john c malone yacht

The amazing life of the largest landowner in the US and billionaire John Malone

You may not know his name, but chances are you’ve used a service or watched a channel with connections to John C. Malone.

The largest individual landowner in the US, Malone is the chairman of Liberty Media and has interests as wide ranging as race cars, the Discovery Channel, and the Atlanta Braves.

Here's a taste of his diverse interests:

• He is largest stakeholder of Liberty Media, which is worth $24 billion.
• He owns 28% of Discovery Communications, which just sealed a $14.6 billion deal for Scripps .
• He owns a quarter of Liberty Global, the largest international cable company with 29 million subscribers.
• He owns 8% of the publicly traded Atlanta Braves.
• He owns 2.2 million acres of land, making him the single largest landowner in the US.

But the media mogul wasn’t just born into his $9.22 billion net worth. Here’s how one of the richest and most powerful people in American business rose to prominence.

John C. Malone was born to parents of Irish descent on March 7, 1941, in Milford Connecticut, a suburb about two hours north of New York City.

He attended the prestigious Hopkins School in neighboring New Haven, graduating with a National Merit Scholarship in 1959.

A post shared by Hopkins School (@hopkinsschoolct) Feb 2, 2016 at 8:15am PST

The school, founded in 1660, is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the country. But Malone didn't always feel that he fit in.

"I was neither a preppy nor a town kid," Malone said in 1994 . "So I put a lot of energy into athletics." He got letters in fencing, track, and soccer. "It was raw drive, not skill," he says.

He has since donated $25 million to fund school's science center, which bears his name .

After high school, Malone stayed in New Haven and attended Yale University. He graduated in 1963 with a degree in electrical engineering and economics.

He has since donated $50 million to the university's engineering school, where some professorships bear his name.

Sticking with the Hopkins name (but no relation), Malone headed to Baltimore to study industrial management at Johns Hopkins University, receiving a master's in 1964.

In 2011, Malone made the largest donation to the university. His $30 million donation has funded construction of a new, 56,000-square-foot research building for the Whiting School of Engineering.

Malone’s introduction to the telecoms industry came as a student in the electrical-engineering program at New York University and Bell Labs.

Now owned by Lucid Technologies, Bell Labs is named for the telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell. The lab is credited with developing many telecom innovations, including the laser beam, the programming language C, early calculators, and radio transmission.

Malone returned to Johns Hopkins in 1967 to do a doctorate in operations research.

Ph.D. in hand, Malone joined the prestigious consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in New York.

In his three years consulting for large companies such as General Electric and IBM, Malone quickly learned of Wall Street's disdain for cable companies.

As any consultant will tell you, it's not easy work. Tired of the constant travel, Malone left McKinsey, and took a huge pay cut, to join General Instrument in 1973.

Malone ran a GI subsidy know as Jerrold, which produced minicomputers like the one above, for the burgeoning cable TV industry. GI would be sold to Motorola years after Malone's departure.

At Jerrold, Malone met Bob J. Magness, who in 1973 offered him the job of CEO of his almost bankrupt cable company, Tele-Communications Inc.

So Malone and his wife, Leslie, headed west to Colorado to try to save the company, which had only 400,000 subscribers and $12 million in annual sales. Worse, the company owed creditors $132 million. Malone wasted no time getting to work.

By 1990, Malone had successfully grown TCI into the biggest cable company, with 8.5 million subscribers.

In 1993, TCI and Bell Atlantic proposed a merger that would have been the largest in American telecommunications history. Then-Vice President Al Gore supported the merger as a way to improve American infrastructure. But the companies could not agree on the terms of a merger, and the deal to fell through, as The New York Times reported .

Instead, Malone shopped a merger to AT&T, which purchased TCI in 1998 for $32 billion.

In today's terms, the sticker price of AT&T's acquisition was $48.5 billion. The buyout was a bold step for AT&T, giving it a shot at offering local phone and high-speed-internet service to millions of homes across the country.

TCI's subsidiary, Liberty Media, would remain a separate publicly traded company, with John Malone still at the helm.

From his corner office in Englewood, Colorado, just south of Denver, Malone has served as chairman and briefly as interim CEO. He is largest stakeholder in the company after nearly three decades.

Under his watch, Liberty's reach has expanded from providing cable service to owning the networks broadcast on its infrastructure. Over the years, Malone has gobbled up the Discovery Channel, Virgin Media, QVC, Lionsgate (which owns Starz), Game Show Network, and more.

His ruthlessness angered regulators, who often criticized the company for its near monopolies in many markets. Al Gore called him Darth Vader, according to a profile by Ken Auletta in a 1994 issue of The New Yorker.

Malone's reach goes well beyond cable networks. Liberty Media acquired the Atlanta Braves MLB team in 2007 and spun it off as the separately traded Liberty-Braves Group, with Malone owning 8%.

Liberty Media acquired Formula One, the top car-racing series, for $4.4 billion in 2016. Malone owns 2% of the separately traded Liberty Media Formula One Group.

The sport had previously been run for decades by Bernie Ecclestone, who was criticized for not embracing new forms of media. With its acquisition , Liberty hopes to expand the circuit's reach and viewership, especially at home in the US.

Over the years, Liberty Media's holdings have almost always beat the market average. With two-thirds of the shares, Malone's wealth has skyrocketed. He's ranked 151st on Bloomberg's billionaires index.

Inspired by a summer spent on a family farm in Pennsylvania, Malone decided put his money in land.

Bell Ranch in Colorado was one of the first purchases made by Malone on his path to becoming the  largest individual landowner in the US. He also owns land in New Mexico, Wyoming, Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, and Maryland.

He owns just over a million of acres of woodlands near Boothbay, Maine and into neighboring New Hampshire, where he maintains a home keeps his sailing yachts.

Many locals, however, were worried about how Malone might use the land, given his conservative tendencies. Malone sits on the board of the libertarian Cato Institute  and has donated large sums to Republican political campaigns.

All these deals — and his 2.2 million acres of land — have earned Malone the nickname 'Cable Cowboy.'

