Ebbers was born in 1941 to a blue-collar family in snowy Alberta, Canada. First job: milkman. After winning a basketball scholarship to Mississippi College and knocking around for a few years as a coach and warehouse manager, he bought a motel in 1974 and built it into a chain of Best Westerns. In 1983 he branched into telecom with a little long-distance company, and the rest is acquisitions history: WilTel in 1995, MFS and UUNet in 1996, chunks of AOL and CompuServe in 1997.
What’s next? Maybe he’ll target a big international carrier. As for strategy, Ebbers complains, “We spend so much dang time planning things–and not getting much done.”
