Who Founded Comcast?

Ralph J. Roberts co-founded Comcast in 1963 when he and partners Daniel Aaron and Julian Brodsky bought a cable system serving about 1,200 subscribers in Tupelo, Mississippi for roughly $500,000. He saw that cable subscriptions produced steady recurring revenue and built the company by buying regional systems. Comcast was renamed in 1969 and listed publicly in 1972. Roberts led the company until his son Brian became president in 1990, and he remained chairman until 2004 and an influential founder until his death in 2015.

Education: University of Pennsylvania. Ralph J. Roberts was born in 1920.

Daniel Aaron was a Comcast co-founder who fled Nazi Germany as a young man and later worked in the early cable industry. He joined Ralph Roberts and Julian Brodsky in buying the Tupelo, Mississippi system in 1963 and spent decades overseeing Comcast's cable operations, engineering and employee relations as the company grew from a single small system into a national operator. Daniel Aaron was born in 1926.

Julian Brodsky co-founded Comcast in 1963 and served for many years as its chief financial officer and later vice chairman. A trained accountant, he arranged the debt financing that let Comcast buy cable systems using their predictable subscription cash flows, funding expansion through the 1970s and 1980s.

Julian Brodsky was born in 1933.

Julian A. Brodsky was born on July 16, 1933. He also co-founded and chaired Comcast Interactive Capital, the venture capital unit now called Comcast Ventures.