Craig McCaw Profile

When Craig McCaw's father died, his mother was forced to liquidate the family businesses one by one to pay his debts and taxes. All that was left was one tiny cable system in Centralia, Washington. While only a sophomore in college, Craig McCaw took the helm of the business.

He expanded the cable business and gradually switched into the new and untested field of cellular telephone service. He borrowed astronomic sums, gambling that the portable phone, a standard feature of the millionaire's limousine, would become a fixture in the workman's pick-up truck. By the end of the 1980s, McCaw's Cellular One was the best known brand in the business, and McCaw Cellular had built a national network that dwarfed its competitors.

McCaw sold the cellular business to AT&T for $11.5 billion, only to embark on an even more ambitious venture, to bring the information age to the farthest corners of the earth, through satellite venture Teledesic. He continues to lead the progress of wireless communications as Chairman of Clearwire, a wireless broadband Internet provider.