I want you to picture a town. And I don't mean
a suburb or, you know, a bustling little city.
I mean a town so small that if you sneeze on
Main Street, someone on the other side of the
borough probably says, bless you. Right. We are
talking about Cootersport, Pennsylvania. It's
nestled way up in the northern part of the state,
surrounded by forests, very rural, very quiet.
It's absolutely the kind of place that feels
frozen in time. You have the brick buildings,
the local diner, the sense that everybody knows
everybody's business because, frankly, there
isn't that much business to know. Exactly. It
is the last place on Earth you would expect to
be the epicenter of one of the largest, most
catastrophic financial collapses in American
history. But right there in that tiny town was
the headquarters of Adelphia Communications Corporation.
It really is a story of incredible contrast.
On one side, you have this quaint, almost Norman
Rockwell style setting. And on the other, you
have a multibillion dollar empire that imploded
in a way that, well, it shook Wall Street to
its core. We are talking about a company that
started, and I love this detail, with a literal
investment of $300. 300 bucks. That was it. And
from that pocket change, it ballooned into a
cable giant. But when it crashed. It was the
12th largest bankruptcy by assets in United States
history. It's a staggering statistic. I mean,
when you look at the list of major bankruptcies,
you see these massive faceless conglomerates
based in skyscrapers in New York or Houston.
And then you have Adelphia run by a family in
a town where they probably parked their own cars
and walked into the office without a security
detail. That's what we are deep diving into today.
This isn't just a story about numbers on a spreadsheet.
It's a story about a family. It's about hubris.
Oh, yeah. It's about professional hockey teams
buying thousands of acres of forest just to keep.
your backyard view pretty, and a fraud that was
so simple, yet so massive, it's hard to believe
they thought they'd get away with it. And it's
a case study in corporate governance, or rather,
the total lack of it. It touches on the dangers
of off -balance sheet debt, which sounds dry,
but I promise you, in this story, it is anything
but. It's about the psychology of entitlement.
And before we even get into the crime, we have
to talk about the name Adelphia. It sounds very
corporate, maybe a little generic, but it actually
means something specific, doesn't it? It does.
It comes from the Greek word for brothers. Brothers.
Yeah. The company was founded by John Regas and
his brother Gus. And honestly, the irony of that
name becomes absolutely crushing by the end of
this story. This was a company built entirely
on family bonds, on that tight knit blood is
thicker than water trust. Right. The idea that
we're in this together. Exactly. But ultimately,
it was that inability to separate the family
from the corporation that caused the entire structure
to collapse. They treated a publicly traded company
like it was still just the two brothers splitting
a pizza. That is the ultimate blurring of lines.
My money, the company's money. What's the difference?
Well, it turns out the difference was about $2
.3 billion. A very expensive and very illegal
difference. So here is our mission for this deep
dive. We are going to unpack how this massive
cable empire crumbled. We're going to look at
the Christmas tree. Yes, actual Christmas trees
played a role in the investigation. It's true.
We're going to look at the hidden loans and we're
going to try to understand the mindset of a family
that felt they were above the law or perhaps
that they just didn't think the law applied to
family business. And we need to answer a fundamental
question. How does a man who starts with $300
and builds the American dream end up dying with
a legacy of fraud and a prison sentence? To understand
that, we have to go back to the very beginning,
1952. The post -war boom. The American dream
is in full swing. It really was the quintessential
origin story. You have John and Gus Regas. They
are in cooter sport. And you have to remember,
in 1952, television itself is still this exploding
medium. But in rural areas, getting a signal
is a nightmare. Oh, for sure. You had mountains.
You had distance. Right. No satellite, no internet.
If you didn't have a line of sight to the broadcast
tower, you were staring at static. Precisely.
So the opportunity was in community antenna television,
which is what cable was back then. You put a
big antenna on top of a mountain where the signal
is good, run a wire down the hill, and charge
people a few bucks a month to hook into it. And
that's what they did. They bought a local cable
franchise in Cootersport. For exactly $300. Which
is an incredibly modest sum, even for 1952. Adjusted
for inflation, we are talking about maybe, what,
$3 ,000 today? Something like that. It was a
small bet. A tiny bet. But John Regas was diligent.
He was a local guy. He knew the people. And he
provided a service they desperately wanted. He
was connecting them to the world. But they didn't
just sit on Cootersport. I mean, you can't build
a multi -billion dollar empire just by serving
one small town. They had a strategy. They did.
