Yummy Century Egg 的 Guowei Zhang 谈 EchoStar $SATS

You're about to listen to the yet another value podcast. Today I have Weey from Yummy Century Stocks on. This is my favorite new Substack. I I'd encourage you to go check it out. He's done such incredible work on the company stock we're going to talk about today. That is Echoar. The ticker is SATS. Listen to the disclaimer at the end because this is a company that found AK and said, "Hey, we're about to skip our interest payments. We might go into bankruptcy." But it is a fascinating fascinating situation. Over a decade of interesting legal, political situations, um, every player you can imagine is in it. All my friends who are in hedge funds, credit funds, distress funds, they're long, they're short, they're all over the capital structure. It is one of the most interesting stocks in the stock market today. I I don't I feel pretty comfortable saying that. So, he has done incredible work on this. I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation. We go through all sorts of different things. Uh, it just touches on everything. So, we'll get to that, but first, a word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by FinTool. Fin is the AI junior analyst tailored specifically for individual investors. Everyone in finance is racing to figure out how AI can best be integrated into their investment process. And one of the biggest areas that is catching on with institutional investors is analyzing SEC filings and earnings call transcripts. Vool takes hours of combing through filings and control effing transcripts down to seconds. Whether it's comparing the current call with prior quarters, finding that sneaky change in the footnotes, or compiling the key facts into an easy to digest one pager, FinTool is saving you hours so that you can go deeper and search wider because your time is better spent turning over more rocks or researching the things that AI can't. Go to fintool.com to transform your research process. That's finttool.com. All right. Hello and welcome to the yet another value podcast.

I'm your host, Andrew Walker. With me today, I'm happy to have on for the first time—and I'm going to go ahead and say it—by far the best Substack that I've seen launched so far this year, from Yummy Century Stocks. Guowei Zhang, how's it going?

Good. How are you? Thank you for the kind words.

I told you before, I just discovered your Substack 2 weeks ago. I read half of 1 post and thought, “This guy has a serious distressed hedge fund and private equity background. There's absolutely no doubt about it.” Your coverage of the situation we're going to talk about today has been fascinating and spot-on. We'll dive into that in 1 second, but before we get there, a quick disclaimer: Nothing on this podcast is investing advice. Always do your own research.

This company literally put out an 8-K 2 weeks ago that said, “Hey, we're not paying interest payments on our bonds. We've got 30 days, or else it's an event of default.” If that doesn't scream “Do your own research, do your own work, not investing advice,” I don't know what does. See the full disclaimer at the end of the episode.

Anyway, the company we want to talk about today is EchoStar, the ticker SATS. This is the merger. This is Charlie Ergen's kind of zombie-Frankenstein mashup of the old DISH Network plus EchoStar. But I'll turn it over to you. What is EchoStar, and why are they so interesting?

Sure. I'll start with a general overview of how they look now, and then we can get into how they got to this place and what's going on with the FCC. EchoStar is a holding company. They have 3 main businesses.

The first is the Hughes satellite business. This is a satellite broadband business. That business is being disrupted by Starlink, and as a result, it's a melting ice cube. There's about $1.5 billion of bonds in that business, but for our conversation, that's zero equity value to EchoStar. So we can disregard that. That's another topic.

The second business is their pay-TV business. This is their DISH TV business. That's also a melting ice cube for a lot of obvious reasons, but that business has about $12 billion of debt. They generate a lot of cash—$2.6 billion of EBITDA—but there's a little bit of equity value. It depends on your views here. For our conversation today, we can view that as zero equity value as well.

2 for 3: zero, zero, zero, zero.

So I got the easy stuff out of the way. Now the more complicated stuff is the wireless business. The wireless business has been this saga for the last 15 years.

Charlie Ergen started accumulating spectrum starting in 2008. He accumulated a very robust portfolio of spectrum, and over the last 5 years, he built this network—this very unique, spanking-new network. But the problem is that this network is losing a lot of money. It hasn't gotten traction in the consumer market, and it hasn't gotten traction in the wholesale and enterprise markets either.

So they're stuck in a very tough spot. They are highly levered. There's about $13 billion of external debt in this wireless business, but there's a lot of assets trapped in this vehicle that's losing a boatload of money.

That's the issue when analysts look at this business. They say, “Okay, the spectrum has definite value, but how do we get from the current situation to a point where shareholders can actually see that value, can see that cash flow?”

So, 2 months ago, the FCC came in and started investigating their spectrum holdings. Specifically, SpaceX came in and wanted to use a part of their spectrum for its satellite services.

Carr obviously is a very political person. He's the chairman of the FCC.

Yep. Right.

At the time, Musk and Trump were buddies, or maybe are buddies. I'm not exactly sure. So Carr saw an opportunity to push EchoStar to free some of the spectrum that's in the portfolio right now, which makes sense from his perspective.

Carr has been a very vocal proponent of freeing up spectrum and serving the public good. He has this running feud with Charlie Ergen over the last at least 10 years about Charlie Ergen warehousing spectrum. There have been multiple points in the last 10 years when he's been vocal about EchoStar.

So he saw an opportunity to free up spectrum and put some pressure on EchoStar. Here we are: 2 weeks ago, Ergen came out with an 8-K saying that, “We don't have the certainty that we need to run our network anymore.” As a result, they're going to stop their buildout and stop their coupon payments.

They have 30 days, which is coming up in exactly 10 days. They have a 30-day grace period, after which the bondholders can accelerate, and that will push the company into bankruptcy.

That was a fantastic overview. I agree with you: Hughes, throw it to the side. DISH, throw it to the side. If you got any equity value from either of those as a shareholder, you'd probably be pretty happy.

Let's talk about the wireless business and the spectrum that backs it up. I have followed this company for a long time. I was long DISH for a while back in 2017 and 2018, at the height of the spectrum story. DISH has had a ton of spectrum, and people were saying, “Verizon's going to need to buy these guys.” There was a spectrum shortage. Everyone saw what Charlie saw: spectrum value. I remember he said, “I think it goes up, up, up, up.” It's the critical thing.

Since 2000, T-Mobile buys Sprint, and they had to divest a lot of assets to DISH. DISH was supposed to become the 4th wireless player through Boost Mobile and its network.

Over the past 5 years, as I've talked to hedge fund friends, you'll hear a lot of different things about buying EchoStar. Some will say, “Hey, I like it. Everyone likes it for the spectrum.” But some will say, “Hey, they're building a new, ground-up network. It's going to be 5G-native. They can support all of this.”

