What I heard was that Joe and his son really liked riding dirt bikes and it seemed like a good thing to do since Cannondale knew aluminum welding and was working on suspension design at the time.
That's the kind of decisions you can make when you own the company! Unfortunately, some decisions don't work out.
I heard that Joe finished his trophy mansion just in time for it to be taken away by the bankruptcy.

I always wondered if they didn't stick with being an aluminum tube bike company for too long.
What if they'd gone into TITANIUM, and did the same to the prices that they did for aluminum bikes? Seems like the processes and machine tools would have been close enough to give them a leg on the market.
Maybe that would have slowed up the acceptance of carbon fiber - but they started using CF in '94 so they were trying to widen their market - or was that just part of the new owner's idea?