His prize-winning race horses almost certainly contributed to the nickname as well.

Malone purchased 800-acre Bridlewood Farms in Florida for $14 million in 2013. Tapwrit, owned by Malone, won the 2017 Belmont Stakes. 

When not running a massive media conglomerate, Malone enjoys the finer things in life, like his Florida beach house.

Malone purchased a seaside mansion in Florida built by the Playmobil founder Horst Brandstätter in 2015 for $38 million. It even has a rotating living room.

Beyond land and houses, Malone has returned to his family's roots, buying up multiple high-profile hotels and castles in Ireland.

Malone acquired the 32,668-square-foot Humewood Castle — located on 427 acres in County Wicklow in Ireland — for $11 million. He also owns hotels in Dublin.

As media companies continue to consolidate, there's no doubt that John Malone will be involved.

In July 2017, Discovery announced it would purchase Scripps Networks Interactive for $14.6 billion , adding HGTV, Travel Channel, and Food Network into Malone's media arsenal.

Meet Patrick Drahi, the little-known French billionaire who's buying up telecom everywhere >>

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The amazing life of billionaire 'Cable Cowboy' John Malone -whose company just sold $22 million worth of assets to Vodafone

John c. malone was born to parents of irish descent on march 7, 1941, in milford connecticut, a suburb about two hours north of new york city..

He attended the prestigious Hopkins School in neighboring New Haven, graduating with a National Merit Scholarship in 1959.

The school, founded in 1660, is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the country. But Malone didn't always feel that he fit in.

"I was neither a preppy nor a town kid," Malone said in 1994 . "So I put a lot of energy into athletics." He got letters in fencing, track, and soccer. "It was raw drive, not skill," he says.

He has since donated $25 million to fund school's science center, which bears his name .

After high school, Malone stayed in New Haven and attended Yale University. He graduated in 1963 with a degree in electrical engineering and economics.

He has since donated $50 million to the university's engineering school, where some professorships bear his name.

Sticking with the Hopkins name (but no relation), Malone headed to Baltimore to study industrial management at Johns Hopkins University, receiving a master's in 1964.

In 2011, Malone made the largest donation to the university. His $30 million donation has funded construction of a new, 56,000-square-foot research building for the Whiting School of Engineering.

Malone’s introduction to the telecoms industry came as a student in the electrical-engineering program at New York University and Bell Labs.

Now owned by Lucid Technologies, Bell Labs is named for the telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell. The lab is credited with developing many telecom innovations, including the laser beam, the programming language C, early calculators, and radio transmission.

Malone returned to Johns Hopkins in 1967 to do a doctorate in operations research.

Ph.D. in hand, Malone joined the prestigious consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in New York.

In his three years consulting for large companies such as General Electric and IBM, Malone quickly learned of Wall Street's disdain for cable companies.

As any consultant will tell you, it's not easy work. Tired of the constant travel, Malone left McKinsey, and took a huge pay cut, to join General Instrument in 1973.

Malone ran a GI subsidy know as Jerrold, which produced minicomputers like the one above, for the burgeoning cable TV industry. GI would be sold to Motorola years after Malone's departure.

At Jerrold, Malone met Bob J. Magness, who in 1973 offered him the job of CEO of his almost bankrupt cable company, Tele-Communications Inc.

So Malone and his wife, Leslie, headed west to Colorado to try to save the company, which had only 400,000 subscribers and $12 million in annual sales. Worse, the company owed creditors $132 million. Malone wasted no time getting to work.

By 1990, Malone had successfully grown TCI into the biggest cable company, with 8.5 million subscribers.

In 1993, TCI and Bell Atlantic proposed a merger that would have been the largest in American telecommunications history. Then-Vice President Al Gore supported the merger as a way to improve American infrastructure. But the companies could not agree on the terms of a merger, and the deal to fell through, as The New York Times reported .

Instead, Malone shopped a merger to AT&T, which purchased TCI in 1998 for $32 billion.

In today's terms, the sticker price of AT&T's acquisition was $48.5 billion. The buyout was a bold step for AT&T, giving it a shot at offering local phone and high-speed-internet service to millions of homes across the country.

TCI's subsidiary, Liberty Media, would remain a separate publicly traded company, with John Malone still at the helm.

From his corner office in Englewood, Colorado, just south of Denver, Malone has served as chairman and briefly as interim CEO. He is largest stakeholder in the company after nearly three decades.

Under his watch, Liberty's reach has expanded from providing cable service to owning the networks broadcast on its infrastructure. Over the years, Malone has gobbled up the Discovery Channel, Virgin Media, QVC, Lionsgate (which owns Starz), Game Show Network, and more.

His ruthlessness angered regulators, who often criticized the company for its near monopolies in many markets. Al Gore called him Darth Vader, according to a profile by Ken Auletta in a 1994 issue of The New Yorker.

Malone's reach goes well beyond cable networks. Liberty Media acquired the Atlanta Braves MLB team in 2007 and spun it off as the separately traded Liberty-Braves Group, with Malone owning 8%.

Liberty media acquired formula one, the top car-racing series, for $4.4 billion in 2016. malone owns 2% of the separately traded liberty media formula one group..

The sport had previously been run for decades by Bernie Ecclestone, who was criticized for not embracing new forms of media. With its acquisition , Liberty hopes to expand the circuit's reach and viewership, especially at home in the US.

Over the years, Liberty Media's holdings have almost always beat the market average. With two-thirds of the shares, Malone's wealth has skyrocketed. He's ranked 164st on Bloomberg's billionaires index.

Inspired by a summer spent on a family farm in pennsylvania, malone decided put his money in land..

Bell Ranch in Colorado was one of the first purchases made by Malone on his path to becoming the  largest individual landowner in the US. He also owns land in New Mexico, Wyoming, Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, Maryland

He owns just over a million of acres of woodlands near Boothbay, Maine and into neighboring New Hampshire, where he maintains a home keeps his sailing yachts.

Many locals, however, were worried about how Malone might use the land, given his conservative tendencies. Malone sits on the board of the libertarian Cato Institute  and has donated large sums to Republican political campaigns.

