How the World Got Wired

Chapter 12 — Three Ships and a Fire Sale

In the summer of 1999, a cable ship was moving slowly across the cold waters of the North Atlantic. Behind it, far below the surface, it was unspooling a glass-fiber cable as thick as a garden hose, settling it gently onto the seafloor between Britain and the coast of Long Island.

The cable was being laid for a company called Global Crossing. The man who owned Global Crossing was named Gary Winnick. That summer, on paper, Gary Winnick was worth about six billion dollars.

He threw himself a sixtieth birthday party at a hotel in the south of France. People say it cost millions. He flew his friends in from around the world. The cable kept unspooling.

Three years later, that same cable was still on the bottom of the ocean. It was still carrying signals. Nothing about the cable had changed at all.

But Global Crossing was bankrupt. Gary Winnick was no longer worth six billion dollars. The cable he had paid fifteen billion dollars to help lay across the ocean floor was about to be sold to someone else for less than two cents on every dollar he had spent. The people who had worked for him had lost their retirement savings, because they had been paid partly in company stock, and the stock was now worth nothing.

This chapter is about how that happened. Not just to Gary Winnick, but to two other men as well — one a former milkman from Mississippi, and one who ran a company that, for a little while, made up a third of the entire stock market of Canada.

All three companies built pieces of the internet you use every day. All three companies died, between 2002 and 2009. And the pieces they built — the cables, the switches, the patents — were bought, cheaply, by other companies. Some of those other companies became the richest in the history of the world.

It is one of the strangest patterns in business. Sometimes, the people who build a thing are not the people who end up owning it.

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