Goei, CEO of Altice USA

Altice USA’s Dexter Goei is on a buying spree, putting down $31 million to buy a five-story multifamily building in Greenwich Village with plans to convert the 10-unit building into his personal megamansion. Cablevision customers will help cover Goei’s extravagant salary and his shopping list with a rate hike on set-top box rentals that will reach an all-time high of $10/month.

Cablevision is notifying customers that effective Dec. 1, customers will need to pay more, in part because Altice wants to make sure its charges “align with the industry” and are “competitive with other providers.” In other words, they are not charging enough.

Optimum’s Broadcast Basic Tier is rising to $17.95/mo for new customers, with existing customers facing a price hike up to $2.39/mo. Customers with Optimum Value or higher level of service will pay $2.98 a month more for Cablevision’s Sports & Broadcast TV fee, split into a $3.99/mo fee for “Broadcast TV” and $4.97/mo for “Sports TV.”

While Altice executives continue to look for at least $900 million in cost-cutting and savings at Cablevision, top executives are under no such constraints. Goei tried to hide his megamansion deal using the name of a Limited Liability Company as the buyer of the property, located down the street from Sarah Jessica Parker’s proposed megamansion at 273-275 West 11th Street. The super wealthy often evict current tenants and then knock the walls down between each apartment to create a larger open space for themselves in otherwise notoriously cramped Manhattan real estate.

“We can’t replace the five-year old broken coffee maker in our break room without appearing before a committee which writes down the names of those who want to spend $150 on a new machine but our new CEO (Goei is CEO of Altice USA) signs off on $10 box rentals and pays himself a salary that lets him shop until he drops,” one Cablevision middle manager on Long Island tells Stop the Cap! “It’s like letting Gordon Gekko run a cable company.”