All these deals — and his 2.2 million acres of land — have earned Malone the nickname 'Cable Cowboy.'

His prize-winning race horses almost certainly contributed to the nickname as well..

Malone purchased 800-acre Bridlewood Farms in Florida for $14 million in 2013. Tapwrit, owned by Malone, won the 2017 Belmont Stakes. 

When not running a massive media conglomerate, Malone enjoys the finer things in life, like his Florida beach house.

Malone purchased a seaside mansion in Florida built by the Playmobil founder Horst Brandstätter in 2015 for $38 million. It even has a rotating living room.

Beyond land and houses, Malone has returned to his family's roots, buying up multiple high-profile hotels and castles in Ireland.

Malone acquired the 32,668-square-foot Humewood Castle — located on 427 acres in County Wicklow in Ireland — for $11 million. He also owns hotels in Dublin.

As media companies continue to consolidate, there's no doubt that John Malone will be involved.

In July 2017, Discovery announced it would purchase Scripps Networks Interactive for $14.6 billion , adding HGTV, Travel Channel, and Food Network into Malone's media arsenal.

In May 2018, Vodafone  announced  that it has agreed to acquire Liberty Global's operations in Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania. The deal consists of €10.8 billion ($12.7 billion) in cash paid to Liberty Global and €7.6 billion ($8.9 billion) of existing debt that Vodafone will take on.

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10 Things You Didn't Know about Atlanta Braves Owner John C. Malone

John C. Malone is an American billionaire who is best-known for being the Chairman of Liberty Media. However, it should be mentioned that he possesses a similar influence over a couple of companies that are connected to Liberty Media, which is on top of other ownership stakes in other companies. What Are 10 Things You Didn't Know About John C. Malone, the prestigious and impressive owner of the Atlanta Braves?

1. Born in Milford, CT

Malone was born in the city of Milford, which can be found in Connecticut's New Haven County. Like a lot of cities in Connecticut, Milford underwent a process of suburbanization in the post-World War II period, with the result that it is counted in the New York metropolitan area. However, it is interesting to note that the city is home to a number of prominent companies such as Schick and Doctor's Associates, Inc.

2. Can Trace His Lineage to Cork County

For those who are unfamiliar, Malone is an Irish name, so it should come as no surprise to learn that Malone can trace his lineage to Ireland. To be exact, Malone's family came from County Cork , which is both the biggest and the most southern of the counties that make up the Republic of Ireland. Nickname-wise, County Cork is sometimes called the Rebel County, having been named thus because of its support for a pretender to the English throne centuries and centuries ago.

3. Studied Electrical Engineering

In school, one of the subjects that Malone studied was electrical engineering. In short, electrical engineering is an engineering discipline that came into existence in the latter part of the 19th century, which was when telephones and other electricity-using machines started seeing use. However, since that time, electrical engineering has expanded by leaps and by bounds, so much so that it now encompasses numerous sub-fields in its own right.

4. Studied Economics

Besides electrical engineering, Malone studied economics as well. The topics that fall under economics have been the subject of much discussion since before the start of human civilization. However, economics didn't become a true discipline in its own right until Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations, which introduced a number of revolutionary ideas. For instance, Smith was the one who claimed that land, labor, and capital were the three factors of production, which was a considerable change from the earlier emphasis on the overwhelming importance of agriculture.

5. Studied Industrial Management

Later, Malone went on to study industrial management at Johns Hopkins University. For those who are unfamiliar, industrial management is the branch of business administration that is focused on companies in the manufacturing sector as well as the various functions that are needed to keep them running. As such, it can trace its roots to factory management, which is one of the reasons that industrial management still retains a very close relationship with the various engineering disciplines in the present time.

6. Was Targeted By a Poison Pill Defense

In 2005, Malone owned 32 percent of the shares in News Corporation. As a result, there were reports that Rupert Murdoch was concerned that he could lose control of the corporation to Malone, which is why he made an attempt to eject Malone using a poison pill tactic. In short, a poison pill tactic in this context means making a takeover either more expensive or otherwise more complicated, meaning that it can take on various forms. One excellent example of a poison pill tactic would be a flip-in poison pill, which is when the shareholders besides the person who could carry out a takeover are permitted to buy more shares at a discounted price.

7. Huge Landowner

Malone is the single biggest landowner that can be found in the United States, seeing as how he is said to own 2,200,000 acres of land. Besides his holdings in the United States, Malone owns land in other countries as well, with Ireland being a particular favorite.

8. Owns Humewood Castle

For instance, Malone is the current owner of a place called Humewood Castle, which in spite of its name, isn't a castle but rather a sizable mansion that can be found in County Wicklow. In short, the place started out as a residence for the powerful Hume family, which commissioned the building in the late 19th century as a summer retreat. Humewood Castle was very expensive, with the result that it was so over-budget that it winded up bankrupting the architect who had been charged with the design process.

9. Is a Libertarian

Politically, Malone is a libertarian. Theoretically, this means that he supports a smaller government that can't interfere much in either personal matters or economic matters. In practice, well, there are a lot of U.S. libertarians who wind up supporting the Republicans, with Malone being an excellent example. For instance, he was one of the biggest donors to Trump's inauguration at $250,000, which was in addition to another $250,000 from his colleague Greg Maffei and then similar-sized donations from both Liberty Media and Liberty Interactive.

10. Has a Reputation For Complicated Corporate Structures

Malone is sometimes known because of a reputation for complicated corporate structures. Something of this can be seen in how his business empire isn't collected under a single corporate umbrella but instead spread out to a number of them. For instance, both Liberty Global and the company that was once called Liberty Interactive originated from Liberty Media, but they are actually separate companies in their own right even though they are also controlled by Malone.