Over the next few decades, they engaged in what
we call a roll -up strategy. The cable industry
is all about scale. It costs a lot of money to
lay the wire. That's your capital expenditure.
Right. Huge upfront cost. Huge. But once the
wire is there... Adding a new customer is cheap.
So the more customers you have, the better your
margins. The whole game is density. So they just
started buying up other little cable companies
in neighboring towns. Exactly. They aggressively
acquired other systems. They expanded out of
Cootersport into other parts of Pennsylvania,
then New York, and eventually all across the
country. They were consolidating a very fragmented
market. And to fuel that kind of growth, you
need capital. You can't just do that on the profits
from... basic cable subscriptions. No way. You
need Wall Street money. So they went public.
They listed the company on the Nasdaq under the
ticker symbol ADLAC. Now, this is a pivotal moment
because once you go public, the rules change
completely. Completely. You aren't just John
and Gus running a business anymore. You have
shareholders. You have the SEC. You have quarterly
earnings calls. You have a fiduciary duty to
people who don't have the last name Regus. And
this is where the friction started. even if it
wasn't visible yet. The Regas family retained
control both in terms of management and voting
power, but they were now playing with other people's
money. But for a long time, nobody cared about
the governance, right? Because the stock was
doing great, the company was growing. That's
the golden rule of Wall Street. As long as the
line on the chart is going up, nobody asks too
many questions. And for Adelphia... That line
went up for a long, long time. If we fast forward
to the peak around 1998 to 2001, they were a
monster. Give us the stats. How big do they get?
By 1998, they had over 2 million subscribers.
They were one of the largest cable providers
in the United States. And they weren't just doing
TV anymore. They had diversified. Right, because
the late 90s was the dot -com boom. Cable wasn't
just about sitcoms anymore. It was about the
pipes for the Internet. The high -speed connection
was everything. Exactly. In 1989, they established
Adelphia Media Services for commercial opportunities
and advertising. Then in 1991, they launched
Adelphia Business Solutions. This was their play
for the B2B market, providing high -speed internet,
phone services, voice messaging for businesses.
They were positioning themselves as a full -service
telecommunications giant. It really felt like
they had made it. If you were looking at them
from the outside, this was a massive success
story. A small -town family makes good, conquers
the industry, and becomes a major player on the
national stage. And that success masked the rot.
When you were growing that fast, acquiring companies
left and right, Your balance sheet gets incredibly
complicated. And in that complexity, it is very,
very easy to hide things. And that brings us
to the turning point. The year 2002. The bubble
bursts. The year everything changed. And it happened
so fast. So set the scene for us. It's March
27, 2002. Adelphi officials hold a conference
call or they put out a press release. Yeah. And
I imagine the analysts on the other end of the
line nearly dropped their phones. It was an absolute
bombshell. They announced that there was a massive
discrepancy in their financials. We aren't talking
about a rounding error or some bad forecast.
No. We are talking about $2 .3 billion in unrecorded
debt. Okay, we need to pause and really unpack
this. $2 .3 billion. How do you hide that? It's
not like losing your keys in the couch cushions.
This is the GDP of a small country. How does
a public company keep $2 .3 billion off the books?
This is where we have to get a little technical
because the mechanism itself is fascinatingly
simple in a way. It involves something called
co -borrowing. Co -borrowing. It sounds innocent
enough, like co -signing a loan for your kid's
first car. In principle, it is similar, but on
a massive corporate scale. Here's how it worked.
Adelphia, the public company, had access to huge
lines of credit from banks to fund their operations
and acquisitions. Okay, standard stuff. But the
Regas family also had private companies, entities
that were not part of Adelphia but were owned
by the family, organized under a trust called
Highland Holdings. Okay, so you have the public
company bucket and the private family bucket.
Yeah. They should be separate, church and state.
Precisely. But Adelphia and the family entities
entered into these co -borrowing agreements.
This meant that the family's private entities
could draw down cash from Adelphia's corporate
credit lines. So the family is taking cash out
of the public company's credit card? Yes. But
here is the trick and the fraud. Adelphia was
jointly and severally liable for all of it. That
means if the family took out a billion dollars
through their private company and couldn't pay
it back, Adelphia, the public company and its
shareholders was on the hook for the entire amount.
OK, that sounds really risky. But if they disclosed
it properly, is it illegal? That's the catch.