Because they're building a network from the ground up, they don't have to support 3G. They can do everything. Their spectrum is all going to be dedicated to 5G. They can optimize in a lot of ways. We think this is going to be a killer network.

I just want to ask you: Should we be thinking about positive value from the wireless business, or should we really just be focusing on the spectrum? How do you feel about that?

You don't have a network without spectrum. So you can't assign any value in a liquidation to the network.

The network itself sounds great on paper—absolutely fantastic on paper. It's 5G, cloud-native, and Open RAN. 5G means they don't have 3G and 4G networks to support, like you said, so it's very cheap.

Cloud-native means they put a lot of hardware into the cloud in the form of software, so it's very easy to update. That's great for the company that has this network.

Open RAN is a very interesting architecture where they plug and play different hardware and software. They don't have to buy an integrated system from Nokia and Ericsson. That's a very cheap thing to do if they can get it working.

The whole network is 70% cheaper to build than a legacy network, which sounds great on paper. Everything sounds great on paper, right? But the issue with this network is that it's new and untested. Integration has been a challenge, and there have been technical issues with it.

They haven't built it out yet. The headline number is 80% coverage in terms of population, but they only have 24,000 towers up right now.

You look at the other guys, the carriers: they have anywhere between 60,000 and 70,000 towers, right? We say it's 80% buildout, but to get from here to a full network, you not only need substantially more towers; you need spectrum.

They have a good portfolio of spectrum, but in order for them to run a full network and support, let's say, I don't know, 50 to 100 million subscribers, you need double the spectrum. Where are you going to get that spectrum? How much is that going to cost?

It's hard for me to think about the value of the network without the spectrum. It's so new and so unique. It's not like T-Mobile will buy that network and plug it into their existing network in an easy way. You're kind of left with this: it's a unique asset. I see the benefit of it, but we also have to be realistic that it has a lot of issues so far.

I want to make a very important point, which is that 5G, cloud-native, Open RAN sounds great only for the operator, only from DISH's perspective. From the consumer's standpoint, they can't tell the difference. Even if you get it working right, they can't tell the difference. We can say that the network was built for wholesale or enterprise customers, but that market is very small. You can't build a full network and have this $60 billion portfolio of spectrum supporting just the enterprise business.

For me—and we should probably just move on to the spectrum—I always thought the wireless thing was interesting because, look, I'm not saying T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T are perfect, but a wireless business is a huge fixed-cost business, right? Your marginal cost to add a subscriber is very low. Everyone's already got a cell phone.

We saw what happened with a fourth-place player. Sprint had huge issues, but they were terrible. I always thought with DISH it was like, "Hey, cool. You're going to build a new network. Cable's coming, too. By the way, now they're on an MVNO." I know there are rumors that maybe Boost and DISH serve as the MVNO for cable, but I've seen what happens to the fourth-place player before. That was Sprint, which had a base of customers and a base of stores.

You build out a new DISH fourth network. You mentioned 50 to 100 million people. Great—we have to go steal 50 to 100 million people from AT&T. There are huge marketing costs. You start a price war and destroy the whole industry. None of the industry was that profitable when there were 4 players.

Now there's kind of like 5, because DISH will be the fourth and the local cable provider will be the fifth everywhere. It sounds nice on paper, but in theory you just start a price war, and it's really hard for me to see how you underwrite those returns. I always thought the NPV of the wireless business was negative, though obviously there were huge tails on both sides. I'll let you comment on that, and then we should probably just talk about the spectrum, because that's really the main course here.

Yeah. First of all, I don't want to take anything away from Charlie Ergen. He's a very, very unique visionary. I don't want to come out sounding negative about what he's doing. I actually respect him a lot, and I don't want to sound bearish on this situation. I'm actually very bullish on the situation, but I just want to be realistic here.

Look, I agree with you. We're just talking about wireless.

And I do agree with you on Charlie. I mentioned this on the Koyfin podcast, which was, I believe, 2 episodes ago. Charlie has taught me a lot for the Cogent podcast in the future: smartest man in the room, which most people who interact with Charlie will say—he's the smartest man in the room in every room he's in.

Smartest man in the room. Super-complicated story and a lot of leverage. For Dish, for 10 years, it has not worked out well. And then I see EchoStar, and I'm like, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check.

Yeah, let's talk about the spectrum. I think the spectrum is the most interesting, but go ahead.

Let me come back to you regarding the wireless business. The 3 carriers are running very competitive businesses. They've segmented their customers very, very well. Charter and Comcast have been successful over the last 2 years in taking away business, but that's only because of the bundling, right?

Charter is offering this ridiculous package where it's $40 for 1 gigabit of data at home and then $30 per month for 2 mobile lines, with the first year free. How do you compete with that as Boost? I know Boost has a pretty competitive offer as well, but the difference is not meaningful enough to grab a lot of consumer market share.

I would actually think that the mobile profit pool is very reasonable. I don't think the ROI is all that—

Oh, I agree with you. I think you mentioned the Charter line. When they launched it, there were a lot of questions: "Are people going to stay on it?" The guy from LightShed mentioned it on Dish's Q1 call: "Sprint gave away a lot of free lines 10 years ago, and that was a disaster."

But with Charter, you can see this a little bit in their stock price this year, too. They said, "We bring these guys on, we're going to offload a ton. This is going to be great, and people are going to stick with us because it's good value." People were skeptical, but you're starting to see that reflected in the numbers.

Comcast has heavily switched its model this year. I think they're kind of emulating Charter. One of the reasons I think they sold to Charter is because Charter proved out that they have a great MVNO, they're going to offload a ton, and the free line—and then having people stay on it—really works.

If you pay $70 all-in for 2 lines plus broadband, that's cheaper than you would pay for 2 lines if you were going to AT&T. Anyway, I follow the industry very closely, and I can rant about it forever. Anything else you want to say on the wireless side?

I just think strategically that Charter and Comcast will need to own a wireless network. It's a very big bull case for them, and it's hotly debated. I know it's very hotly debated on the cable side, too. But that's one of the natural buyers for Dish's assets, I think.

Let's turn to the spectrum. The spectrum is, as I said, the main course. As you said, the wireless business can't exist without spectrum, so it's hard to disentangle. I think this is so interesting because, look, go look at analyst price targets. The stock closed in the low to mid-$20s. There are analysts with price targets approaching $100 per share, and there are analysts with price targets saying this is going bankrupt.

It might go bankrupt, and it might be worth $100 per share. Both could be true. I'd love to discuss the spectrum—how you value it, how you think about it, all of that. Then we can flow from there and maybe start talking about all the different buckets, all the different securities, everything. But let's just start at a high level with the spectrum that EchoStar and Dish own.

