Quote Originally Posted by emu steve View Post
Thanks. You posted 'billions' instead of 'millions' but I understand.

If i follow the numbers of both Ilitch and Gilbert correctly, NEITHER had the resources 10 or 15 years ago to do the type of things they are doing today.

815 or 900M is nothing to sneeze it, but to do what Gilbert and Ilitches are doing today they need to be multi-billionaires.

Maybe we have stumbled on the truth: The reason Gilbert has done what he has done is that he is worth 3.7B more today than 11 years ago.

Ditto for Ilitch. He is now worth 5B more than 10 years ago.

Taking Ilitch's 815M net worth in 2005. Wasn't most of that tied up in non liquid assets like the Red Wings and Tigers? I always thought that years ago that Ilitch had a lot of assets [[Red Wings, Tigers, etc.) but wasn't liquid or cash rich. Wasn't it posted here sometime that he had to mortgage the Tigers [[???) to build Comerica????

What we are seeing is two men who have done extremely well in the last 10 years and they are spending aggressively on these projects.

The other aspect that needs to be taken into consideration is that when someone mentions "Illitch", who/what are they specifically referring to?

I mention this because historically Illitch always meant Mike and Marion Illitch, and their associated holdings. However in the last few years, everything the Illitch organization has done has been presented by Chris Illitch. I get that for health reasons Mike Illitch may not be able to be there physically for the PR stuff, but for those same health reasons is he able to be making the decisions as well?

This leads to two questions: 1) who is the one making the decisions in the Illitch organization, and 2) if the decision maker is now someone different, will they make different choices than their predecessors would have?