They didn't disclose the extent of it properly.
On Adelphia's balance sheet, they wouldn't show
the full amount of the debt as a liability for
the company. They treated it as if it were the
family's debt, even though the company was legally
on the hook for it. They were netting it out,
hiding the true leverage. So investors are looking
at Adelphia thinking, oh, they have X amount
of debt. That seems manageable. But in reality,
they have X plus two point three billion dollars
of debt that could drop on their heads any moment.
Exactly. It completely distorted the financial
health of the company. It made Adelphia look
much more stable and much less risky than it
actually was. It's like finding out your spouse
has a. secret second mortgage on the house that
they never told you about, but you are legally
required to pay it if they stop making payments.
That is a very, very apt analogy. And the question
then becomes, what was the family doing with
all that money? Because $2 .3 billion is a lot
of spending money. It wasn't just going into
building out the cable network. Oh, this is where
it gets really interesting. And frankly, this
is the part that makes you angry. Because it
wasn't just bad business investments. It wasn't
like they were trying to invent a new type of
cable box and failed. It was a personal piggy
bank. The investigation revealed that the Regas
family was using these public funds drawn from
these co -borrowing agreements for illegitimately
purchasing personal luxuries and assets. The
lines were just gone. Let's look at the shopping
list. Because when the feds raided the place
and went through the books, they found some items
that just make you shake your head. First off,
17 company cars. Which is excessive, certainly,
but you could almost argue executive transport
if you squint really hard. But then it gets much
harder to justify. Christmas trees. Yes, Christmas
trees. The sources specifically mention Christmas
trees. Now, I don't know about you, but a nice
Christmas tree is maybe $100, $200. How many
trees do you have to buy for it to show up as
a line item in a federal fraud investigation?
It implies a massive amount, or perhaps they
were flying in designer trees from, I don't know,
Norway for every single property they owned.
But it speaks to a lack of boundaries. When you
are using shareholder money to buy holiday decorations
for your personal homes, you have completely
lost touch with the concept of fiduciary duty.
It's the pettiness of it, right? If you're stealing
billions, why bother stealing the Christmas tree
money? It shows a mindset of, I own all of this.
It's all mine. And that mindset is perfectly,
perfectly... illustrated by the timberland purchase.
Oh, the Cootersport land purchase. This is my
favorite example of rich guy insanity in this
whole story. It is absolutely breathtaking. They
bought 3 ,600 acres of timberland and they paid
$26 million for it using company money. And just
to be clear, Adelphi is a cable company. They
run wires. They don't log forests. Why on earth
did they buy this land? According to the investigation,
the prior motivation was to preserve the view
in the backyard of John Regas' home. To preserve
the view. They spent $26 million of other people's
money so they wouldn't have to look at it. A
neighbor? A logging truck? It's just wild. It
suggests the Regas family viewed the public company's
cash as their own personal wallet. They wanted
a nice view. The company had cash, so the company
bought the view. This is the core psychological
failure here. They didn't see a distinction between
Adelphia, the corporation, and the Regas family.
In their minds, they built it, so they owned
it. Every single penny of it. It's the founder's
trap. You start it in your garage or with $300
in Cootersport, and you think it's yours forever,
even after you take millions from investors.
You forget that you sold a piece of the soul
of the company in exchange for that capital.
And that entitlement didn't stop at land and
cars. It extended into the world of professional
sports. And this is where the visibility of the
fraud became impossible to miss because you can
hide a loan document in a footnote, but you can't
hide a hockey arena. Right. Let's talk about
the sports ventures because nothing says I have
too much money and power like buying a professional
sports team. It is the ultimate status symbol
for the ultra wealthy. In 1997, John Regas bought
the NHL's Buffalo Sabres. The Sabres. Now, as
a sports fan. Owning a team sounds cool, but
from a business perspective, sports teams are
notoriously difficult investments, aren't they?
They're often money pits. They are often vanity
projects. They lose money operationally, but
gain value as an asset over time. The problem
was the Sabres were consistently losing money
at the time Regus bought them. They were bleeding
cash. So how do you plug the hole in a sinking
ship? If the team is losing millions every year,
who pays the players? Well, in a normal world,
the owner writes a check from his personal funds.
But in the Regus world, you use the other ship's
fuel. The investigation found that misappropriated
Adelphia funds were being used to subsidize the
hockey team. So they were just siphoning money.
