Word: itt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Building modest homes made Levitt rich. In 1968, after his company had built more than 140,000 houses around the world, Levitt & Sons was sold to ITT Corp. for $92 million in stock, most of which went to him. That fortune bought, among other things, a 237-ft. yacht, La Belle Simone, named for his third wife, and a 30-room mansion in Mill Neck, N.Y. But the deal barred him from the domestic construction business for 10 years. Within four years, the ITT stock, which he had been using as collateral to build subdivisions in places like Iran, Venezuela...
...give him signed, undated resignation letters that he could use if they tried to vote against him. His closest employees, according to one biographer, formed the Occidental Mouseketeers--with official membership drawings of a cowering mouse on a red carpet. But they weren't as beaten as the ITT execs of the 1960s and '70s, who were regularly grilled and even sickened in large meetings with CEO Harold Geneen...
Theoretically, a conglomerate made sense because it could balance out the business cycle by trading in a wide array of goods and services. Somewhat perversely, both the tax code and the antitrust policy at that time encouraged the strategy. ITT bought the maker of Wonder bread...
...ITT Tech...
...television, another distribution outlet where it has fared badly. The company is expected to announce a deal this week with CNBC under which it would provide Dow Jones' business news to the CNBC and MSNBC cable channels. Earlier this year, Dow Jones launched WBIS+ in New York City with ITT. But ITT forced a sale of the station after that company became the target of a hostile takeover by Hilton Hotels. "Our New York television adventure can only be described as a detour," says Dow Jones spokesman Richard Tofel. "It didn't get us to where we were going...