, it hasn’t escaped the unrelenting downward pressure on pay television subscriptions.

“It is hard for companies to identify technical shifts and do something about it,” Ergen said. “It is hard to stay in business as a company for a long period of time.”

Only a tenth of the Fortune 500 companies that existed in 1980, when Echostar got its start, are still around, Ergen said. But Ergen argued to analysts that DISH has found the path to reinvention, and will leverage the cash and expertise from its legacy businesses, which still make it a Fortune 200 company, to launch a new one.

“I believe we have passed the crux,” Ergen told analysts in Vegas. “I feel very confident we have everything we need to become a Fortune 100 company. We have work to do, and we aren’t spiking the football. We have several years of deployment. We have to monetize.”

As innovation cycles played out, Colorado also has seen its status as a leader in telecommunications grow and shrink. The state was a pioneer in the early days of cable television thanks to executives like Bill Daniels and John Malone. Liberty Media and its group of companies still call the metro area home, but industry consolidation has taken the center of gravity in cable elsewhere.

Metro Denver was also a leader in the nation’s buildout of high-speed fiber-optic networks thanks to companies like Qwest, Level 3 Communications and TimeWarner Telecom, among others. But high-speed data networks got overbuilt and eventually became a commodity business. All three firms were swallowed up in mergers.

DISH was a pioneer in satellite television, but that business line is fading. The company’s shift to 5G wireless opens up the possibility that Denver could once again be back on the cutting edge of telecommunications in a meaningful way.

“With DISH at the helm, it could be a chance for Denver to become a new center for mobile innovation. There is that possibility. Denver has a lot of talent already from the telco market,” Chua said.

A different kind of network

DISH Wireless has about 8.2 million Boost Mobile customers and is targeting about four times that many once it builds out Project Genesis.

“We anticipate growing our retail wireless business to more than 30 million subscribers in the next several years on the heels of our 5G network,” Swieringa said. “We would anticipate the team to grow here in town significantly.”

Boost Mobile offers a $30 a month plan which is solid but isn’t in and of itself a game-changer, said Sascha Segan, lead mobile analyst at PCMag and author of the “Best Mobile Networks” report. But that price should drop as more traffic moves onto the Genesis network and less is paid out to T-Mobile and AT&T.

“I don’t think there is going to be a massive price war in consumer wireless, at least for now. The big three are more interested in expanding their businesses in different ways,” Segan said. “DISH is not going to try and be the No. 1 fastest network. They are going to try to be a good enough network that you can afford.”

DISH Wireless also plans to roll out a Boost Infinite plan that takes better advantage of the Genesis network but hasn’t unveiled details. Rakuten started with a free, limited time cellular plan to build its customer counts and eventually moved to $10 a month, Chau said.

But pursuing a lowest-cost strategy could result in more customer churn and may not be the best approach, he argued. DISH, which has expertise in bundling content, should explore the additional features and applications that 5G allows, he advised.

DISH also expects to place a heavy focus on the commercial market, which could surpass the consumer market in terms of revenue potential. That would include providing companies with private wireless networks they could control and manage. The networks would allow them to do things such as overseeing robots in the warehouse or pinpointing where delivery trucks are on the road.

Chua also notes that while the Genesis network is up and running, it hasn’t been stress tested with heavy loads of traffic. DISH right now seems more interested in finding customers who want to be on the cutting edge of technological innovation and can provide feedback on what is working and what needs improvement. It isn’t making a big push for the mass market until it gets the bugs worked out. At the same time, it has to keep adding more cities.

There also remains the problem of getting more devices that will work on the Genesis network. DISH has accumulated a very specific set of wireless spectrum that isn’t compatible with handsets now on the market. DISH Wireless will need to convince manufacturers to roll out multiple devices, and not just one or two, as is currently the case with Motorola and Samsung.

“We are waiting for the Apple iPhone. We will know the network is ready for prime time when they sign on,” Chua said.

The NFL has become too big and expensive for chauvinistic American pride.

If commissioner Roger Goodell and the good, old boys in the league’s ownership fraternity want the Broncos to establish the value of a franchise at $4 billion or more, Robert Kraft and Jerry Jones might want to seriously consider welcoming investment in the league by bidders from around the world.

If our friend Stan Kroenke, who left a trail of broken hearts in his home state of Missouri to make the Rams a Super Bowl contender in Los Angeles, can own Arsenal in soccer-mad England, maybe it����ap time for the Broncos to look beyond American billionaires to restore the championship luster to our downtrodden franchise.

A generation ago, when Pat Bowlen wore a fur coat on the Denver sideline while bearing witness to an epic comeback staged by quarterback John Elway in the AFC championship game, he was regarded in ����apountry as the upstart son of a Canadian oil baron, despite being born in Wisconsin and taking his lumps as a football player at the University of Oklahoma.

As long as the new owner of the Broncos has the financial wherewithal and keen interest in giving coach Nathaniel Hackett every chance for success, while also footing the bill for a new, glitzy, state-of-the-art stadium, would fans care if he or she was not a billionaire from next door?

