The Acquisitions: Overpaying With Other People's Money
Altice's US story begins with two enormously expensive bets made almost entirely with debt. In 2015 Altice paid $9.1 billion for Suddenlink, and in 2016 $17.7 billion for Cablevision — the parent of Optimum. The combined $27 billion was financed almost entirely through leveraged debt, leaving the entity with roughly $25+ billion in obligations and almost no margin for error.
The theory was straightforward: cable is a cash flow machine, and Altice would extract European-style efficiencies to service the debt while the business ran itself. That theory worked in less competitive European markets. It failed badly in the US.
Regulators saw the warning signs immediately. In early 2016, New York City's Public Advocate Letitia James and the state Public Service Commission staff formally opposed the Cablevision acquisition, warning that Altice's planned $900 million in cost cuts would damage customer service, eliminate jobs, and harm affordable broadband access. Moody's agreed, estimating realistic savings closer to $450 million. Both James and the PSC pointed to Altice's French wireless unit SFR, which had lost approximately one million customers after identical cost-cutting. The deal was approved with conditions — including a $10/month low-income broadband option, a fiber upgrade within 36 months, and no elimination of customer-facing jobs for five years. Altice agreed to those conditions and then largely ignored them.
Vanity Over Practicality: The HQ Move
One early signal of Altice's priorities was the decision to move the company's headquarters out of Bethpage, New York — the heart of the Cablevision footprint — to Long Island City, Queens, in the former Citigroup building. Long Island City sits just outside the Optimum service territory and offered no operational benefit. The move was driven primarily by the preferences of European executives who wanted proximity to Manhattan rather than any business rationale. Bethpage would have been cheaper, less disruptive, and actually inside the footprint. Instead, the company spent heavily on a prestige address to accommodate transplanted leadership while cutting costs everywhere that touched customers. It set the tone for the management culture that followed.
The Cost-Cutting Playbook: Too Deep, Too Fast, Too Corrupt
What followed was a systematic extraction of value from the US business, much of it benefiting Drahi and his inner circle directly rather than the company or its customers.
Call centers gutted and outsourced to an insider-owned vendor. Thousands of local US call center employees were laid off and their work transferred to Intelcia, a Moroccan call center company that Drahi owned. Customers called Optimum and reached agents employed by a Drahi-controlled entity, with fees flowing back to him. Drahi has since sold his Intelcia stake, but the damage to customer experience and the conflict of interest were real and lasting.
Chat support outsourced to an unqualified insider-owned BPO. Yossi Benchetrit — a key Altice USA executive and son-in-law of co-founder Armando Pereira — opened his own chat support BPO company and forced Altice USA to do business with it. The company was real and did handle chat interactions, but Altice USA was their very first client — meaning a major cable operator's customer-facing chat operation was handed to a startup with no track record, no experience, and no proven capability. The results were predictably poor, directly harming the customer experience. After Benchetrit was pushed out following the Portuguese corruption investigation, the company was able to exit that agreement within three months — a telling detail about how quickly the damage could have been remedied had anyone with authority been willing to act sooner.
Field tech work funneled through a shell entity. A short-lived company called Altice Technical Services briefly existed during this period. Key executives including Hakim Boubazine were allegedly shareholders. Field technical support work was moved into it so the company could charge Altice USA for services previously performed in-house. It failed, was shut down, and the technicians were brought back in-house — before eventually being outsourced entirely to MasTec, where they are employed today.
Fiber deployment outsourced to a connected contractor. The fiber upgrade Altice promised regulators was handed largely to Excell Communications, a contractor whose ownership traced back to Dunas de Contrastes, a Portugal-based firm heavily linked to Altice insiders and Armando Pereira's network. Excell received massive fiber deployment contracts almost exclusively from Altice USA. When Portuguese authorities raided Altice leadership in July 2023 as part of Operation Picoas — a corruption and money laundering investigation — Altice USA abruptly terminated nearly all its contracts with Excell to distance itself from the scandal. Stripped of its primary revenue source overnight, Excell filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, taking with it hundreds of US telecom workers and leaving Altice's fiber buildout in disarray.
Armando Pereira arrested. Altice's co-founder was placed under house arrest in Portugal in July 2023 as part of the same Operation Picoas investigation covering corruption, money laundering, and the insider contracting schemes that had been running through the US business for years.
The $1 billion NYC network loan. As financial pressure mounted, Altice USA secured a $1 billion asset-backed loan using its New York City HFC network infrastructure as collateral — essentially mortgaging the physical plant that serves millions of customers just to maintain liquidity.
Sotheby's. Drahi's 2019 acquisition of the auction house raised eyebrows from the start. A 2025 New Yorker investigation documented the turmoil and controversy his ownership brought to the institution. High-value art and collectibles are among the most commonly cited vehicles for moving money across borders in ways that are difficult to trace — a dynamic that has drawn regulatory scrutiny globally.
The Network Decision That Sealed the Outcome: Fiber vs. DOCSIS 4.0
Amid all of this, Altice made a fateful technology decision that accelerated the competitive deterioration.
Rather than upgrading its existing hybrid fiber-coax network to DOCSIS 4.0 — which would have delivered multi-gigabit symmetrical speeds across the entire footprint at roughly $100-200 per home passed — Altice chose to build fiber-to-the-premises in select markets. FTTP runs $800-1,200 per home passed depending on density. On a network of several million homes, that difference amounts to billions of dollars Altice simply did not have.
The technology choice wasn't purely operational. Altice Labs, the company's internal technology division, was developing proprietary fiber equipment and solutions. Deploying FTTP in the US served as both a revenue source and a proof-of-concept for that technology — benefiting Drahi's broader empire even when it wasn't the optimal choice for the US business. Once again, insider interests shaped decisions that harmed customers and shareholders.
The result was the worst possible outcome: billions spent on a partial fiber build covering only a fraction of the footprint, while the rest of the network remained on aging DOCSIS 3.1. Competitors — Verizon FiOS in the Northeast, T-Mobile Home Internet nationally, Comcast with DOCSIS 4.0, and fiber overbuilders in the South and West — had either already upgraded or were upgrading faster and more completely. Optimum was losing customers in markets where it was sometimes the only broadband provider, which is a remarkable operational failure.
Had Altice taken that same capital and deployed a full DOCSIS 4.0 upgrade across the entire network, they would have delivered multi-gigabit speeds everywhere, spent a fraction of what FTTP costs, maintained a competitive product, and preserved the cash flow needed to service the debt. The customer losses that have driven the financial collapse would have been materially lower.
The Outcome
The combination of over-leveraged acquisitions, systematic insider extraction, regulatory commitments ignored, a vanity headquarters move that prioritized European executive preferences over operational logic, a technology strategy distorted by self-dealing, and a competitive market that punished every one of those mistakes has produced a company with $25+ billion in net debt, hundreds of thousands of lost broadband customers, a stock fallen from $30+ to under $1, and a restructuring that will hand control to Apollo Global Management, Oaktree Capital Management, and JPMorgan Chase.
The warning signs were visible to New York regulators in 2016. The corruption was visible to Portuguese authorities by 2023. The competitive deterioration was visible in the subscriber data every quarter. What was missing was any ownership accountability that could have forced a course correction — because Drahi's dual-class share structure gave him 90%+ voting control with a minority economic stake, insulating him from the shareholder pressure that might otherwise have stopped it.