[cestith]

Motorola wasn't just some cellphone company. The car radio went into production there after Galvin hired Wavering and Lear. He later changed the name of the company to name it after that product. The automotive alternator was invented there (by Wavering). They made the 6800, 6809, 68k, and POWER/PowerPC processor lines used in various lines of Apple, Tandy, Sun, Amiga (later Commodore Amiga), SGI, HP, IBM, Momentum, and Raptor Engineering computers (the POWER/PowerPC was a partnership with IBM and Apple but largely designed at Motorola). Neil Armstrong spoke into a Motorola transceiver from the moon.

Motorola broke up into way more than two companies over time. It sold its TV business to Matsushita in 1974. Motorola bought General Instruments and became the largest builder of set-top devices in the world and also spun off ON Semiconductor in 1999. Later this home products division would largely end up sold to Arris. Freescale Semiconductor split off in 2003 then later merged into NXP in 2015. Further spinoffs and department selloffs include Iridium, what became General Dynamics Decision Systems, and Cambium Networks.

[eigenvalue]

Yes, and even the legacy business (which makes radios for emergency responders among many other things) has been a great investment. If you bought MSI 10 years ago, you've made just under a 20% annualized return if you reinvested dividends. And ON Semi has been almost as good over the past decade. It's only in consumer cellphones where they did really badly.

[bdcravens]

Is it common to refer to it as MSI (the stock ticker for Motorola Solutions)? I would think most think of the computer hardware company when they hear that.

[eigenvalue]

That’s the stock symbol for the company. Investors often refer to companies by their tickers.

[walrus01]

Iridium wasn't a sell-off. Motorola was one of the largest investors in Iridium, and lost a vast amount of money when it went bankrupt. Additionally they were deeply involved in its hardware.

The second incarnation of the Iridium corporation we know now is the group of people who bought it at pennies on the dollar in the bankruptcy auction.

[OldHand2018]

Iridium went under because the developing world installed mobile networks, and Motorola had a huge portion of that market.

Accounting tricks aside, they didn't lose money on the downfall.

[ppg677]

Iridium was doomed from day 1. The system could only support a small number of subscribers. It was nearly impossible to recoup the capital expenditures given the capacity of the system.