Written by  Allen Lee

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Dr. John C. Malone

Independent Director

Warner Bros. Discovery

Director since 2008

Dr. John C. Malone is chairman of the boards of Liberty Media Corporation, Liberty Broadband Corporation and Liberty Global Plc. His extensive experience includes serving as chief executive officer of Tele-Communications, Inc. for over 25 years until its merger with AT&T Corporation in 1999. Dr. Malone previously served as chief executive officer and chairman of the board of directors of Discovery Holding Company from 2005 to 2008, when it merged with Discovery. Dr. Malone has served as a director of Liberty Broadband since 2014, Liberty Media (including its predecessors) since 2010, Liberty Global (including its predecessors) since 2005 and Qurate Retail (including its predecessors) since 1994. Dr. Malone previously served as a director of GCI Liberty, Inc. from 2018 to 2020, Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. from 2015 to 2018, Liberty Expedia Holdings, Inc. from 2016 to 2019, Liberty Latin America Ltd. from 2017 to 2019, Charter Communications, Inc. from 2013 to 2018 and Expedia, Inc. from 2005 to 2017. He also brings extensive experience serving on boards of non-profit organizations within the cable industry, including Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. and the National Cable Television Association.

Dr. Malone is a Class II Director; his initial term expires at the 2024 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

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John Malone Sails Uncertain Sea of Damage Control

More hot gossip from Ned Brainard's poison pen.

Judging from certain stories we've been reading in this, the first week of the new year, John Malone's resolution for 1997 appears to have been, "I shall return to my media-manipulating ways of old." After spending most of 1996 playing the Zen role of the silent, mysterious master of all he surveyed, Malone was burned last week by a highly skeptical, unflatteringly negative profile in Fortune magazine, headlined "High Noon for John Malone," with a lead sentence that said, "Often credited with brilliance, John C. Malone, 55, CEO of cable TV giant Tele-Communications Inc., seems lately to be trending toward incoherence." It must have been the word "incoherence" that prompted the normally secretive former " Infobahn Warrior " to invite a Wall Street Journal reporter into his office for an interview that became a front-page story in the 2 January edition of the paper - a story clearly intended to counteract the most damaging comments made by Fortune about Malone's recent remoteness from company affairs. The magazine, for example, portrayed Malone's acquisition of an 80-foot racing yacht, Liberty , as an indulgence in creature comforts predicated on Malone's commitment to his wife to "reduce stress" and "have more fun." The big boat sails again in the Journal article - only this time, Malone claims to be too busy to enjoy it: "I spent a total of six days on that boat since it was built." TCI's deeply disappointed shareholders can only hope the market buys that story.

We don't quite know what to make of Avalanche, the most recent project announced by America Online's Greenhouse. Is it a real, if terribly conceived project, or a metaparody of the entire Greenhouse program? Greenhouse, you'll recall, is one-time catalog salesman and Fred Silverman-wannabe Ted Leonsis's demonstration that AOL is a new-media studio capable of turning out the same kind of dumb, lowest-common-denominator, sure-to-fail projects that Hollywood has always given us. According to the Greenhouse-generated press release, Avalanche is the "First Ski/Snowboard Cybersoap," wherein "Suzy Chafee (aka Suzy Chapstick) and Real-Life Celebs to Appear as Romance and Political Intrigue Grip the Slopes of Telluride, CO." We can only assume the final green light for this project came during a Christmas party after a bit too much holiday cheer had flowed.

Our diatribe in last week's edition against the year-end reviews and the New Year prognostications of conventional pundits seems not to have penetrated the walls of Building #8 in Redmond. That, at least, is the conclusion we're forced to draw after reading the latest installment of Bill Gates' soporific syndicated column. Unable to resist the worst of the columnist's clichés, Gates gave us not just the standard top-10-style list, but a full 15 predictions for 1997. Predictably, added predictions only meant added obviousness. Apparently taking a page from Michael Kinsley's recent essay for Forbes magazine, which waxed poetic about the power of email (Get this: Editors actually use it to exchange story ideas at Slate!), Gates' predictions include "7. Most corporations will employ electronic mail systems by the end of the year, and employees will typically send or receive e-mail several times a day." Since "most" is such an elegantly inexact qualifier (Is it most corporations in America? Most worldwide? Most in the Fortune 500? Most that are Bill's customers?), we can only assume that Bill will be right come 31 December 1997. Unable to contain his enthusiasm, the Pope of Puget Sound also told us that "3. Advertising revenue on the Internet will soar, but not as high as some expect," and "By the end of the year, many people will recognize the historic dimensions of the global interactive network." But Gates doesn't want us to get too excited by his latest vision of the future: "15. My final prediction is that some of the preceding 14 predictions will prove too optimistic. A year is a short time, so some of these predictions may not happen until 1998." In other words, don't hold your breath on that email thing.

How Media Mogul John C. Malone Quietly Became America’s Largest Landowner

With an estimated net worth of $7.2 billion, Malone is now the largest private landowner in the United States, with 2.2 million acres—more than both Delaware and Rhode Island—to his name.

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When considering the pantheon of entrepreneurial titans, we often find that an individual’s success was due to their brilliance and superior understanding of a specific field or industry, and the development of new markets as technology advances. 

Whether that’s Bill Gates or Steve Jobs in personal computing or Henry Ford’s innovative development of the modern automotive industry, we’ve long come to identify these icons of business directly with their sphere of dominance and the era in which it occurred. So it’s understandable that a similar thing could happen to John C. Malone. 

He could have forever been the man who helped build the cable television industry and also helped lay the groundwork for the vast content marketplace that now exists. 

Referred to by some as the “Cable Cowboy”, Malone did indeed make his biggest mark in the development of the cable television business from a disorganized network of companies in the 1970s and ’80s into the conglomerates that dominate the landscape today. 

But to simplify the man as simply a visionary in the cable world is to ignore the way that Malone continues to personally evolve along with the media business. 

Where some saw the massive paradigm shifts in the media as a threat, Malone saw opportunity. Which is why more than five decades after beginning his illustrious career, he is still considered a scion of the media landscape, and looks poised to thrive in the digital age just as strongly as he did during the age of cable. 

With an estimated net worth of $7.2 billion, Malone is now the largest private landowner in the United States, with 2.2 million acres—more than both Delaware and Rhode Island—to his name. 