The value math is that the portfolio of spectrum is worth probably $60 billion. That's my base-case number. There's about $13 billion of debt in the wireless business. Let's round it out and say the equity value is $45 billion. That translates into a $150 per share stock price.

You can cut the spectrum value however you want, but whatever reasonable number you substitute shows you a lot of value trapped in this business. Let's take that number. I would encourage people again—as I said, Yummy Century Eggs is the best Substack that I've seen start up, and I hope you keep writing forever because I've loved it—you did a March deck, which I'm looking at.

I've seen other math before on the spectrum. People can go look at the March deck. It is slide—I’m sorry, I can’t see what slide it is—but if they flip through it, you have EchoStar and Dish spectrum holdings, carrying value, historical cost, and market value. That comes up with the $60 billion that you mentioned.

Let me start with the first pushback that I think a lot of people would have. All the spectrum sounds great, right? They've got a lot of spectrum. You can look at historical cost, which, as you said, is about $30 billion. You can look at what AT&T, T-Mobile, and all those companies paid. The C-band auction is going to be a big one here. You can look at all of that.

The bears would say 2 things. Point 1: Dish owns 20% of the spectrum in the nation right now. If Dish went bankrupt and tried to sell this, we've never seen this much spectrum come up for sale.

Point 2: there is a spectrum cap. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile would like this spectrum—they would love it—but they're all brushing up against the spectrum cap. Those are the 3 most natural buyers. In fact, we can talk about cable in a second, but they're by far the 3 most natural buyers. They might be the only 3 buyers, and they're all either hard-cap limited or they would have to take it piecemeal.

And guess what? If you put this $30 billion up for sale and Dish was the fourth bid, so they were the incremental buyer...

If they put it up for sale and all the natural buyers are hitting the spectrum cap, all of a sudden the auction fails, right? Is this even worth anything? So I think I made the bare points clear. I’d love to talk to you about both those points.

Yeah, I understand your points. I think MSS spectrum is unique. There’s only 1 part of the spectrum; you can’t change that. So there’s only 1 party, and there’s more than 1 party on the other side. Regardless of the caps, which can be changed, spectrum is spectrum.

There’s a shortage of spectrum, especially in the bands that Dish owns. I’m actually very bullish on spectrum value. I think spectrum value over the last 10–15 years hasn’t gone up as much as you would expect, right? Even though everyone’s talking about spectrum value going up, it hasn’t gone up as fast as real estate, and it hasn’t gone up as fast as the stock market, right?

Going forward, we’re seeing a lot more stuff being connected to the network, driven by AI, robotics, drones, self-driving cars, and so on. I feel like spectrum value will actually go up in the future. Now, knock on wood, who knows when that’s going to happen or how much that’s going to happen, but there’s a clear need for the spectrum, and there’s only 1 of these.

I’m very confident that when they come to the market with this big portfolio of spectrum, they can sell it in a piecemeal fashion. Or, like I said, Charter and Comcast have to get into the wireless business, and there’s only 1 network. There’s only 1 portfolio that they can get into here. There’s nothing else, literally. It’s a very, very unique thing to have in the business world.

So let me give 1 other pushback, and we can come to cable in a second, because I’m very familiar with them as well. I think the other pushback would be that 10 years ago, everyone thought what you thought, and that’s why spectrum values were appreciating so much. Right? Data demands continue to go up; we need to get more spectrum.

You can go back and look at the broadcast auction and a bunch of other auctions. Spectrum demand continued to go up. About 10 years ago, you started hearing, particularly from Verizon—but I think T-Mobile as well—they said, “Hey, look, there is an alternative to spectrum. Instead of buying more spectrum, we could push fiber deeper into the network, build more towers, right? By doing that, we could leverage our fiber better.”

If you kept that thought in mind and then thought about the broadcast auction, a lot of this lower-band spectrum was really valuable for voice because you would build a tower, and 5 miles away you would send the spectrum and get it there. Voice is very low-data, but you could cover the whole country that way.

That’s not really what people need anymore, right? What they need is higher-frequency spectrum that doesn’t go as far but carries more data, which blends well with, “Hey, let’s just build out the network closer to people, put up more towers, and densify the networks.”

So I guess I would just love to—and I have a follow-up question where we can specifically break down a few blocks of Dish spectrum—ask: When you say spectrum continues to increase and data demand continues to increase, and therefore the value goes up, is that kind of using the 10-years-ago way of thinking? Have things changed today?

No, I don’t think it has changed at all. I think these networks have to be built using spectrum based on peak demand, right? You can’t look at the average and say, “Well, we’re only using 20% of the spectrum.” That doesn’t make any sense.

The fact of the matter is that most of the data is now offloaded onto the Wi-Fi network and into the fixed-line business, right? You don’t hear about it as much, but Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile—most of their data goes through the fixed-line business. This is why Charter and Comcast were saying, “Our mobile plans are so profitable,” right?

Even without trying, 80% of your data goes over the fixed network. If we can build our network to do the offload, we can just say, “All of the data demand happens around Madison Square Garden in New York City. We’ll just build out a lot of Wi-Fi stations there. We’ll offload everything, and all of a sudden we’re offloading 98%. The 2% that we can’t offload, that’s what we’ll pay the MNO.”

Yeah. I think that’s wishful thinking, because that’s been the case for the last 10 years, but there are still more devices being connected to the network. And like I said, these spectrums are truly unique in the sense that there’s only 1 of them, and you can’t create more of it.

The propagation properties in the mid-band part of the spectrum are very unique, and most of those bands—all the bands, actually—have been taken for other uses. There’s limited, very limited availability. You see that with SpaceX trying to get some spectrum for its satellite services, and there’s nowhere else to look. You’ve got EchoStar and you’ve got Globalstar, and that’s about it. What are you going to do?

So you mentioned—and again, I’m looking at your deck—$60 billion of value for the spectrum, which, if that’s true, means the stock is a multibagger. But we can break that down into 3 bands that really move the needle here, right?

The first band, the most important band by far, is the AWS-3 and AWS-4 bands. If I’m looking at your market value, you’ve got that at $33 billion, so more than half of your market value. If I’m looking at historical costs, it’s over $10 billion, so approaching half of the historical cost of the spectrum.

I’d love to talk about the properties of AWS-3 and AWS-4, how Dish came to buy them, and why this is such great spectrum, because again, this is most of the value here.

