He became teary recounting how he was instilled with respect for human rights at an early age, having seen older neighbors who bore the tattoos of Nazi concentration camps.
He said his father was a brilliant man who worked on missile targeting for the National Security Agency. If that work had been used successfully, Anderson said, his father "would have become a war criminal, by having millions of civilian deaths on his conscience." He said his mother had a doctorate in education.
He said he never graduated from college -- and didn't stop hearing about it from his mother until his first company went public.
"I tried various colleges" -- the University of Richmond, Northern Virginia Community College, George Mason University -- and "didn't find any of them suited me," he said. "I should have been at MIT, but I couldn't get in."
He began his telecommunications career with MCI Communications Corp. in 1979, when the upstart long-distance phone company was helping to usher in a new era of entrepreneurship in telecommunications. Anderson said he worked in a low-level sales job.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he helped found or fund a series of telecommunications companies, including Mid Atlantic Telecom Inc., Esprit Telecom Group PLC and Telco Communication Group Inc., which were sold at huge gains. According to a biography provided by his office, he was also an investor and board member of Erols Internet Inc. before the service was sold in 1998.
Anderson was one of the driving forces behind MirCorp, which sought to privatize Russia's decrepit Mir space station and arranged for an American financier to take an excursion in space. MirCorp's ambitions were dashed with the station's demise.
But Anderson has remained passionate about space. "I want to build my own space station since we lost the Mir," he said. "I want to have a moon base."
In 1997, Anderson created FINDS, the Foundation for the International Non-governmental Development of Space, and endowed it with millions of dollars. The organization's Web site says it "is in the process of applying" for status as a not-for-profit under IRS rules.
The site says FINDS has issued grants to support such causes as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the tracking of near-earth asteroids, plans for a human outpost on the moon and "beamed energy propulsion."