His property not only ranges from the woodlands of Maine—he is said to own five percent of the state—to ranches in Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico, in addition to holdings in Ireland and South America, but the Bahamas as well. 

Malone owns Sampson Cay, an island in the Exumas, an archipelago that begins 35 miles southeast of Nassau, which had been home to a high-end resort called the Sampson Cay Club until Malone shuttered it in 2013 and converted it into his private retreat. 

The island manager said at the time that he wanted “to be able to enjoy this Bahamian paradise with his family and friends.” 

The property includes several villas, a restaurant, a marina and mangrove bordered flats where Malone likes to go fishing. “Of course you don’t really ever own the land,” Malone has said. “You are kind of a steward of it so you really want to be a good steward. But it is sure enjoyable while you are on the planet to be able to go walk around or get on a horse or drive a truck around and be out in the open,” or even better, on a private island. 

Now 78, Malone owns an array of brands and companies well-known to the general public through his many corporations, largely Liberty Media and its subsidiaries. He holds stakes in, and has helped mold, well-known brands like Discovery, Inc. Lionsgate, SiriusXM satellite radio, and his TV and broadband company Liberty Global, which alone had $15.9 billion in revenue in 2018. 

Liberty Media also owns the Atlanta Braves baseball franchise. Prior to his rise to billionaire status, Malone studied electrical engineering and economics at Yale, before getting his PhD in operations research at Johns Hopkins. He worked for corporate giants like Bell Labs and global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, before finding himself in the position that would provide the launching pad for his empire. 

In 1973, a struggling, Denver-based cable company named TeleCommunications Inc. made Malone its President and CEO. It was early days in the cable business, and Malone took this burgeoning industry and made it his battlefield. Over the next 26 years, 24 as president and CEO, he built TCI into a cable giant, eventually selling the organization to AT&T in 1999 for around $48 billion. 

As a founding father of sorts for the cable television industry and the media landscape that has resulted, he’s considered a key figure in the “old media” arena. 

But what makes Malone stand out from many of the other key players from this era is the way he seems to have evolved into an expert for the 21st century media landscape. In this period of “cord-cutting” and the potential end of the cable era that he helped build, he remains largely influential. In fact, with his numerous media holdings, including Discovery, Lionsgate and others, he seems to be positioning himself to also help mold the streaming era as much as the cable era. 

In a rare interview, Malone sat down with CNBC last November to discuss the rapidly-shifting media landscape. Speaking insightfully about brands ranging from Amazon to Netflix, Disney, Fox and other major players, he showed a deep understanding of where the market is now, and perhaps more importantly, where the media opportunities are in the future. 

Far from a comfortable billionaire willing to let the young bucks take the lead, he appears poised to remain a major player in the monetization of media and entertainment in the internet age. 

He openly praised men like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos , Netflix’s Reed Hastings and News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch for their insight and contribution to the development of what the next media landscape, and marketplace, will look like as the internet, streaming and globalization continue to upend the media industry. 

He stressed the impact that globalization of media has on the economics of scale and the role that scale will play in deciding who are the ultimate victors of the still-developing internet-based media economy. As content creation and distribution continues to evolve through different models, he sees tremendous opportunity, perhaps in the same way he saw the possibilities about to arise in the cable industry nearly a half century ago.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BzVfQ8BJjtW

Perhaps a prime example of Malone’s approach and evolutionary nature was the purchase of Formula One by Liberty Media for $4.4 billion in 2017. The racing series has a long history and a global fan base, but had been long overseen by Bernie Ecclestone, who could be considered a reluctant early-adopter, leaving Formula One (essentially a content creator) behind in the newly developing media landscape. 

Since the takeover, Formula One has revamped its media approach and content, essentially entering the 21st century at last. Perhaps symbolically, Malone has taken an F1 based in the cable era and retrofitted it for today’s global digital market, again emphasizing scale through efforts to grow viewership in markets like the United States and China via digital channels and social media, which was largely ignored or undervalued by the previous regime. 

Malone and his wife have donated millions to charitable organizations, including large bequests to his alma maters Yale and Johns Hopkins, among others; their family foundation supports scholarships at some 50 private schools nationwide. Land conservation is also a major area of interest, and the Malones’ plan to leave most of their wealth to philanthropic causes. 

And he still has many more years of savvy business deals to put together before then.  

Why billionaire John Malone’s shadow looms over CNN

One of the world’s most powerful news outlets has a new mandate.

by Peter Kafka

CNN is in flux. It has a new owner, and a new boss, who promises to remake the news channel and has told employees to be prepared for “ a time of change .”

Most of those changes have yet to manifest. But one of the first ones — canceling its long-running Reliable Sources show and pushing out anchor Brian Stelter — has already unsettled some CNN employees and viewers.

But the bigger question floating over one of the world’s largest and most important news organizations is why it’s changing. Is it because the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, its new owner, wants an overhaul? Or is it at the behest of a conservative billionaire investor in the company who sits on its board?

That billionaire is John Malone, a legend in the cable TV business and one who has deep and longstanding ties with David Zaslav, the CEO of WBD. People close to both men insist that Zaslav is remaking CNN because he wants to for both business and editorial reasons, and not because Malone has told him to.

But complicating that narrative is the fact that Malone has repeatedly wished, in public, for CNN to remake itself. And his prescription happens to sync with the new CNN agenda: a plan to steer the channel away from what Malone and others call a liberal bias they say muddles opinion and news. And to shift it toward a supposedly centrist, just-the-facts bent.

“I would like to see CNN evolve”

In November 2021, Malone sat down for an hour-long interview with CNBC , where he held forth on the state of the pay TV business — where he made his $10 billion fortune — and plenty of other topics.

One of them was CNN — at the time, owned by AT&T, but scheduled to become part of WBD, a company that Malone would own a piece of along with a seat on its board. Malone waved away one bit of recurring speculation — that WBD would want to sell CNN — and then offered some programming advice for the new company:

“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” he said. Then he suggested a model: “Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have ‘news’ news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions.”

