“Here’s a short version of a long back-story reported by Gizmodo: Monster founding CEO Noel Lee sent his son Kevin to single-handedly negotiate an agreement with Beats’ cofounders – rapper Dr. Dre and music industry mogul Jimmy Iovine (also chairman of Interscope Records) – and their hoard of high-priced attorneys,” Steve Tobak writes for FOXBusiness. “That was Lee’s first mistake and it was a big one. Outmanned, outgunned, outmaneuvered and desperately needing to close a deal – any deal – to recoup millions he shouldn’t have invested in prototypes and marketing, Kevin gave away the store in what had to be about the most lopsided deal in business history.”

“That’s when Lee made his second mistake. That too, was a big one. Now that Beats had control of pretty much everything, Lee sold his stake in the company. But if he had just held onto his share until after the Apple acquisition, he would have been more than $100 million richer,” Tobak writes. “That, I believe, led Lee to his third mistake, suing Apple’s Beats unit in January of this year.”

“If I’m Apple, I see that as the relationship-ending move,” Tobak writes. “Apple didn’t overreact. Apple didn’t bully. What Apple did was get rid of a partner that chronically makes shockingly bad business decisions and calls itself a victim.”

Read more in the full article – highly recommended – here.

MacDailyNews Take: Spot on target.

And, regarding Monster cables:

“In true Silicon Valley fashion, [Monster CEO Noel Lee] started out in his family’s basement: taste-testing different varieties of copper wire until he found a type that he thought enhanced audio quality. Then, also in Silicon Valley fashion, he marketed the shit out of it and jacked up its price: Monster Cable. Before it was ever mentioned in the same gasp as Dre, Monster was trying to get music lovers to buy into a superior sound that existed mostly in imaginations and marketing brochures,” Sam Biddle reported for Gizmodo back in September 2013. “‘We came up with a reinvention of what a speaker cable could be,’ Noel Lee boasts. His son, Kevin, describes it differently: ‘a cure for no disease.'”

Much more in the full article here.