Hugh Panero appears to be a loser in all of this – which is ironic, since he was one of the visionaries central to the launch of satellite services, dating to the days when Karmazin was on the other side of the competitive fence.
Although Panero is CEO of XM and would stay until any deal is closed, nothing has been said about a possible future role with a merged entity. Parsons did credit Panero for his “leadership over all these years. All of us at XM owe him a lot.”
You could argue that Panero helped to build the more successful satcaster of the two, based on subscriber count and XM’s decision to keep chip development in-house. The latter proved crucial at launch.