Absolutely. You’re absolutely right to focus on how they got hold of that spectrum. It’s very important to what’s currently going on with the FCC.

Let’s talk about the easier one, I guess: AWS-3. They bought that pretty cleanly in 2015. They paid about—you know, there’s been some back and forth, but I’ll just make it easy—they paid about $10 billion for that part of the spectrum. It’s in the mid-band part of the spectrum, very useful for 5G. So I would say that’s very clean. That’s a clean part of the spectrum.

AWS-4 has a more complicated background. AWS-4 started as mobile satellite services. These are licenses that were owned by 2 entities, TerreStar and DBSD North America. They went bankrupt, and Dish bought them in 2012, I want to say.

In 2012, Dish petitioned the FCC to add a terrestrial license to this spectrum without paying anything for it, and the FCC did that. So that was a huge windfall, I want to say, for Dish, and that increased the value of that spectrum dramatically.

But there are some problems with that. One is they didn’t pay a lot for it. They paid, I think, close to $3 billion for the 2 bankrupt entities, and they got a big band of spectrum that was available for mobile use without paying anything in addition to that.

Some people were unhappy about that, right? If you look at the FCC, its purpose is to serve the public interest. It’s not windfalls for private businesses. When it made this addition, there was a lot of pushback.

What the FCC did was keep this band satellite-centric. What I mean by that is it started off as a mobile satellite service license with an ancillary terrestrial component to it, and Dish changed it into a full-scale flexible-use terrestrial mobile license.

But in the order, what they did was say, “Okay, if there’s any interference between the MSS license and the terrestrial license, the terrestrial license has to make sure that the MSS license is not impacted.”

So even though the satellite license and the terrestrial license are co-primary, in practice they are not, because the terrestrial license has to protect the satellite license. That wasn’t a problem because Dish owned both the terrestrial and satellite licenses, so it hasn’t been a problem for a very long time.

That continued until SpaceX started pushing on this in 2023. They started petitioning and filing applications with the FCC to try to become an additional MSS licensee. They’ve tried it in various ways 6 different times with the FCC, and the FCC has rejected those applications 6 times.

What they said was, “There’s already a licensee in this band, and unless something changes with interference management, we’re not going to add another licensee.” They don’t want to add another licensee and interrupt the normal operations of existing, incumbent businesses in the band.

SpaceX continued to try, and they were met with some success at the FCC in the last couple of months.

I want to—we might come back to the spectrum holdings, because I do think we should talk about that—but you mentioned the FCC several times. Let’s talk about what’s happening with the FCC.

So, to my knowledge, SpaceX, as you said, has been petitioning and saying, “Hey, we want access to this license. It’d be hugely helpful for every piece of their business.” And they want access to much more spectrum. To my knowledge, the FCC says they’re property rights.

SATS is sitting on this license. Unless SATS does something wrong, they have the license. Now, there were issues with the buildout requirements from the Sprint–T-Mobile deal. SATS got an extension from the prior regime, and Brendan Carr didn’t like that.

And I will say, look, one of the things with the FCC is that you’re not allowed to warehouse spectrum. As you said, you can’t buy all the spectrum in the world and sit on it and say, “Ha-ha, one day a mobile player is going to be desperate,” because that’s not in the public interest.

So Brendan Carr has not been happy with them from the beginning. But I do think he said, “Hey, not only do I not like them, I can score political points if I kind of rap them on the wrist and, in some way, free up spectrum for President Trump’s big buddy, Elon Musk.”

And it’s not lost on me that SATS stock was up 20% the day that Elon Musk and Trump had their big fallout and Elon accused Trump of being in the Epstein files. Every stock was down except SATS, which was up 20%, because we were like, “Hey, maybe Brendan Carr is not going to be so interested in helping SpaceX now.”

But I would just love to talk quickly about this. I summarized some of the FCC situation briefly, but did I hit on the main points? What’s going on with SATS and the FCC right now?

Yeah. So Musk was the major instigator in this whole situation, but he has fallen off to some extent. I don’t think it’s only because of Musk and his relationship with Trump that Carr started this process of review. For 10 years, he’s been saying SATS is a bad actor, in fact.

Yes. Yes.

And he was very unhappy with that extension back in September 2024 because that extension kind of smelled fishy, right? I mean, from an outsider’s perspective, EchoStar came in, and then 2 days later the Wireless Bureau gave the extension. Two days without any review, without any public comments. That’s weird. I mean, what are you going to do? That doesn’t make any sense.

So I think Carr has every right to go back and review that, from Carr’s perspective. It just so happens that it helps Trump and helps him score political points. I mean, it kills a lot of birds with one stone.

But having said that, I think Carr is a—you hear what Carr says about the public interest—he’s highly, highly focused on it. And I do believe him that he wants to do what he’s saying about the public interest. He’s been in the FCC for a very, very long time, and so I do trust him that, even though he’s doing some things that may look political, the ultimate goal aligns with what he’s saying about the public interest.

Yeah. Quickly, I was just Googling to make sure I was remembering this correctly. Nathan Simington was one of the FCC commissioners, right? Brendan Carr is a commissioner. He’s one of the FCC appointees, whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. Carr is the chair, and Simington was a Republican.

He resigned at the start of this month and then, 5 days later, published an op-ed blasting the FCC and saying they’re making a mistake with how they’re treating EchoStar.

So I’d love for you to lay out what the mistake is that Simington is talking about. And like you said, Carr is not being super political with this—maybe a little bit—but he’s trying to do what’s right for the spectrum. I don’t know if I disagree with that, but you’ve got an FCC commissioner resigning and, 5 days later, blasting the FCC for this.

I’ve loosely followed the FCC for 10-plus years, and I’ve never heard of someone blasting it 5 days after resigning. It’s a funny story.

I feel like—I mean, first of all, Simington was supposed to step down at the end of June. So he stepped down 3 weeks earlier. That was very abrupt, very unusual. Everyone was guessing, “Gee, what happened?”

You didn’t need to wait 5 days, and you’d find out.

Yeah, exactly. And then he came out with this op-ed basically saying that the FCC shouldn’t move against EchoStar. It’s not in the public interest because of this network that EchoStar has built, this fourth network.

If you push EchoStar into bankruptcy, then we lose this fourth network, which doesn’t serve the public interest—which is also a fair point, right? Also a fair point.

But the fact that he resigned so abruptly means there’s been some sort of major disagreement on this, and it means that Carr probably wants to move extremely fast.

