Why did Jack Tramiel not buy Commodore back?

[Gorf]

I don't know if there is an answer to the question:
Why did Jack Tramiel not buy Commodore back?

Jack founded Commodore as a typewriter manufacturing company, later calculators and finally computers ... with many ups and downs and financial problems, that forced him to transfer most of the shares to Gould.
A constellation that lead to Jack leaving "his" Commodore in 1984.

I could imagine getting his old company back would have been most satisfying for him ... after all the rivalry between C= and Jack's renewed Atari was quite obviously something personal and went on for years.

So why did the Tramiels not act, when fate delivered Commodore on a silver plate 10 years later in 1994?
Not having the necessary money did not stop him from "buying" Atari, where actually Warner did lend him the money .... he could have e.g. joined up with David Pleasance for the bidding.

Was he or one of his sons ever asked this question?
Does anyone know more?

[Matt_H]

Good thread topic!

I can only speculate, but there are 3 possibilities that come to mind for me.

1. Commodore in 1994 was a very different company from 1984. The 8-bit era was over, which was what Jack had built the company on, and nostalgia alone wouldn't have made good business sense. Was there a business case for merging Atari and Commodore? He might have seen Commodore/Amiga going down as one less competitor and vindication of his own product line.

2. Atari was not exactly in good shape in 1994, so they might not have had the capital themselves to acquire Commodore.

3. Buying Commodore would have meant bailing out Irving Gould, either financially or figuratively, which I can imagine being something that Jack absolutely did not want to do, e.g., "Well, Irving, you got yourself into this mess and I'm definitely not going to get you out of it."

[Predseda]

He was 66 at that year, maybe he was already retired?

[ImmortalA1000]

He had already handed over control of Atari corp. to his sons by that time. Atari Corp was also pretty much drained of profits due to the pathetic Jaguar and underwhelming Falcon sales.

In fact Leonard Tramiel said in an interview this week [on youtube] that after the dispute with Irving Gould where he left he had decided to retire and proceeded to go on a bit of a world tour to thank all those people that had made him successful. He also planned to sell his personal C= stock which was worth a fortune at the time.

It was the other parties that chased him down during this 'world tour' and offered him an incredible deal, unlike any other it has been noted, that he agreed to buy Atari. I'm not a financial adviser/accountant so I don't understand what was so great about the deal but it was noted in serious magazines/programs that he got a very very favourable deal to take it off Warner's hands. Apparently if Warner did not offload Atari soon they too would have been in serious financial trouble.

The receivers would have wanted absolute maximum value for Commodore due to them filing for bankruptcy, which is one of the reasons it took so long for Escom to acquire it probably. Atari Warner's computer division was not bankrupt, they were just losing $2million a week or month or something.

I would imagine the plan was probably exactly that, to get back at Irving Gould, via the Atari Mickey project out there (licensed Amiga chipset to use in a 128k RAM console) started in 1983. When Commodore bought Amiga outright AND Dave Needle illegally sabotaged the Amiga custom chip schematics on purpose he was contractually obliged to give to Atari they were a bit screwed and that's how it all turned out.

[Drittz78]

He could probably see the writing on the wall that Commodore was loosing the war against the PC.

[ImmortalA1000]

I am sure Jack Tramiel would have been better off if he had just sold his C= stock in 1984 and invested it wisely in property.