Roberto Escobar, 71, is releasing a foldable cell phone through his investment company Escobar Inc. It's called Escobar Fold 1 and is named after his brother. Pablo Escobar's brother worked for years as an accountant in the brutal Medellín cartel as it reinvented the global cocaine trade. Now he has his sights set on a new market: smartphones. The company claims the foldable phone has the most durable screen for this type of model on the market.
Roberto Escobar with a cheaper alternative
Olof Gustafsson, chairman of Escobar Inc., told CNN the display is made of a proprietary plastic that is "virtually unbreakable." He claimed this was the “longest-lasting phone screen on the market.” Prices start at $349. The phone also uses Google's Android operating system. “Our phone has undergone rigorous testing,” said Gustafsson. “The only real way to damage our phone is to burn it, which the average user probably wouldn’t do.”
The company was formed by Roberto Escobar in 1984 as a holding company for "assets and value protection" for the Escobar brothers, according to their website. There were quite a few of them at the time. Pablo Escobar was reportedly responsible for trafficking 80 percent of the world's cocaine in the late 1970s and early 1980s. According to Forbes, Pablo Escobar was on the list of billionaires in the world from 1987 to 1993. Escobar was shot dead in his hometown of Medellín on December 2 while fleeing Colombian authorities.
From prison to the smartphone business
Roberto Escobar then surrendered to police in 1992 during the crackdown on the Medellín cartel. He then spent ten years in prison for various drug offenses. However, after his release, he went on a business trip to one of his brother's houses and once claimed he had a breakthrough in finding oneCure for AIDSachieved.
Roberto is half blind and half deaf due to a letter bomb that exploded in front of his eyes in prison in 1993. He dreams of going to the world with his foldable deviceFollowing in Samsung's footstepsto step up and become a smartphone manufacturer. “We want to beat the competition,” Gustafsson told CNN. “We found out very quickly that if we made a good phone that worked at a reasonable price, we could sell a lot of devices. And that’s exactly what’s happening now.”
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