Given Craig's aspirations to be just like his dad, the loss was devastating. From his early teens, Craig eagerly spent most summers learning his father's business, selling cable television subscriptions door-to-door. In return for his dedication, Craig garnered more than his share of the elder McCaw's attention—when he sold one of his radio properties for $10 million in 1962, Elroy McCaw sent a 13-year-old Craig into the bank alone to deposit the check. In addition to the immeasurable emotional damage inflicted by the death of the McCaw patriarch, there were very estimable financial consequences. After the IRS and other creditors had picked over the debt-laden McCaw companies, the family estate was reduced to one cable television company, Twin Cities Cablevision, and a life insurance payment of $2 million—insolvent by gentry standards. Craig assumed control of the family's finances—he took a year off from Stanford to help his mother and, after returning to college, ran Twin Cities from his dorm room. Immediately following graduation, Craig took over the cable franchise, and became Mr. McCaw. In the 25 years since then, he has built and sold two companies—Twin Cities and McCaw Cellular—for over $12 billion. He currently has multimillion (and in some cases multibillion) dollar interests in an assortment of communications companies. Carillon Point, Washington On one of the rare clear days in Seattle, the view from the offices that house Eagle River Investments, the company that oversees the McCaw family fortune, is spectacular—across Lake Washington sits the city skyline, the snow-capped Olympic mountains hovering in the distance. A location clearly chosen by one reared in the Northwest and influenced by its environmental ways. In the six years since selling McCaw Cellular to AT&T, Mr. McCaw has been active in charitable and environmental efforts: in 1997, he donated $1 million to Seattle public schools, the largest gift ever to a Washington school district; in 1998, he sponsored the release of Keiko, the killer whale of "Free Willy" fame, and called his brief swim with Keiko "the greatest experience of my life"; also in 1998, he attempted to head off a whale hunt by the Makah, a local American Indian tribe; most recently, when Nelson Mandela was through Seattle for December's World Trade Organization summit, he contributed $15 million to the former South African president's charity. His philanthropy, though substantial, comes without the usual contrived public relations fanfare. In fact, his magnanimity receives press in spite of, not because of, the combined efforts of Mssrs. McCaw and Ratliffe. The stories of his personal benefaction don't scream from the covers of this week's business journals, rather they are bits that must be weeded from the depths of Mr. McCaw's local newspaper, the Seattle Times. Even on the rare occasion Mr. McCaw concedes to discuss his latest audacious business venture, Teledesic, a $9 billion satellite system that will provide global broadband access, he sounds more like a human rights activist than a meticulous communications entrepreneur. From a 1998 interview with Business Week magazine: "Our dream in Teledesic is that we can change a paradigm, which is, 'You have to go to the city in order to have opportunity.' In every way I can think of, tearing people from their communities as a choice between prosperity or being poor is unacceptable." From a 1997 interview in Fortune magazine: "Take a poor village in Guatemala. They have electricity; they have television; they see our riches and they want them. But where they are, they cannot have them. They don't have communications, and they don't have the tools to make money. Yet they have crops or they weave blankets, things that could be quite valuable if there were not so many middlemen. Indigenous societies would be able to survive, rather than disintegrate as young men and women leave to seek work in the city." Hunts Point, Washington But is Craig McCaw actually different? The imposing fence that surrounds his latest residence—a 12,200-square-foot mansion that he recently purchased, somewhat comically, from Kenneth Gorelick, aka Kenny G—offers no clues. It might it be that Mr. McCaw is just another disingenuous billionaire do-gooder, with a PR machine so refined as to give him an aura of mystery. Craig McCaw as the post-modern entrepreneur. Armed with scads of money, it is simple for Mr. McCaw to pick his spots, doling out the occasional millions, a pittance after all. Mr. McCaw's youth provides two crucial clues to the person behind the persona—his dyslexia accounts for his disinterest in publicity, his relationship with his father offers a window into his professional inspiration. However, what we still lack from Mr. McCaw's narrative—hidden behind his veil of privacy—is an explanation of his altruistic motivations. It might be that an explanation would ultimately prove an injustice. Perhaps his role in the theater of 21st century entrepreneurs is that of the foil—by virtue of his consistent and silent detachment, we are reminded how ludicrous all of the intimate publicity and hype surrounding the business of technology really is. Perhaps Mr. McCaw is best left as an enigma—the refreshingly private, ostensibly well-intentioned exception that proves the absurdity of technology's noise-ridden, dollar-driven rule. Perhaps.

Start Founders' Note Dateline Dispatches about the interaction of culture and technology. Through a lens People use cameras to answer a question. Backlash Killthedot.com Translator Software interprets the classics Send-up Satire and ridicule. Features Silicon Valley The Enigmatic Craig McCaw Finish Fiction "Cyber-sized" History of... the typewriter. The Watch Reviews and commentary Wind-up Physicist Carver Mead explains why innovation requires courage and luck.

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