Word: waitt
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Inflation may be at a historic low, but the price of independence is climbing. What better evidence than the ponytailed Ted Waitt, founder and 46% owner of South Dakota's mail-order computer retailer Gateway 2000? Waitt, 34, the son of a fourth-generation cattle broker, has just walked away from a monumental deal with Compaq Computer that would have left him with a personal fortune of more than $3 billion. No, he did not get kicked in the head...
...computer industry's prize catches in Gateway, the iconoclastic Sioux City outfit whose packaging bears the black-and-white markings of a cow's hide but whose burgeoning revenues are 100% filet mignon. Few know or even suspect just how close Pfeiffer came. The contracts were ready, and Waitt had the proverbial pen in hand before he evidently had a cathartic flash and rejected a nearly $7 billion takeover by Compaq. Gateway's current market value is $4.8 billion...
...Waitt, a college dropout who founded Gateway in his father's Iowa farmhouse, put a stop to the deal only days, possibly hours, before it was to be announced. The exact details aren't clear, but at one point Pfeiffer and Waitt met at Waitt's sprawling estate on the Missouri River. Gateway's public relations firm, New York City-based Hill & Knowlton, had begun preparing a press release. Waitt had even dispatched a courier to foreign offices to deliver the news to key executives. But ultimately Waitt couldn't sign on the dotted line. The deal appears to have...
...quantum leap in demand as people who previously couldn't afford a computer rush to buy one on the notion that one day a PC will be as indispensable as a car or TV. Compaq wanted Gateway so it could speedily add capacity to meet the new demand. But Waitt's vision of the future told him the Compaq offer wasn't worth it--not to a billionaire free spirit who values his independence...
...Graphics, which built the microchips for the set-top boxes and huge media servers that are being used to shuttle movies to and from households in Time Warner's Florida test. Others say television will soon be passe. ``There is a critical limitation in set-top boxes,'' argues Theodore Waitt, chief executive of Gateway 2000, which pioneered selling PCs by phone. ``The quality of the picture you get just isn't as good for text-based information as on a computer, and a lot of the information people are going to want will be text-based...