So while it would be cool if Charlie Ergen, the founder of Dish Network, wanted to make winning the Vince Lombardi the next goal in his rewarding career, Broncos president Joe Ellis and the trust can’t pick and choose or play favorites when selling the team.

With this sale expected to shatter the record price for a North American sports team and a solemn financial responsibility to Bowlen’s heirs to fetch top dollar from a qualified bidder, the No. 1 quality the Broncos are looking for in a new owner is the ability to sign an outrageously big check.

Although the NFL would technically allow the controlling partner of the Broncos to have as little as a 30% financial stake in the team, that is not at all how the league likes to operate. The movers and shakers in this sport want no more than one powerful stakeholder speaking for each team. In this very exclusive club, it����ap about more than winning football games. An owner is expected to be an active business partner, willing to bring ideas to the table that can grow league revenues and visibility.

While there’s no doubt the NFL is king of America, other leagues have been more global in outlook. The Brooklyn Nets, which were purchased in 2017 for an NBA-record $2.25 billion, are owned by Joseph Tsai, a 58-year-old native of Taiwan who put his degree from Yale University to good use to found a Chinese multinational technology company.

As the American owner of Arsenal, Kroenke has been pilloried in North London for knowing less about soccer than Ted Lasso. Since taking control of Chelsea FC in 2003, however, Russian businessman Roman Abramovich has won the Premier League five times, and fans of the team don’t mind accusations that their foreign-born owner buys championship trophies.

Dick Monfort is a proud and loyal son of Greeley, but disgruntled Rockies fans don’t cut any slack to a Colorado native when he lets star third baseman Nolan Arenado slip away to St. Louis.

Abramovich hangs out with the beautiful people in Aspen, where he owns real estate fit for a king. If a Russian oligarch wanted to buy the Vince Lombardi trophy for the Broncos, would anyone except old-timers who proudly display a “Native” bumper sticker on an old Jeep really care?

The NFL still likes to operate as a family business. The problem? The new economic realities of skyrocketing franchise values, not to mention some questionable estate planning by Mr. B, tore the Bowlen family apart.

Let����ap hope the Broncos’ sale can bring $4 billion of healing to the Bowlen kids.

But at that hefty price, I don’t really care who buys the team or where in the whole wide world a billionaire calls home, so long as winning championships in Denver is the way the new owner wants to keep score.

None gained more between March 18, 2020, and Thursday than Charlie Ergen, the co-founder of Dish Network and EchoStar who is now Colorado’s richest person. Ergen $5.4 billion last March and is now worth $10.7 billion, .

That����ap a gain of 98% that puts him ahead of investor Philip Anschutz, who saw his net worth drop during the pandemic, from $11 billion to $10.1 billion, or about 8%.

The economic downturn of 2020 was different in some ways than the Great Recession, as seen in these billionaire gains, said , a professor of economics at the University of Denver. The stock market has soared since hitting a nadir in March 2020, bringing investors large gains even as unemployment rates have remained well above pre-pandemic levels.

“As has become painfully clear, the stock market is not, in fact, the economy,” Schneider said. “Recently they are trending quite differently and yes, in a downturn like this if you’re relying on income from work then you’re in a much more vulnerable position.

“This is where the pandemic is very different from the Great Recession,” he added. “During the Great Recession, things happened in financial markets and therefore, of course, the stock market also declined rather rapidly.”

Ken Tuchman, founder of the Englewood-based , saw the largest percentage increase of Colorado’s billionaires — from $1.3 billion in March 2020 to $3.1 billion by Thursday, according to Forbes data. TTEC did not respond to a request for comment.

John Malone, chairman of Liberty Media, gained $2.3 billion over the past year and is now worth $8.1 billion. Pat Stryker, the medical technology heiress and Colorado’s richest woman, took in $900 million and is now worth $2.9 billion. And media heir Gary Magness gained $500 million and is worth $1.6 billion. Messages left with their spokespeople were not returned.

Another thing the pandemic has made clear is that billionaires have “delinked” from the rest of the economy, said , a scholar at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies and author of several books on income inequality.

“I was watching billionaire wealth during the Great Recession in 2008-2009, when the total assets of the Forbes 400 went down for four years, declined with the fortunes of everyone else and didn’t recover to 2007 levels until 2013,” he said. “So, I thought (last year) that the economy’s going to get hammered, wealthy people are going to feel the pain like others, and that is clearly not the case.”

With both Kroenke Sports & Entertainment franchises’ seasons now underway, the regional sports network (RSN) that carries their games, Altitude TV, remains unavailable to Comcast and Dish Network subscribers.

There does not appear to be an end in sight to the 17-month long impasse, either, with no new developments in negotiations, according to Ken Miller, Altitude’s executive vice president and executive producer.

In the case of the Avalanche, Altitude is scheduled to exclusively broadcast 50 of 56 games this season, with NBC Sports carrying the other six.

Altitude’s previous contracts with DirecTV, Comcast and Dish expired within a week of each other in August 2019. DirecTV reached an agreement to re-launch with Altitude on Oct. 31, 2019, but the other two remain in a stalemate.