Directly. Siphoning money from the cable company
to keep the hockey team afloat. Wait, how did
they even justify that on the books? Did they
claim Adelphia was getting some massive advertising
value from the Sabres? That was the cover story,
of course. But the amounts were completely disproportionate
to any marketing value. They were just wiring
cash to cover payroll and operations, essentially
treating the cable subscribers in Florida and
California as the financiers of a hockey team
in Buffalo. And the consequences of this were
immediate once the law got involved. Oh, absolutely.
The day John Regas and his sons were arrested,
the NHL had to step in immediately. They seized
control of the franchise. Imagine that. You were
the owner one day sitting in the luxury box,
and the next day the league says, nope, we'll
take the keys, you're going to jail. The team
remained a ward of the league until 2003 when
it was eventually sold to Tom Golisano. But it
wasn't just the team itself. Adelphia tried to
build a whole sports ecosystem. They wanted to
be a media mogul, not just a cable provider.
They had the Empire Sports Network, right? A
regional channel. Yes. Launched in 1990. A regional
sports network serving Central and Western New
York. And they also owned a radio station, WNSA.
See, that makes sense on paper. Vertical integration.
You own the cable distribution. You own the TV
network. You own the team that plays on the network.
It's what Ted Turner did. It's what Comcast does
now. It is a sound strategy, provided you are
paying for it with legitimate capital and the
businesses are sustainable. But here, the synergy
was fueled by the same pot of tainted money.
It was a house of cards. They were propping up
losing businesses with fraud. And speaking of
names on buildings, we have to talk about Nashville,
Tennessee. Ah, yes. The Adelphia Coliseum. In
1999, they bought the naming rights to the brand
new stadium for the Tennessee Titans. Now, here's
what's funny to me. Adelphia wasn't even a big
player in Nashville, were they? Not really. They
had a small subsidiary there, Adelphia Business
Solutions, which was trying to compete with Bell
South. But buying the stadium rights wasn't about
local advertising. It was a massive marketing
play. It was about projecting an image of national
dominance. It's the ego play. We are big. We
are powerful. Our name is on an NFL stadium on
Monday night football. Exactly. It signals to
Wall Street that you are a tier one company.
But that image shattered very, very quickly.
They bought the rights in 1999. By 2002, after
the scandal broke and they missed a payment,
the name was stripped off the building. And for
four years, the stadium didn't even have a sponsor.
It was just called the Coliseum. It stood as
a kind of monument to the failure, a blank space
where the Adelphia name used to be. It was a
physical reminder of how quickly the empire had
just evaporated. So we have the cars, the trees,
the land, the hockey team, the stadium. It's
all built on this $2 .3 billion lie. But gravity
always wins. You can't levitate forever. No,
the crash is inevitable. So let's walk through
the collapse, because once that thread was pulled,
the whole sweater unraveled incredibly fast.
The speed was breathtaking. We go from the revelation
of the debt in late March 2002 to John Regas
resigning as CEO in May, just two months later.
He was indicted for bank fraud, wire fraud, and
securities fraud. And then... the bankruptcy
filing. June 26, 2002. As we mentioned at the
start, this was the 12th largest bankruptcy by
assets in U .S. history. To give you a sense
of the scale, they needed a $1 .5 billion loan
just to restructure under bankruptcy protection,
just to keep the lights on and the cable signals
flowing while they figured out the mess. The
SEC didn't mince words about this, did they?
They must have been furious. No. They called
it one of the most extensive financial frauds
ever to take place at a public company. And you
have to remember, this is in the era of Enron
and WorldCom. Right. We are talking about the
Hall of Shame of the early 2000s. The competition
for worst fraud was... And Adelphia was right
up there on the podium. So it goes to trial.
And this is where the narrative battles play
out. The federal prosecutors lay it all out.
They show this complicated cash management system
that spread money around to hide the debts. Prosecutors
painted a very clear picture of a family that
treated the company as their personal fiefdom.
They proved that distinct from the debt hiding,
the family had simply looted about $100 million
specifically for themselves. That's the Christmas
tree and Timberland money. That wasn't debt support.
That was just theft. What was the defense? I
mean, how do you defend against that? I didn't
know I couldn't buy a forest with company money.
Their defense was largely that they intended
to pay it all back. that the lines between the
family entities and the public company were blurry
because the family was the company. They argued
it wasn't malicious theft, but rather sloppy
accounting and a chaotic corporate structure.
