I have no idea whatsoever how “Inside Washington” works, but I do know that the past several weeks have shown that EchoStar Chairman Charlie Ergen knows that game and knows that game well.

Ergen is a person who, to assume you know what he has going on, you do so at your own risk. I know he has a “gambler” persona that is probably overblown, but after what he has managed to do in terms of selling off $40 billion in spectrum assets, I want no piece of this person anywhere near a gambling establishment, game of “truth-or-dare,” or fantasy football pool.

A quick rundown on what Ergen has recently pulled off is impossible to fully encapsulate, but the end result is that Ergen is now a much richer person than he was just a few weeks ago and has fewer headaches. From my lowly journalism perspective: win-win.

I have always had a somewhat skeptical view of Ergen’s path toward greater wealth and cranium wellbeing, a view that was definitely clouded by my early introduction to the domestic wireless telecommunications space. This was in early 2000, when the industry was just starting to absorb spectrum assets from the 1997 PCS spectrum auctions, that was feeding new entrants into the space.

New players like Sprint, T-Mobile, Cricket Wireless, and MetroPCS were putting their newly won spectrum licenses into play, building out extensive networks that they hoped to use to rival established players like AT&T (the OG), SBC Communications, BellSouth, NYNEX, Bell Atlantic, GTE, AirTouch, etc.

Heck, there were even some crazy operators like Nextel, Nextel Partners, and SouthernLINC that were using updated walkie-talkie technology to offer enterprise-focused wireless services.

And the technology wars (CDMA, GSM, TDMA, GAIT, iDEN), oh man, were those fun!

If none of this is ringing a bell, let me just tell you it was crazy.

That craziness was exacerbated by the numerous entities that bought spectrum licenses with seemingly no plan to actually ever use them. The most famous of these was a firm called NextWave.

Colleagues of mine from that time are well versed in that name, but my version in short is NextWave was a company that managed to buy a lot of wireless spectrum; immediately filed for bankruptcy protection stating that it could not pay for those licenses; had enough money though for good lawyers that allowed NextWave to maintain control of those licenses despite not paying for them; and eventually selling those licenses off to established operators for a nice profit.

That model has, in my mind, now become known as “the underpants gnomes” model as perfected via “South Park.”

A license of love

Ergen’s entry into this cave was through acquiring every conceivable spectrum license he could get his hands on, no matter how useless those licenses might be for an actual wireless network. Ergen never saw a wireless spectrum license he did not like, and this resulted in Ergen spending approximately $35 billion on thousands of licenses strewn all over a spectrum chart.

Ergen then, for years, touted how he was going to use these licenses to power a new mobile telecommunications provider at a time when the overall market was all about consolidation due to the high cost of running a mobile telecommunications network. I saw Ergen speak at different industry trade shows espousing this plan, which, despite my NextWave-tinged skepticism, made me a fan of Ergen’s swashbuckling style.

I know many analysts and industry observers who never saw a legitimate path for EchoStar’s mobile telecommunication ambitions to actually pan out. And I have to believe that all of the various EchoStar/Boost/Dish executives operating under Ergen, despite their best intentions, also had to have had their doubts.

Yet, Ergen publicly never wavered, and in fact earned that gambler moniker by upping the ante rather than blinking. Why be normal when you can deploy a forward-leaning 5G network using a cloud-based, open radio access network (RAN) architecture that relies on new vendors?

And it didn’t matter how wild Ergen’s mobile telecom businesses swayed in the breeze due to operational instability. All this seemed to do was keep doubters off balance in terms of the overall stability of the firm’s management team.

The “right” or “wrong” of all of this is secondary at this point, as I doubt any “right” learnings will come of it. There will also be questions over how much Ergen has personally pocketed from being a spectrum Svengali, or whether there might have been a better way for Ergen to have invested his money.

Regardless, EchoStar is now set to unveil its “strategic pivot” next week at a space event in Paris. With little left in the way of assets, I am guessing that “pivot” will be more of a “this is all we have left, so this is all we can do” shift.

But, if history has taught me anything, it’s that if Charlie Ergen is involved in any way, don’t assume anything and don’t bet against him.