Let’s talk about what happened last week. You and I are recording this on June 19th. Last week, Bloomberg reported after hours on Friday that Charlie Ergen tried to sit down with Brendan Carr. I can’t remember if that didn’t happen or if it went poorly, but the next day Charlie got a meeting with the president, and the president ended up calling Brendan Carr in and telling him to squash this beef, right?

Yeah.

And then, to make it even crazier, on Monday, the Trump Organization announced that they’re launching a Trump Mobile network and a smartphone. I’m sure that was in the works before this, but it’s not hard to connect the dots and say, “Trump tells him to squash this beef,” and maybe SATS is about to be really connected to a Trump Mobile launch.

But I’d love to know: How do you read the room of what’s happening? What do you think Trump means when he says, “Squash this beef”? What’s the result? How do you read all of that?

Yeah, it’s such a strange turn of events, and I was speechless for a long time.

Chronologically, what happened was that on Friday afternoon, an article came out on Bloomberg saying that trademarks had been filed by Trump for Trump Mobile. This happened in the early afternoon, before the market closed. It didn’t get a lot of attention, I guess, but as soon as I saw that, I thought, “Gee, why? Why did he file this trademark on Thursday?”

Then, as soon as the market closed, news came out on Bloomberg saying that they had met and that Trump had told Carr and Ergen to basically hug it out. Very vague coincidence, right? And you know what they say: There aren’t any conspiracies, but there are no coincidences either.

The timing of the trademark filing and the timing of the meeting is highly suspicious. Then they came out with Trump Mobile on Monday, and the product—it’s clear that they’ve been thinking about it and working on it for a while—but that product was pushed out prematurely.

You can tell just by the service that they offered. Did you see the press release? It said they offered 27/7 service. Twenty-seven/seven. Three extra hours in the day.

The 3 guys who came out and basically launched Trump Mobile don’t have telecom experience. They’re partnering with what I would say is a marketing outfit in Florida with an MVNO agreement with T-Mobile. This marketing outfit has about 12 people working for them.

Their website was full of mistakes regarding the specs on the phone. It seems like they didn’t know how a phone works. There were mistakes everywhere. So I have my suspicions as to why they pushed it out prematurely.

What are your suspicions?

Well, my suspicion is that they wanted to push it out to create some room between this announcement and the announcement that they will partner up with Dish at some point in the future.

Trump is basically saying, “Hey, for the good of the American public, we don’t want a big company going bankrupt,” which makes sense. And so the FCC worked with Dish to fix it. At some point in the near future, there’s going to be an announcement saying that Dish is partnering with Trump Mobile, to some extent.

I’m not exactly sure how the details will work in that case, but they will announce some sort of partnership. So Trump says, “Hug it out” between the FCC and EchoStar.

What does “hug it out” look like? Does the FCC drop everything? Is it Dish committing to accelerating its buildout requirements? As you said, they’re about 80% done. They need to cover 100%. I think it’s 2027 at this point. Do they accelerate that? What does “hug it out” look like to you?

Yeah. Assuming that they would come to an agreement, I think that agreement would look like an accelerated buildout of the existing licenses and then an accelerated buildout of the satellite service in the 2 GHz, the AWS-4 band. That’s what I would assume it would look like.

I feel like that could be amenable to Ergen. The one thing I haven’t said, which we need to really focus on, is that from Ergen’s perspective, running this business is not the best option for him.

Yes, like we said, they are highly levered. They’re burning $600 million to $700 million a quarter on their wireless network. They only have $5 billion left in cash, and they are going to run out of cash—zero cash—by the 3rd quarter of 2026, which is maybe 5 quarters from now. Zero cash.

Obviously, they can’t go down to zero cash, and any sort of strategic deal has to be approved by the FCC. That takes time. The deal has to come together, right? That takes time. There’s literally no time for EchoStar to do anything but file for bankruptcy.

Let’s talk about the bankruptcy route in a second. I just want to go back to spectrum. The big kahuna of their spectrum, as we said, is AWS-3 and AWS-4. You’ve got the market value at $33 billion. Just real quickly, where do you get the market value of $33 billion? How are you coming up with that number?

Yeah.

Two things. One is just through market comps, right? I mean, there have been deals in the mid-band, and you can look at all these deals that were done—

What was the most recent deal in the mid-band?

The mid-band was AT&T and Verizon paying $80 billion for spectrum in the C-band.

Was it the Intelsat spectrum that they bought?

Exactly. Yes.

Intelsat is a very sore subject over here.

Yeah. Well, you know, that goes to the—well, we can talk a lot more about what this spectrum asset is and what it actually means to own spectrum, right?

Please, would love to.

Yeah, absolutely. That dovetails nicely into a possible filing, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

So, I mean, the spectrum asset is a very strange asset, right? It's not a hard asset; it's not even property. It's a permit, and it's issued by the FCC. When they issue the permit, you have to provide services that provide a public interest, a public good. That's what it means.

The permit is subject to a buildout schedule, right? The permit is granted to you for you to make money, for sure, but it's also highly constrained. So I think spectrum is unique, but there's a reason why, when people provide spectrum-backed financing, they provide it at a 35% LTV. It's just a weird asset, and the FCC has almost 100% power over how you use it and how you monetize it.

With respect to the C-band, Intelsat is a very good example of the value of spectrum. Intelsat had a very narrow satellite license, right? When the FCC came out and wanted to open up and repurpose that band, everyone thought, “Oh my goodness, there's a lot of value here.” But the fact of the matter is, you have to think of this spectrum as being for the public good. It's not for you to make a windfall, okay?

The license that Intelsat had was very limited, right? On top of that, politically, it's a foreign business. You're not going to hand over a boatload of billions and billions of dollars to a foreign business for a public good that U.S. citizens own. There's just so many problems with that. As a result, Intelsat filed for bankruptcy and got a few billion dollars from that.

It's a tip. They got some fees for clearing that spectrum, and they got some new spectrum. So, you know, the FCC tried to make everybody kind of okay with that. But think about it: The value of that spectrum went from very little to $80 billion, and then it came down to a few billion dollars. It's still the same spectrum. What changed was the FCC's treatment of that spectrum and how they decided to monetize it. They went through the public route rather than the private route.

And if I remember correctly, the AWS-3 and AWS-4 blocks that they own are very close to the C-band block. So, in terms of strength of coverage, you can almost think of these blocks as being similar. Am I remembering that correctly?

I mean, it depends. AWS-3 and AWS-4 are in the 1.6 to 2 gigahertz range. The C-band is in the 3.0 range.

Oh, I thought it was in the mid-2s for some.