They tried to portray John Regas as a confused
old man who was out of his depth with the complex
financing, not a mastermind criminal. The jury
didn't buy it. Not at all. The verdict came down
in June 2005. John Regas, the father, the patriarch,
he was found guilty of looting and debt hiding.
He was sentenced to 15 years in prison. And his
son, Timothy, he was the CFO. Timothy Regas,
who was the CFO, the one who really should have
known better regarding the financials, received
20 years. Wow. That is serious time, especially
for white -collar crime back then. It is. In
2007, they reported to the Butner Federal Correctional
Complex. It was a humiliating... devastating
end. They were led away in handcuffs, the empire
in ruins. And here is where I think we need to
pause and look at the nuance because there is
a detail here that makes Adelphia different from
the other big scandals of that time. It's really
fascinating. Yes. This is the part that fascinates
legal scholars and psychologists. The New York
Times made a very, very keen observation. In
a lot of these fraud cases, think pump and dump,
the executives know the ship is sinking. They
see the real numbers. They know it's over. So
what do they do? They sell. They cash out. They
exercise their stock options, dump the shares
on the market while telling everyone else to
buy. Exactly. They secure their own lifeguards
while the passengers drown. But the Riggises
didn't do that. They didn't sell their stock.
No. They held their stock. They wrote it all
the way down to zero. In fact, in some cases,
they were buying more stock or putting up more
collateral to try and save the share price as
it was cratering. So wait, if they weren't trying
to cash out and run, what were they doing? Why
commit fraud if you aren't going to take the
money and run? It doesn't quite add up. That
is the tragic question. The evidence suggests
they weren't trying to trick investors solely
to get rich and flee. They were trying to hide.
inconvenient facts until they could fix them.
They believed, perhaps delusionally, that if
they just move the money around long enough,
the business would grow. The debts could be paid
off and no one would ever know. So it wasn't
pure malice. It was delusion, a belief that they
could still land the plane. The New York Times
called it a more tragic crime than ordinary looting.
It implies they really believed their own hype.
They thought they could fix it. They viewed the
company as their child. You don't abandon your
child. You do whatever it takes to save it, even
if whatever it takes is completely illegal. That
almost makes it scarier. A crook who knows he's
a crook might stop when he has enough money.
A delusional CEO who thinks he's saving the company
will keep digging the hole until the entire earth
collapses on top of him. Precisely. It raises
the question. Is it more dangerous to have a
greedy leader or a delusional one? The greedy
leader acts rationally in their own self -interest.
The delusional leader acts irrationally, believing
they are the savior. The Reguses went down with
the ship. They destroyed themselves along with
the shareholders. They lost everything. And speaking
of going down with the ship, let's look at what
happened to John Regus personally. Yeah. Because
this is where the story takes a turn that feels
like it's straight out of a movie script. It
really does. So John Regus goes to prison in
2007. He is an old man by this point in his 80s.
Fast forward to 2015. Based on this, he requested
compassionate release. Which makes sense. If
you have a month to live, the system often lets
you go home to die in your own bed rather than
a prison infirmary. It happens. And the judge
granted it. Judge Kimball Wood issued the order
in February 2016. John Regas was released to
spend his final weeks with his family back in
Cootersport. It was a mercy release, a final
act. But he didn't die in six months. No. He
defied the doctors completely. How long did he
live after being released? He lived for five
more years. Five years. He didn't pass away until
September 2021 at the age of 96. So he essentially
got a five year reprieve from his prison sentence
due to a medical prognosis that turned out to
be quite off the mark. That is. Well, it's something.
Talk about defying the odds in every sense. He
survived the rise, the fall, the prison and even
the terminal diagnosis. It adds another layer
to the legend, doesn't it? The man who wouldn't
give up control, wouldn't sell his stock and
wouldn't even die when he was supposed to. But
while John was living out his final years back
in cooter sport. What happened to the company?