Malone’s comments didn’t resonate much beyond a couple of places: At Fox News, which responded with glee, and inside CNN, where they sounded alarm bells.

Those bells started ringing again last week when the company pushed CNN media reporter Brian Stelter out of his job. As I’ve reported, some people in and outside CNN believed there was a direct through line between Malone’s perspective on CNN and Stelter’s departure . The theory: Stelter, a frequent critic of Fox News, was let go either at Malone’s direct urging or by managers who wanted to please the investor.

That theory is hotly contested by employees and executives at CNN, WBD, and Liberty Media, Malone’s holding company. “It’s not in keeping with John’s character or style that he would be doing that,” says Liberty CEO Greg Maffei.

There’s also a middle ground between the two arguments: Malone meant what he said but didn’t think he was meddling with his soon-to-be property.

“I don’t think John would think it legitimate for him to give specific direction on coverage or personnel. But I don’t think he would restrain himself from saying what he thinks on overall content. And he probably wouldn’t view his comments as revealing a bias,” says former Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, who’s known Malone since the late 1970s.

• Did CNN’s Brian Stelter lose his job because of politics or money?

What we do know: Malone made his comments in November. In February, Zaslav announced he was hiring TV producer Chris Licht to run CNN and then the organization promptly began messaging its plans to “push CNN back to hard news, and away from red-hot liberal opining.” And now one of the faces most often critiqued by CNN’s right-wing competitor Fox News is out of a job.

“He’s in awe of John”

Malone is well-known in the pay TV world, where during the 1980s and 1990s he held more power than arguably any other executive or investor. And for a while, some TV watchers knew who he was as well, when he became a stand-in for everything people hated about cable TV at the time. Al Gore memorably called him “Darth Vader” on the Senate floor.

But that was a while ago, and unless you’re paying a lot of attention to corporate media ownership, you may not know who he is at this point. Let’s sketch it out.

Malone, who was raised in Connecticut and graduated from Yale with degrees in economics and engineering, traveled west and made his fortune by getting in on the ground floor of the cable TV business in the 1970s.

In its earliest years, cable was sold as a way to deliver broadcast channels in areas where normal TV antennas wouldn’t work, like the Rocky Mountains. Malone built up his Denver-based company Tele-Communications Inc. into a cable Goliath by rolling up a series of small mom-and-pop operators using debt financing. Along the way, he used his power as a distributor to extract ownership stakes in cable TV programmers like Fox News and QVC. He cashed out by selling to AT&T for $48 billion in 1999 .

Since then, Malone has bought and sold and swapped companies and stakes in companies over and over, always with an eye on keeping his taxes as low as possible. He now owns a portfolio that includes meaningful ownership in everything from satellite music service SiriusXM to baseball’s Atlanta Braves to Live Nation, the ticketing and concert giant. And until last year, he was the major force behind Discovery, the cable programmer best known for reality TV shows like Deadliest Catch . He plucked NBC executive David Zaslav to run Discovery in 2006.

That relationship has given Zaslav a powerful mentor. It has also made Zaslav very wealthy, via a series of giant stock-based compensation packages . The two men have been in constant touch via phone calls and walk-and-talks over the years.

“Anybody who underestimates the amount of space that [Malone] occupies in David’s strategic mind and emotional bandwidth has just not followed the last decade,” says one of Zaslav’s friends. “He’s in awe of John,” says another Zaslav pal.

The two men do have very different politics: Zaslav has been a consistent donor to Democrats; Malone is conservative/libertarian whose bona fides include a former board seat at the Cato Institute , the libertarian think tank, and a $250,000 donation to Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee. (Two years later, Malone had pivoted: He told CNBC that Trump generated too much chaos and shouldn’t have a second term. “Look, I think a lot of the things Trump has tried to do — identifying problems and trying to solve them — has been great. I just don’t think he’s the right guy to do it,” he said.)

Malone has also said he admires Rupert Murdoch as a business frenemy and shares a political viewpoint with the Fox News owner: “Rupert is sort of like I am. He’s a libertarian, but he thinks we should have a strong military,” he told the Financial Times in 2017.

But unlike Murdoch, who loves both owning news outlets and getting his hands dirty running them, there’s no record of Malone getting into the fine details of the properties he owns.

Which brings us back to the unusual nature of his pronouncements about CNN last fall. While Malone has previously talked about his affection for Fox News — the US “needs Fox News or something like it. Because otherwise, everything’s leftist,” he told FT — it’s rare for him to opine about programming choices in his own portfolio of properties. You’ll be hard-pressed, for instance, to find him commenting on the music acts Live Nation books for its venues.

And that’s why some people who know Zaslav are convinced Malone has told Zaslav his theories about the direction he’d like CNN to go. And that given their relationship, Zaslav would be all ears. Under that theory, Malone — who now owns a small sliver of Warner Brothers Discovery instead of much of Discovery — wouldn’t need to explicitly tell Zaslav how to run CNN. He would just broadly lay out his view of the world, which Zaslav put into place by hiring Licht, who had produced Morning Joe on MSNBC, the CBS Morning News , and most recently The Late Show With Steven Colbert .

“I am not in control or directly involved”

That argument raises real hackles at various corners of the WBD, where defenders of both Zaslav and Licht say the two men aren’t taking marching orders from Malone — it’s just that they all agree.

Mostly agree, that is: Licht’s supporters acknowledge that Malone’s comments holding up Fox News as a paragon of journalism would be searing for CNN employees, for instance. But they’re aligned on the idea that a CNN that occupies a middle ground between Fox and MSNBC is good for American democracy as well as WBD’s business prospects because then CNN can capture an audience that doesn’t want partisan news from the left or right.

The idea that Fox News is a journalism outlet, as opposed to cynical pandering in the form of a news channel that occasionally reports news, isn’t worth debating here. But if you needed convincing, you could, say, read Jane Mayer’s piece about the channel’s complete immersion with the Trump White House .

Or, more pointedly, you could ask Chris Wallace, the longtime Fox anchor who left for CNN last year, saying that he could no longer abide the channel’s coverage — particularly the way it treated Trump’s 2020 election lies and the January 6 riots. Working as a journalist at Fox had become “ increasingly unsustainable ,” Wallace said.

