They Pay for Water: Building XM Satellite Radio

At twenty-four, Dan Murphy walked into Sony with a year and a half of work experience and no real plan beyond the next paycheck. Fifteen years later he was one of the founding executives building XM Satellite Radio from a paper concept into a national broadcast company — raising the money, building the satellites, designing the radios, and convincing a country that had never paid for radio to start paying ten dollars a month for it.

He launched the service once, and then had to do it again: XM’s national rollout began the morning after Dan drove past the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, later wondering whether anyone would still care about satellite radio once the biggest press event of his career finally arrived. The company survived, scaled, and merged with Sirius, filling its hallways along the way with some of the biggest names in music and sports.

They Pay for Water is the inside account of that decade — the sleepless nights, the boardroom battles, the celebrity walk-throughs, and the numbers, like CHURN and SAC, that quietly ran the whole show — written by the man who was there for all of it, and who ultimately walked away from the company he helped build to fight a harder battle at home.