Conglomerates were the Internet stocks of the 1960s, when large numbers of them went public. Singleton, however, ran a very unusual conglomerate. Long before it became popular, he aggressively repurchased his stock, eventually buying in over 90 percent of Teledyne’s shares; he avoided dividends, emphasized cash flow over reported earnings, ran a famously decentralized organization, and never split the company’s stock, which for much of the 1970s and 1980s was the highest priced on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