What happened to the 15 ,000 employees who were
stuck in the middle of all this? That's the collateral
damage we often forget. The employees didn't
commit the fraud, but they lived through the
chaos, the uncertainty. The cleanup was messy
and took years. A restructuring plan was approved
in 2004. The new CEO, William Schleyer, had to
come in and stabilize the ship. He made a point
to emphasize the relentless effort of the employees
who kept the cable running while the executives
were on trial. And in a bankruptcy like this,
there is always a fight over the scraps. Who
got paid? Who got left with nothing? The possession
lenders, the bank lenders, the joint venture
partners, the big institutional money, they got
full cash payments. They were made whole. And
the Regas family, did they salvage anything from
the wreckage? Zero. The bankruptcy plan explicitly
stated no payments to claims and equities of
the Regas family. They were wiped out completely.
They forfeited their assets to help pay back
the restitution. And finally, the empire was
sold off for parts. Adelphia ceased to exist.
In July 2006. Adelphia sold its assets for $17
.6 billion to two giants, Comcast and Time Warner
Cable. So let's translate this for the listener.
If you were living in an Adelphia service area
in 2006, maybe in Los Angeles or Cleveland or
Buffalo. You went to bed one night with an Adelphia
cable box and you woke up the next morning as
a Comcast or Time Warner customer. Exactly. Time
Warner Cable actually distributed about $6 billion
in shares to the Adelphia stakeholders as part
of the deal. So there was some recovery for them.
But the Adelphia name vanished from the bills,
absorbed into these larger entities. Time Warner
Cable later became Spectrum, of course. So the
name is gone. The stadium is renamed. The family
is disgraced. The founder is dead. But... Are
they gone? Is the story really over? Not entirely.
And this is the final surprise that most people
don't know about this story. The zombie company.
I love this part of it. You could call it that.
The Regus family. Specifically, the other brothers
and family members who weren't in prison established
a successor company called Zito Media. Zito Media.
They operate in some of the areas that weren't
sold to Time Warner and Comcast, specifically
in Potter County, Pennsylvania. Back in Cootersport.
Back in Cootersport. In fact, the visual here
is absolutely striking. Adelphia had built this
massive, opulent headquarters in Cootersport
right before the crash. It was called the Taj
Mahal of Potter County, a symbol of their power.
And who is in that building now? Let me guess.
Zito Media. The Regas family is back in the same
building running a cable company in the same
town. So the family is still in the cable business.
In the same town. Yeah. In the same building.
It's like the ghost of the empire refused to
leave. It shows a level of resilience or perhaps
stubbornness that is hard to comprehend. They
return to their roots on a much, much smaller
scale, but they are still there. It brings the
story full circle from Cootersport to the heights
of Wall Street and all the way back to Cootersport.
That is wild. It really drives home the point
that this was. At its core, a local story that
just got way too big for its own good. I think
that's the perfect way to put it. So what does
this all mean? We've looked at the rise, the
$2 .3 billion fraud, the hockey teams, the prison
sentences. When you step back. What is the big
takeaway here? I think a primary lesson is about
corporate governance and the danger of the family
business mentality when applied to a public corporation.
You cannot treat a billion dollar public entity
like a personal fiefdom. The mechanisms of control,
the board, the auditors, they all failed to stop
a family that felt entitled to the cash. They
failed to ask the hard questions because, well,
the stock price was high. It's the Christmas
trees for me. It's the Timberland. It's the idea
that I built this so I can take it. Take this.
Even when this belongs to thousands of shareholders.
It's a warning about what happens when founders
refuse to transition from being builders into
being stewards. And believe in your own hype.
The Timberland Purchase shows a complete detachment
from reality. They thought they were untouchable.
They thought the rules of gravity simply didn't
apply to them. And that leads to our final provocative
thought for you, the listener. We touched on
it earlier, but I want you to really think about
this. The Riguses didn't sell their stock. They
went down with the ship, believing, however delusionally,
that they could fix the hidden deck. So as an
investor or even just an employee, what is more
dangerous, a CEO who is a calculated crook robbing
the place blind and planning an escape or a CEO
who is so delusional, so convinced of their own
genius that they believe they can hide billions
of dollars of debt and somehow make it all work
out in the end? One runs away with your money.
The other one drives the bus off the cliff with
you inside thinking you can make it. fly. Exactly.
And the delusional one is often much, much harder
to spot because their belief, it feels like passion.
It feels like commitment until it's way too late.
That is a terrifying thought to leave you with.
Check your portfolio, everyone. Make sure your
CEOs are sane, not just passionate. Indeed. Thank
you for listening to this deep dive into Adelphia.
It's a wild ride from $300 to $17 billion and
back again. It certainly is. We will see you
on the next deep dive. Stay curious.