Malone, who declined an interview request for this story, appears to have been stung by the furor that erupted in media circles when Stelter was let go last week. In an email to the New York Times , he said he had nothing to do with Stelter’s departure, adding that while he wanted “the ‘news’ portion of CNN to be more centrist ... I am not in control or directly involved.”

Malone doubled down on that argument in another Times story a few days later , complaining that CNN had melded opinion and news, and holding up “Fox News host Bret Baier … [as] a reliably centrist newscaster.”

Which, again, echoes what new CNN boss Chris Licht has been telling employees he wants to do with his network — to remove the perception, which he thinks is accurate, that CNN has a liberal bias, and that too much of its programming has become “outrage porn.”

I’m with Licht, by the way, when it comes to critiquing CNN’s reliance on breathlessness in general. And an early decision he made to tamp down its use of “breaking news” branding for almost every item it talks about is a fine idea.

But arguing that CNN lost its way during the Trump era seems like a misguided critique, given that CNN, like every other news outlet, was dealing with an unprecedented circumstance: Americans had elected a president who routinely lied about everything and whose destruction of democratic norms was capped off by an effort to overturn a free election.

I think it’s also important to understand how 24-hour cable TV news operates: Viewership spikes when there’s a genuine news event, but beyond those rare moments, news channels struggle to retain viewers. Which is why all of them gin up fake urgency about whatever they think their audience will respond to.

Pre-Trump, CNN’s solution was to focus on jaw-dropping but not terribly important events and talk about them incessantly — see, for instance, its round-the-clock coverage of the “Poop Cruise,” which involved a Carnival cruise ship and ... poop. Or the mysterious disappearance of a Malaysian airliner, which prompted CNN anchor Don Lemon to ask if a black hole might be the culprit .

So if you were cynical enough — like me — you could simply describe Trump as a never-ending poop cruise, guaranteed to create new content daily.

And I don’t know how Licht can solve that systemic problem, with or without Trump. And even as he promises to feature more reporting over bloviating, CNN already boasts a strong and well-supported newsroom, which is why it can do excellent coverage in Washington and around the world . I also don’t think that Licht is ever going to convince a Fox News fan — whether it’s Malone or anyone else — that CNN is now a centrist news outlet, no matter who he hires or fires. But whatever changes he does make may be meaningful, especially as the US heads into a charged election cycle.

It’s possible, by the way, that none of this will matter much to CNN’s owner in the long run. Some industry sources I’ve talked to argue that even though CNN makes around a billion dollars a year in profit, it won’t mean much to the long-term future of Warner Bros. Discovery.

That’s because WBD has much bigger problems. For starters, like every big media company that makes most of its money from traditional TV, its viewers are departing daily for free and paid digital options. And WBD has specific challenges. Like a stock price that values the combined company at $33 billion — less than half of what Time Warner alone was worth in 2016 when it sold to AT&T. It also has a huge pile of debt to service, which is one of the reasons Zaslav is cutting projects and staff.

Malone has consistently argued that big media companies need to consolidate in order to reach the scale they’ll need to compete globally — and by merging his Discovery with Warner Media, he’s already made a step in that direction.

But it’s possible to see another transaction down the road, where WBD picks up another asset and Malone’s power gets even more limited. Or maybe it simply sells itself to a bigger player and Malone gets out of the business altogether.

At that point, it wouldn’t matter what he thinks of CNN. But whatever CNN has become by then will be crucial for the rest of us.

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Malone Gained Double Tax Break in Liberty Address Shift

Featuring  Stephen M. Breitstone  and published Nov. 4, 2014

Shifting the address of his Liberty Global Inc. from Colorado to London last year didn’t just put billionaire John C. Malone in a position to reduce his company’s tax bill.

He also took precautions to avoid the capital-gains hit that the so-called inversion would trigger for him and other investors. The day before the deal was announced, Malone — the company’s chairman and controlling shareholder — transferred $600 million of his shares into a tax-exempt charitable trust. He avoided paying taxes on his remaining stake, worth about $260 million, by exploiting IRS regulations meant to block a different loophole.

All told, Malone escaped about $200 million in personal taxes, and Liberty Global’s U.S. shareholders together likely saved more than a billion dollars, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“He’s congenitally averse to paying taxes,” said Robert Willens, an independent tax accounting analyst in New York City.

Tax Inversion

As the Obama administration attempts to implement anti-inversion rules announced in September, Liberty’s strategies illustrate how billionaires and their companies find their way around tax regulations, and take advantage of unintended consequences.

Creative Tactics

Malone — whose net worth is $7.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — has a history of creative tax-avoidance tactics. Over the years, many of the 73-year-old media billionaire’s biggest deals, such as buying the Atlanta Braves, have helped his companies to cut their tax bills.

Malone has at least four other charitable trusts, with more than $210 million in assets, IRS records show. Such trusts permit wealthy individuals to use the tax-exempt status of a charity to shelter income. In the past two years, he has also taken advantage of an Irish tax break to buy prime real estate in central Dublin.

Marcus Smith, a Liberty Global spokesman, declined to comment. He directed a request to interview Malone to Courtnee Ulrich, a spokeswoman at another of Malone’s companies, Liberty Media Corp. She declined to answer questions and said Malone would not comment.

A Connecticut native, Malone runs his growing media empire from his adopted state of Colorado. He recently surpassed Ted Turner — a predecessor as owner of the Braves — as the largest private landowner in the U.S., according to The Land Report magazine. He owns about 2.2 million acres, including more than 5 percent of Maine’s total land mass.

Fleece Wind Breaker

Often spotted in public in a fleece wind breaker, he owns Mosquito Island, off Maine’s coastline, and at least two yachts — the 42-foot-long “Salty” and the 72-foot-long “Liberty,” records show.

Malone, a Yale graduate with a doctorate in operations research from Johns Hopkins University, began his career doing research for the old Bell Labs. He built his reputation turning a tiny Denver cable company called Tele-Communications Inc. into the country’s largest cable operator. He sold it to AT&T for $59 billion in 1999.

