Stealth and Wealth
The Bullshit Billionaires
Stealth, by definition, refers to something done deliberately to conceal it from one or more parties. In everyday language, it’s often called “backstabbing.” This term fits the actions of the British company Acorn, which claimed ownership of copies of an Internet TV design which in 1996 it offered to the U.S. corporation Oracle as its own. In 1995, Acorn was effectively run by two men who weren’t official directors but effectively controlled its affairs: Marco Benedetti, son of the President of Olivetti (which owned 48% of Acorn’s shares), and Herman Hauser, a former Olivetti employee and major shareholder in Acorn Plc, a publicly listed London company.
At the time, Acorn was near bankruptcy when it seized on the designs of the small English firm Viewcall, which had previously engaged Acorn to manufacture its set-top box (STB) uniquely connecting the Internet to TV by phone lines. While bound by a Non-Disclosure Agreement to keep Viewcall’s designs confidential, Acorn pitched similar designs—claimed as its own—to the giant U.S. software company Oracle.
It’s unclear how much Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder and CEO, knew about the origins of the designs, but he quickly promoted the product as Oracle’s own Network Computer (NC), positioned as a rival to Microsoft’s PC dominance and in open opposition to Viewcall whose existence was public knowledge. Known for strategic publicity, Oracle announced its partnership with Acorn and the NC to the world’s press while the NDA with Viewcall was still active in 1995. By early 1996, Ellison was openly stating the NC’s designs came from Acorn. In reality, the NC hardware was essentially a replica of Viewcall’s STB Internet TV product, though no working model appeared until September ’96, as it required eight months to develop the browser software. Viewcall having publicly launched its STB hardware product and fully operative browser nine months earlier at the CES show at Las Vegas early in January 1996.
As a result of Acorn’s claims Oracle was to organize the buy out of the failing Acorn for several hundred $million at three times its share value only months before, much to the benefit of Olivetti and to Dr Hauser who was appointed CEO of Net Channel, the company formed by Oracle to sell its NC’s services to a global market in competition to Viewcall, and which was later sold to American Online (AOL). A year later Hauser was to preside over the demise of Viewcall in a buy out of its assets by Net Channel which left nothing for the Viewcall shareholders.
Hauser was later to claim a role in the development of the NC and found further fame and fortune as part of a team which developed the Arm Risc chip which Viewcall had uniquely used in its STB as a memory device and was later to achieve great success in use by mobile phones. Today Dr Hauser modestly acclaims himself as a scientist turned financier finding funds for inventive UK companies from investors, a role he established following the sale of Acorn and Arm to foreign investors. A full account of Acorn’s dealings with Viewcall are given in Mr Internet TV the Ego and the Id published on Amazon and other sources.