With no offers, he took a job with Telus Communications, standing in the cellphone sections at Wal-Mart and Best Buy and pushing Telus products.
All in all, it adds up to quite a ride for Telus — and for those who have the good fortune to watch these things only as case studies in how the capital markets can sometimes work in odd ways.
But things haven't turned out so well for Mason, which has found a shrewd opponent in Telus.
After a call for a boycott from a Roman Catholic archbishop, hundreds of complaints and one lawsuit from customers, the Canadian phone company Telus abandoned a service that allowed cellphone customers to buy soft-core pornography.
According to SeaBoard, Bell Canada accounts for more than a third of wireless subscribers and Telus more than a quarter, making them, respectively, Canada's biggest and third-biggest wireless operators.
The local "big three" providers Bell, Rogers and Telus, which between them control 90% of the mobile market can each bid for one of four blocks of spectrum available in all of Canada's 14 service regions.
After that the share prices of Bell, Rogers and Telus tumbled.
Last year, a rural telecom company in North Carolina blocked its users' access to the Internet-based phone service Vonage, and in Canada the telecom company Telus blocked access to a Web site supporting the telecommunications workers' union.
He said that in two days, he was to play in the 2010 Telus World Skins Game in Canada, but after that, he was flying his entire family - parents and siblings included - to Tuscany.
Telus did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
In April, the Deal Professor wrote about the unusual proxy battle going on at Telus.