RELATED: Why Altitude TV went all-in on sports betting as embattled network endures pandemic

“I have Comcast and I’m considering moving to DirecTV,” Avalanche fan John Wegener of Highlands Ranch said. “It is ridiculous. I find it very annoying that these two companies cannot meet in the middle somewhere.”

The Altitude situation is currently at its worst because most restaurants and bars have limited indoor dining service due to Colorado’s recent COVID-19 spike. So the options for Comcast or Dish subscribers are limited.

“Given the way that all sports are hurting and hemorrhaging money, combined with all the rest of us feeling like we’ve been repeatedly clubbed over the head for the past year, if not four years, it seems absurd that these billionaires can’t find a way to throw us a few crumbs while benefiting themselves as well,” Avs fan Cary Wolfson of Boulder said. “We have two potential championship teams that nobody can watch. How is that supposed to build fan loyalty?”

Altitude filed a lawsuit against Comcast last year alleging illegal business tactics, but the final pretrial conference won’t come until April 4, 2022.

Altitude argues that Comcast’s negotiations “make no economic sense” and are part of a plot to buy or eliminate the RSN. Comcast contends Altitude is conflating a “routine commercial disagreement” with a violation of antitrust laws.

U.S. District Judge William Martinez partially denied Comcast����ap request to dismiss the case, per online court records, allowing it to proceed as both sides produce evidence in the discovery phase. Martinez dismissed several Altitude claims within its lawsuit, but he wrote that it “has alleged facts sufficient to show that its allegations of anticompetitive conduct are plausible” against Comcast.

Unofficial Avalanche owner Stan Kroenke (his wife is listed as the club’s owner under KSE) has a 2020 net worth of $8.3 billion, . Brian L. Roberts is the majority owner of . And Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen has a net worth of .

They didn’t create their wealth by making bad business decisions. But can’t they find a way to make a deal that benefits Avalanche and Nuggets fans?

Rider Jensen from Denver is an Avalanche season-ticket holder since the team arrived in Colorado in 1995. He has DirecTV and pays a $40 premium during the NHL season to watch the Avs when they play on the road — and on the rare occasion he doesn’t attend a home game. Jensen said Altitude is not provided on his basic service, but he’s willing to pay the extra charge.

But Jensen still has a beef with Altitude’s inability to find a way to reach Comcast and Dish subscribers. He’s tired of the various Kroenke-led advertisements bashing Comcast and Dish that encourage fans to complain to the providers.

“I’m not looking for a part-time job to protest something, and I’m kind of lucky because I have DirecTV and I can get Altitude,” Jensen said. “But cable is hurting. Streaming is taking over — the Netflix, Hulu. Cable is hurting. I don’t think they can’t afford to pay Altitude what they used to. And if the Avs started their own streaming service, they probably wouldn’t survive.” ]]> /2021/01/16/avalanche-nuggets-fans-no-deal-comcast-dish/feed/ 0 4396880 2021-01-16T16:36:44+00:00 2021-01-17T09:32:22+00:00 /2020/07/24/business-billionaires-ergen-recession-pandemic/ /2020/07/24/business-billionaires-ergen-recession-pandemic/#respond Fri, 24 Jul 2020 12:00:21 +0000 /?p=4178489 While Colorado was grappling this spring and summer with 10% unemployment, a wave of small business closures, a massive state budget crunch and the possible eviction of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, the wealthiest residents of the Centennial State were acquiring billions of dollars more.

Between March 18 and July 22, Colorado’s 10 billionaires increased their net worth by a combined $6.9 billion — a 22% gain — according to Forbes data analyzed by Americans for Tax Fairness. Only two of the 10 lost money in the sudden and stark recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic and accompanying shutdowns.

“So few Americans can live such a fabulously wealthy life while everybody else is toiling away, trying to keep their head above water, trying to make it day to day and struggling,” said Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, a national group that advocates for progressive tax policies.

Charlie Ergen, co-founder and chairman of DISH Network, increased his net worth by about $4 billion, or 73%, in the brutal economic months between mid-March and mid-July, according to the Forbes data. Ken Tuchman, founder of the outsourcing company TTEC, increased his worth by $596 million, or 46%. Both men, through spokespeople for their respective companies, declined to comment this week.

Colorado’s wealthiest person, Phil Anschutz, began the recession with $11 billion and now has $11.7 billion. Its second-wealthiest, media tycoon , had $5.8 billion on March 18 and $6.9 billion by Wednesday, according to the data.

“Folks at the top like this are able to accumulate so much wealth for lots of reasons, but one reason is because their wealth is much more lightly taxed than an average person’s salaries and wages,” said Clemente, a wealth tax proponent. “The growth in their wealth is not even taxed unless they sell their wealth.”

Pat Stryker, a medical technology heir and the wealthiest woman in Colorado, increased her wealth by 29% — from $2 billion to $2.6 billion — in the four months from mid-March to mid-July. A spokesperson for Stryker’s Bohemian Foundation in Fort Collins did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Two of Colorado’s billionaires lost money during the tough economic times this year. James Leprino, CEO of Leprino Foods, watched his net worth go from $3.2 billion in March to $3 billion on Wednesday, according to the Forbes data, and financier Thomas Bailey lost a relatively modest $34 million in that time.