Walter Anderson (entrepreneur)

Walter C. Anderson (also known as Walter Anderson Crump; born 1953) is an American telephone entrepreneur who was arrested and convicted in the largest tax evasion case in United States history.

Anderson grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. He later moved to Fairfax, Virginia, where he graduated from Woodson High School in 1971. He did not graduate from college, though he spent some time at a number of institutions, including the University of Richmond, Northern Virginia Community College, and George Mason University.

Anderson began his telecommunications career as a salesman at MCI Communications in 1979. He entered into entrepreneurship in the 1980s and 1990s, during which he heavily invested in several telecom companies, which were later sold for large profits. Anderson bankrolled many early private space ventures and paved the way for the "astropreneurs" who followed. His most high-profile space investment was MirCorp, the 1990s start-up that briefly privatised Russia's ageing Mir space station. He reportedly pumped as much as $30 million into the venture. He also invested into Rotary Rocket.

In 1988, Walt Anderson became an early backer of the International Space University (ISU) (www.isunet.edu). Walt Anderson provided critical funding, strategic support and advice to the founding team and in 1992 was awarded the distinction of ISU Associate Founder along with 11 other critical supporters. The ISU was founded in 1987 and held its first summer session program (SSP) in the summer of 1988 at the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ISU operates a multicultural / multidisciplinary graduate space studies program. The ISU has held SSP's annually in varying locations around the world since the inaugural 1988 session. In 1995 the ISU began offering a Masters program from its permanent campus in Strasbourg, France. Walt Anderson was a permanent member of ISU and served on its Board of Directors for its initial 5 years of operations.

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