Okay, so it's a little bit lower down the spectrum. It doesn't matter. The propagation properties are almost the same.

So, yeah. And I mean, the AWS-3 and AWS-4, if I remember, are pretty clear; you can use them for anything. From a commercial standpoint, it's not a windfall if you're selling them to a wireless licensee or transferring them to a wireless licensee. They're already cleared for this.

Yes, exactly. Aside from AWS-4, because of the history of how they got that license, there are some little quirks, right? We talked about that. But aside from that, these are licensed for flexible-use terrestrial mobile. So these are clean—relatively clean—compared to another company that's trying to repurpose spectrum and get a windfall.

So when you've got that $33 billion market value, you're kind of just taking the C-band—the $80 billion—and saying, “I can't even remember what that was on a dollars-per-MHz-POP basis or whatever,” but you're using that to get to the $33 billion.

And also, there's $10 billion of bonds associated with that band.

Yes, that was underwritten at around a 35% LTV.

Yep. So it's through market transactions, right, that these bands have value.

So, let's talk about the future. I think we've talked about so much stuff, and we probably could go 3 hours on this podcast, but I haven't had lunch yet, so we're not going to go 3 hours.

But let's talk about this. You and I are sitting here on June 18. I believe by July 3 or so, Dish is either going to have to make its interest payment or not make its interest payment.

June 29.

I was basing it on the 8-K, not the skip date. I guess by the end of June, they're going to have to make their interest payment. If they make their interest payment, they continue. They limp along. If they don't make their interest payment, we go into bankruptcy.

You and I both kind of alluded to the idea that there might be a reason Dish wants to go into bankruptcy. So let's talk about the bankruptcy path—why Dish might be interested in going down the bankruptcy path. And look, if you're looking at the ticker, people are generally looking at this equity. We can talk about the different things in the capital structure, but people are generally looking at the equity.

When you hear “bankruptcy,” you think, “Oh my God, it's a disaster.” Charlie Ergen owns a lot of stock here, right? He's been putting—one of the bull cases here was that, for the past couple of years, he's been trying to shift as much of his stock into different GRATs and everything for his kids, right? People said he's only doing that because he thinks the stock's going to the moon. He owns a lot of stuff. What's the bankruptcy path? Why might the company be interested in going down the bankruptcy path as a way to potentially maximize value for equity holders?

So, like we said, they're burning cash. They don't have time at all. I'm saying that they have until the 3rd quarter of 2026, but that's looking at zero cash on the balance sheet, and that can happen to a large business like this.

Any kind of transaction—any kind of strategic transaction—is going to be pretty tough, right? You look at it from Charter's perspective and from other wholesale customers' perspective: They don't want to align with this business that's about to go bankrupt. There are very few places where Charter can kind of squeeze cash out of. There's some unencumbered spectrum, and if they do some restructuring, there are a lot of ifs in order for them to squeeze maybe a couple billion out. That's not enough to run their network.

From his perspective, with or without the FCC's intervention, let's assume that the last 2 months didn't happen and they're just operating as a normal business. The best way to liquidate is to file, because they stop most of the interest payments, right? They have time; they have a stay from the FCC, and they could reduce their cash burn significantly. That will give them time to actually run a process and liquidate.

You don't want to be in a situation where you're running out of cash and liquidating at the same time. The market will just wait for you, right? There's no leverage. There's no benefit for you to just say, “Hey, we're running out of cash. We have to sell some assets now, or else we're going to file.” Well, guess what? You're going to file, right?

I mean, these bankruptcy talks are highly detrimental to this business from a fundamental perspective, and these bankruptcy talks are highly reflexive in the market. When you start talking about bankruptcy, especially for levered businesses such as this that are burning cash, you're pretty much in bankruptcy.

Look, you need to raise money. Well, cool. Nobody's going to lend to you unsecured anymore, right? You can start pulling up the unencumbered assets and borrowing against them because people are going to—

But, yeah, it's a disaster. It's reflexive, as you're saying.

So that's one of the reasons, right? You stop the buildout requirements, you pause the interest payments, and then you can go to the bankruptcy court and say, “Hey, you know, it's funny. For most companies, the cash burn increases when they go bankrupt because you get all these extra costs.” For these guys, because the buildout requirements are paused, it might actually improve.

Yeah. They go bankrupt, right?

How does that impact the FCC? Does that stay a lot of the FCC issues they're having as well?

No, the FCC has a right to do its job, so it wouldn't be impacted substantially. What bankruptcy does is give a forum for a lot of these issues to be adjudicated.

Yep. I think historically, the adjudication is much more favorable in the bankruptcy court than if you're negotiating with the FCC. Am I thinking about that correctly?

Man, I'm looking at these precedent cases, and none of these guys came out unscathed from a fight with the FCC. The biggest case was NextWave, which happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

That was a very clear, simple—in my mind, a clear, simple—issue. Just for your listeners, NextWave bought some spectrum, but they didn't have the money, so they were put on an installment plan. They filed a couple of years later. The FCC took away the spectrum, saying, “Hey, you defaulted on your payment, so we can take that back and sell it to the wireless guys for a boatload of money.”

The court took years to basically say, “Hey, the FCC should be acting as a creditor and not as a regulator in that case.” As a result, the FCC did not have the right to take away the spectrum. The spectrum was returned to NextWave.

But NextWave came out, even though they won the case nominally, in a practical perspective. They missed the hot market to sell their spectrum, and they got very little relative to what they could have sold it for in the late 1990s, when the market was hot.

I was thinking of it because of that case in particular, because the judge ruled, “Hey, the FCC, in a bankruptcy, can’t just go revoke the license. The company can go sell it.” I did not realize that they missed the hot market. Though, you know, the dynamics of the late-1990s spectrum market are probably very unique in terms of the internet bubble that was going on, right?

For the NextWave case, we have to be very specific. The court didn’t say that the FCC doesn’t have the right to do its job. The court said they couldn’t take away the spectrum because they were a creditor, and in bankruptcy all these things are stayed.

So that’s the decision that we have. I think, if I’m reading correctly—if I’m hearing you correctly, if I’ve seen your decks correctly—you kind of think a bankruptcy is the best path forward here, right? It stays the build-out requirements, it stays the interest, and it lets them run a process and everything.

I think the two things—because I look, it takes time to gain all this research and everything. I was pretty close to buying this stock a couple of weeks ago. The two things that I had in my worry were, one, they go into bankruptcy court and the FCC says, “Hey, we still have the right to do our jobs. DISH didn’t hit their build-out requirements, all this sort of stuff, so we can take this spectrum back.” A judge says, “Yeah, you’re right. We have to go by the bankruptcy, but they missed their build-out requirements. It’s a public good; you take it.” That was number one.

