Terry

"Unbidden, Foxconn had orchestrated its own job interview and demonstrated a willingness to start that day. Hsieh and Gou took the Apple visitors on a tour, showing them a facility with capacity to build an immense quantity of iPods. “Terry’s like, ‘All this is at your disposal. We have all these great engineers. We’ve got all this stuff for you, and we’re here to help,’ ” says a person present."

"“Terry has an intuition about how to get government incentives that is hard to rival,” says a former Foxconn executive. “Nobody in the West can ever understand how China [attracts] so many factories. It’s literally—you’re given land. They’ll build the infrastructure for you. If you expect the buildings, they’ll build them for you. They’ll help you with your interprovince migration. If there’s not enough labor in the zone they want you to go on, they’ll get you the people and they’ll bear that cost.” This person adds: “The caveat is: you better deliver on your export commitments.”"

"Thanks to this alliance of private and state interests, Foxconn didn’t just command low-cost labor, but also cutting-edge equipment. One Apple executive recalls, in 1999, being stunned by the dichotomy between the world-class machines in the Foxconn factory and the “shithole” conditions around them. “Terry’s office was, like, a trailer, with a plastic table-desk,” this person says. A photographer who visited a decade later described it as an “old, single-story, metal-roofed building that more resembles a landscape maintenance shed than a typical executive suite.”"

"‘I think Nate would rather have had Craig back out of the whole thing and let Nate and Time Warner, and to a lesser extent TCI, take over, really,’ Downey says. ‘Nate tended to keep Craig out of the loop and Nate saw his reporting line as back to Jeff Schwall in the US, who was the Time Warner director to whom Nate reported. That was okay to a point because Time Warner was a huge influence on the HK Partnership. But it did mean that Craig felt not consulted when he should have been and when he saw himself—because of him and Terry having founded the whole operation—as having special rights. That led to persistent misunderstandings and conflicts between Craig and Nate. Both sides were in the wrong. Craig did poke into matters that a chief executive should have handled without difficulty, and Nate did withhold information from directors, including Craig, where he should have consulted us instead of consulting Jeff Schwall.’"