Craig McCaw Gets Another Kick in the Pants

Craig McCaw is one of the more fascinating billionaire entrepreneurs around. Dyslexic and reclusive, from my interviews with him I'd say he doesn't just think outside the box -- he thinks in circles. At first, that served him well. But in the past decade, McCaw has been kind of the Dave Kingman of wireless communications -- taking huge swings for the fences, and mostly whiffing.

Today looks like a whiff. Sprint Nextel ended what was supposed to be a huge deal for McCaw's latest venture, Clearwire, to build a nationwide WiMax wireless Internet system. Sprint's not giving up on WiMax; it's giving up on Clearwire. Sprint isn't saying why other than they failed to reach a final agreement on the terms.

Meanwhile, today Clearwire reported third quarter numbers, burying key results four paragraphs down. It reported an EBITDA loss of $84 million compared to a loss of $23 million a year before. Clearwire stock is near an all-time low.

McCaw famously built the first nationwide cellular network, then sold it to AT&T in 1994 for $11.5 billion. After that? Well, his XO Communications filed for bankruptcy in 2002, and his mega-project Teledesic basically folded. His first wife won a very public billion-dollar divorce settlement, and now he's married to the Bush Administration's ambassador to Austria. At least she'll be home more now -- she's leaving office by the end of this year.

(Credit: Neal Hamberg/Bloomberg News /Landov)

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