MURPHY, DAN
Radio is free, my mother said. Why would anyone pay for this? I asked her whether she paid for bottled water. In 1998, Dan Murphy walked away from a VP title at Sony, fifteen years of relationships, and one of the most respected brands in the world to join fourteen people in a rented basement office with bright orange walls, an $80 million FCC license, and roughly twelve months of money left. The plan was to build a radio network in space and convince a country that had never paid a dime for radio to start paying ten dollars a month. Nobody knew yet whether a satellite signal could even reach a car moving at highway speed, or whether the antenna would end up the size of a car roof and cost two thousand dollars to install. Raise the next round or disband. That was the whole strategy. They Pay for Water is the inside account of what happened next, told by one of the founding executives who lived it: the funding rounds that nearly failed, the fight to get XM radios onto retail shelves and into car dashboards, the satellites, the programming wars, and the two numbers CHURN and SAC that quietly de
