Eli Broad's big goof

CEOs do makes mistakes and some of them are whoppers, as JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon demonstrated by not aggressively pursuing suspicious trading activity that wound up costing the company $2 billion. Well, billionaire Eli Broad blundered badly in the early 1970s when Kaufman & Broad, the company he headed, got out of the cable business. From his comments in Newsweek:

Back then, we had three main businesses: home building, life insurance, and cable. They all demanded a great deal of capital. We looked at our finances and we didn't have enough for life insurance, home building, and cable, so we had to divest one of the three. I figured something had to go, and the executives around me and I made a choice. We ended up selling Nation Wide to Tele-Communications Inc, and we then owned 15 percent of TCI--which we foolishly and immediately cashed in for $23.5 million. At any rate, TCI went on to become the nation's largest cable provider. It was later acquired by AT&T, which then sold it to Comcast. Comcast is worth about $78 billion today. It was a mistake selling it. We should have sold the home-building business and kept cable.

Broad has been plugging his quasi-autobiography, "The Art of Being Unreasonable."