Number two, which is actually probably what weighed on me a little bit more, is that Charlie Ergen owns a lot of stock here, right? You throw a bankruptcy requirement in, Charlie manages to throw in a DIP, throw in some financing, and get a new plan. You could imagine a way where the equity is getting massively, massively diluted in a way that’s very beneficial for Charlie Ergen.

I was kind of worried because, again, people have gotten in trouble with DISH for 10 years because Charlie Ergen is really smart. Every hedge fund manager says, “Hey, did you know Charlie Ergen’s a really good poker player?” What I’m worried about here is that we’re playing poker and Charlie Ergen holds all the cards. You think that you’ve got a pot of gold, and Charlie Ergen says, “Actually, that pot of gold through the bankruptcy process is all mine.” So I’d love to just hear you discuss those two points.

Yeah. There are limits on what he can do, obviously, because he’s been talking about the value of this spectrum portfolio for a long time. It’s public record. He can’t just go in and say, “Well, whoops. Now the value is halved.”

Why are there limits to that? He said two years ago, “I think the spectrum is worth $100 billion.” He files for bankruptcy and says, “Hey, build-out requirements, the market changed, blah, blah, blah. I’m here. I’m putting my DIP. I’m putting my DIP financing. I’m putting my security.” Why does the public record matter? He just says, “The market changed. I was wrong. Nobody else is paying more for this than me.”

Yes. You’re right. Charlie Ergen is driving the bus there. He’s a Class B shareholder, but there are Class A shareholders as well. There need to be equity committees for both the Class A and Class B shareholders, and there’s going to be natural tension.

Well, unless the Class A shareholders have fresh cash. I’m assuming that most distressed guys are going to be playing in that name, and they do have distressed cash and know how to play the game. It wouldn’t be a big deal, right? They’ll just follow along with the rights offering at a low valuation. That’s great for everybody, right? But that kind of defeats the purpose of the rights offering to some extent if they don’t need the cash.

Despite all that, because there’s a public record as to what management thinks the value of the spectrum is, you can’t just go in and say, “Well, things have changed, so the value is now down a lot.” Spectrum is spectrum, right? It’s not like a business, where the value of the business can go to zero. Even if the FCC comes in and tries to take away a portion of their license, it’s a small portfolio—it’s a small portion.

There’s a limit to what Charlie can do. He can try; he can definitely try. But I don’t think you’ll be disadvantaged by being in the equity as long as you have fresh cash to do whatever Charlie Ergen is doing at that point in time. The judge is also going to review it very carefully.

So what you’re saying is, in my draconian “Charlie takes everything” scenario, it’s probably done through a rights offering. If you’re an equity holder with fresh cash, you’ll get pro rata participation in a rights offering, so you’ll probably be okay there.

Let’s talk about the base case. Forget my shenanigans and everything. It sounds to me like you think they are going to file. Am I thinking about that correctly? Do you think they file this round, or do you think it takes another 6 months or something?

I think there are sort of 3 scenarios. One is filing now. The other is working with the FCC, resolving their issues, and doing some partnership with Trump Mobile. I think that’s a very risky move.

The more I think about it, at first I was pretty happy about that. I thought that could solve a lot of EchoStar’s issues, but now, with Trump Mobile being out and what they’re doing with it, I just think it’s going to be very risky. It’s like a poison gift.

Yeah, so I would suggest Charlie Ergen be very careful there.

The third option is some sort of strategic deal, but the strategic deal has to meet a few criteria that are very tough to meet. One is that it has to stop the bleeding in the operating business, which an MVNO agreement with Charter or Comcast could do.

But then you have to think about how long it takes for their subscribers to move onto the DISH Network. Are there going to be any technical issues or business issues? They still need the MVNO agreement with AT&T. On top of that, Charter has to make an equity investment into DISH in order to make sure that they don’t go bankrupt.

You mentioned Charter. Charter just bought Cox.

Yeah.

Comcast is slightly different. They’re spinning off their cable network, so I don’t think that deal is as likely. Charter is in the process of buying Cox; that deal happened 2 or 3 weeks ago. When you saw that deal, did you think it had any read-through to a potential DISH deal, either positively or negatively?

It’s negative for sure because it’s a distraction from a deal with DISH now. But the deal with DISH could look in many different ways. They could make an equity investment; they don’t have to own the business.

The problem with the equity investment comes down to what kind of valuation they’re going to invest at. The stock value and the intrinsic value are so far apart. Any sort of path for Ergen looks bad, and as a result, that’s why I think bankruptcy is the best thing for him. I don’t mean that in a negative way. I think it’s the best way to realize value.

Unfortunately, the situation is what it is. He’s constrained from a leverage perspective, and as a result, there’s no one coming in to save him. There’s no wholesale customer or enterprise customer coming in and all of a sudden, you know, you’re golden.

Even a Charter deal, because of the leverage, the difference between intrinsic value and stock value, and maybe some technical issues with the network—that’s a lot, a lot of issues to work through in the next 5 quarters.

I don’t know. So you’re positive on the stock, right? You’re looking at your low-case recovery because you think there’s a lot of asset value here, but then you hear all my concerns. It’s messy. The history shows that people can get burned. The buyers are questionable, because either you have the natural buyers—the carriers—or, if Charter and Comcast do it, it’s an equity investment.

There are a lot of questions here. I guess my question to you is, why be positive on the stock? Again, it does seem like there’s a lot of asset value here, but when you game it out, it’s tough to see how that asset value gets fully unlocked for a lot of different reasons.

Yeah. I’ve been following this situation for a while. It’s always been a dicey situation. Everyone knows there’s intrinsic value there, but the path to realization was very murky.

The reason I got really focused on this a few months ago was that you could see they were running out of options.

You can literally see they’ve levered up most of their spectrum assets. There may be some ways to get cash through junior liens on spectrum assets here and there, but that’s not going to be a viable path now with the FCC review. So there’s going to be a deal somewhere, right? There’s going to be action here. It’s not going to be business as usual.

That’s why it’s interesting for me: this value is finally going to be unlocked after 15 years of everyone saying, “Spectrum value, this and that.” There has to be a deal here, right? Whether it’s a strategic deal—at first, I thought it was going to be a strategic deal with Charter—and then when this bankruptcy possibility came up, I thought, “Wow, that’s natural, right? That’s the easiest path to realize value for equity guys.”

Now, Ergen has pulled a lot of rabbits out of his hat through the years. For 7 years, people said, “Hey, all that SATS—for those who don’t know, it used to be the legacy Hughes business—and it had a ton of cash.” For 7 years, all the bears said, “That cash is going to be used to bail out DISH,” and you’d hear, “No, no, no chance. It would never be used to bail out DISH.” And then guess what? He merged the 2 together, and it was used to bail out DISH.

By the way, do you know what a century egg is? Have you had it before?

I looked it up, so I knew. I have not, but I’ll try. The next time I’m down in Chinatown, I’m going to try to have one in your honor.

Try it. Be careful, though. You say Yummy Century Eggs, and then your profile suggests they might not be that yummy.

No taste.

We're gonna have you on back in the near future because I've got a lot of thoughts on local broadcasters I'd like to talk to you about. I know people want to hear your thoughts on s Sirius XM Spectrum. Don't have time for this. Last question. Uh, DISH’s cap structure is complex. Everyone should remember this is not financial advice, all that sort of stuff. But I’m just going to break it down to 1 question: Do you prefer the convertible notes—specifically the AWS-3 and AWS-4 convertible notes, which convert at $33 and have the benefit of a lien on those AWS-3 and AWS-4 assets—for the downside protection with a lot of equity upside, or do you just prefer the straight equity?

I prefer not doing anything now until they file.

Until they file?

Yeah, until the forced selling there.

And when they do file, the FCC is going to come out with some tough language that might scare the market a bit. It’s interesting you say that because I did game that out in my head, but then I was also like, look, you and I are not the only ones having these conversations. Every one of my event-driven distressed friends has been all over this situation for 18 months minimum. This is a very popular one, with a really complex cap structure.

So I was kind of like, is this one of those things where, the day they file, the stock actually goes up instead of down because people say, “Look, we’re cutting out 6 months of cash burn, right? We’re finally getting to the end game”? The stock goes up because people can start saying the end game is here. As I kind of questioned you, you said it would be better for them to file today versus filing in 6 months because they wouldn’t have to worry about that 6 months of cash burn. That’s kind of why I was gaming it.

To me, those AWS-3 convertible notes don’t look like they can get primed because they’ve already got the senior securities above them and they’ve got the covenant on them. Those AWS-3 convertible notes look really interesting because they’ve got the downside protection of having a lot of AWS-3 value there. I think that’s the prime asset here. And then they’ve got the upside kicker: they can convert at $33, which is a long way from $25.

But if you got the full, beautiful value unlock, where you’re getting $50 or $100 in equity value, you’d be very happy as a convert. So that’s the interesting one to me, but I might just be too much of a dumb-dumb, you know.

No, I think it makes a lot of sense. I think that’s fine. But it’s weird, right? This is a situation where there’s a lot more equity value in bankruptcy than outside of bankruptcy. So we haven’t seen a lot of situations like that. You need to figure out—or I haven’t figured out—how that convert feature works in bankruptcy.

My understanding of it, my very limited understanding of it, is that the convert feature goes away and you’re left as a creditor.

Okay, I’m going to have to do some more digging on the indenture there, then, because I had assumed you would have that option until the deal was struck and that people would be jostling around it. But I’m going to have to go do some work there.

Yeah, in most cases this doesn’t matter, right? Because the convert feature was worth zero anyway. But in this case, there is value there, and the judge will take that into account too. I think normally what they would say is, “Okay, you pick: You want to be equity, you’re equity. You want to be a creditor, you’re a creditor.” But the optionality—I don’t know how that works in bankruptcy specifically.

That’s really interesting. I’ve done quite a bit of bankruptcy—not that I’m the world’s preeminent expert, but I have done a lot of bankruptcy—and as you’re saying, I can’t remember a time when there was a convertible that had potential in-the-money optionality. So it’ll be interesting to see.

The stock going up when they file—that could very well be the case. Most distressed guys are not getting in, right? They’re not getting in until the bankruptcy. The long-only guys are not buying, right? Because there’s a bankruptcy coming.

So you’ve got to think: Who’s the marginal buyer? Last week, the stock went up 4 days out of 5, and you’re thinking, gee, who’s the marginal buyer there? Who’s the marginal buyer there? I don’t know who the marginal buyer is there, but when the news came out about Trump, maybe it’s some people who are close to the administration who actually know what’s going on there. But as of now, I think all the distressed guys are waiting.

It’s a super fascinating situation for every reason we talked about. I liked one thing you said at the end, where there aren’t a lot of situations where I think this is worth more in bankruptcy than it is as a standalone. The only thing that I can even think of that remotely resembles that—well, if you had talc litigation or one of those asbestos litigations, maybe—but those are so far away.

The only other one is GGP in 2009, right? You file because you can’t refinance, and then you have tons of equity value. That basically made Aman’s career and a lot of people’s careers, right? That’s because they bought it cheap, but in this case, I don’t know if you can actually get it at a low basis.

The other thing that I want to emphasize is that a lot of people are bullish on EchoStar because they built this great network and they have this vision of this network creating a lot of value for the business. I would just say, okay, even if you look at T-Mobile and try to imagine a path to get to T-Mobile, this path is very treacherous.

Not only because of the customers—assuming you can even get the customers—you need the spectrum. You need to double or even triple your spectrum. You can’t get there, and even if that spectrum is available, you’re going to pay, I don’t know, $100 billion for that. There are people trying to play the upside from this business being a going concern. I think that’s a very tough path.

Look, that’s what I was trying to drive with you at the beginning, right? Like, hey, play it out for me. It’s not like there are 100 million people waiting to get cell phone service, right? So you have to go start a price war and do the buildout. You’re going to have to spend billions. Think about NFL Sunday Ticket: Anybody who watches it, how many ads for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon do you see? DISH is going to have to do those every Sunday as well.

You’ve got to win people as your network fills up. You’ve got to buy more spectrum. That’s a tough, tough path, and one I’ve always been very skeptical of. Now, Charter and Comcast forming a joint venture to buy EchoStar and go down that path might be a different story, right? Or EchoStar doing that with a path to selling might be a different story.

This has been a ton of fun because, alternately, throughout this conversation I’ve wanted to YOLO call options and YOLO put options on the stock. A straddle is a good way to play this: It’s either going to go up or go down. That’s not investing advice for anyone; that’s just general advice.

This was awesome. It doesn't hurt. This was great. Thanks, man.

All right, man. A quick disclaimer. Nothing on this podcast should be considered investment advice. Guests or the hosts may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial adviser. Thanks.