Malone and his three main companies — Liberty Media, Liberty Global and Liberty Interactive Corp. — have held stakes in a virtual Who’s Who of big media, Internet and telecom businesses: News Corp., Viacom Inc., Time Warner Inc. (TWX), QVC, Discovery Communications Inc., Court TV, DirecTV,Sirius XM Holdings Inc. (SIRI), Barnes & Noble Inc., and Expedia Inc.

Braves Deal

Since 1995, Malone has served as an unpaid director of the Washington-based libertarian think tankCato Institute, which advocates for lower taxes. In his business life, Malone has put that anti-tax philosophy to work.

In 2006, for example, Liberty Media cashed out its stake in Time Warner without triggering a capital gains tax. Along with the $1.4 billion it got in cash from shedding the shares, Liberty also received ownership of the Atlanta Braves baseball team from Time Warner. Although the Braves were en route to their first losing season in 16 years, the move was worth it. Acquiring the team via a tax planning technique known as a “cash rich splitoff” entirely eliminated the company’s tax bill on the deal.

The Braves, which Liberty Media still owns, broke ground in September on a stadium in the Atlanta suburbs, scheduled to be subsidized with more than $300 million of public funds.

Liberty Media later used a variation on the split off strategy when exiting its 19 percent stake in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Liberty Media swapped it for Murdoch’s stake in DirecTV, again completely avoiding a capital gains tax.

Sirius Investment

In 2009, Liberty Media invested $530 million in money-losing satellite radio company Sirius XM. The main attraction: Sirius’s $6 billion in tax losses, which could be used to offset taxes on Liberty’s future profits. Sirius’ stock, worth about a dime when Liberty made its investment, has risen to more than $3 since then.

The tale of Malone’s inversion tax coup goes back to 2004, when Liberty Media spun off its overseas cable business into a separate U.S. company, tax-free. That company, eventually renamed Liberty Global, now has about 25 million cable, broadband and telephone customers in 14 countries, including Germany, Hungary, Belgium and Ireland. It provides those services under various brand names, including Unitymedia, UPC and Telenet.

Malone has served as chairman since then. He effectively controls the company by owning almost 87 percent of Liberty Global’s super-voting B shares. That gives him about 30 percent of the company’s total votes, the biggest voting bloc of any shareholder.

Virgin Media

By 2013, however, Liberty Global had a problem: if it wanted to tap into its offshore cash for some purposes, it could trigger a 35 percent corporate tax bill in the U.S., minus credits for income taxes paid overseas.

So, in February 2013, Liberty announced it would acquire Virgin Media Inc., a U.S. company with virtually all of its business in the U.K. The headquarters of Liberty Global Plc (LBTYA) look across a small plaza at the upscale department store Harrods, in London’s pricey Knightsbridge area. Since the deal was announced, Liberty Global’s three classes of shares have risen, helping to add about $160 million to Malone’s net worth.

The inversion can help Liberty Global gain access to offshore cash without generating a U.S. tax bill. Since the beginning of 2012, 14 U.S. companies have shifted their legal addresses to lower-tax jurisdictions overseas. Seven more have announced similar plans, including medical device maker Medtronic Inc. and Burger King Worldwide Inc.

Taxable Sale

Such companies are seeking to take advantage of the generous U.S. system of interest deductions for payments to their own affiliates abroad — benefits that are only available with a foreign parent company.

While lucrative for corporations, these inversions can have a drawback for their U.S. shareholders: they have to pay capital-gains tax on the transaction.

That’s because, under 1994 U.S. Treasury Department regulations, exchanging the shares of the old company for the new one is treated like a taxable sale. It’s as though a shareholder sold his stock and then used the proceeds to buy stock in the new company.

For many investors this tax bill is not a big issue. Large shareholders often include pension funds, 401(k)’s and other big institutions that don’t owe taxes on their gains.

Not so for John Malone. In a typical inversion, he would have owed capital gains taxes at a rate of 23.8 percent on his stake worth about $860 million.

He took two steps to avoid this bill. The day before the deal was announced, he transferred about $600 million worth of his shares into the Malone LG 2013 Charitable Remainder Unitrust. Such trusts permit wealthy individuals to avoid tax by using the tax-exempt status of their favorite charity.

The use of such a vehicle by former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney became controversial during his 2012 presidential campaign. Tax returns obtained by Bloomberg News through a Freedom of Information Act request showed that Romney would likely receive more in annuity payments from the trust than it would leave his chosen charity. A Romney spokesman said at the time that the trust “operated in accordance with the law.”

Congress has tried to make these trusts less appealing, but they remain popular. Over the years, the IRS has challenged several similar moves on the eve of a taxable transaction, said Stephen Breitstone, head of the tax group at Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein & Breitstone, LLP.

“The IRS has successfully challenged transactions that were done too late in the game,” he said.

Liberty Global also figured out a way around a tax bill for Malone’s remaining stake, as well as for the rest of the company’s U.S. investors. It used the government’s own anti-abuse rules to its advantage.

U.S. companies are permitted to defer income taxes on profits attributed to foreign operations, until they bring home the cash generated by those earnings. Over the years, companies including International Business Machines Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. have used strategies to bring billions home yet avoid the tax.

In 2008, the Treasury Department cracked down on one such transaction, nicknamed the “Killer B” after a section of the tax code. Under the new regulations, the IRS checks if the transaction generates at least as much corporate income as the shareholders’ potential gain. If it does, the transaction is not taxable for the investors under the anti-inversion rules, said Bret Wells, a tax law professor at the University of Houston.

Guided by advisers at Shearman & Sterling LLP, Liberty Global took those new regulations and put them to work for a purpose the government never imagined. Liberty Global devised a transaction that would indeed generate income — but credited those profits to a newly created U.K. unit, not subject to U.S. tax. Because the income satisfied the U.S. government’s test, investors weren’t subject to any capital-gains tax. And since the U.K. has different tax rules, that particular income didn’t generate any U.K. tax bill either.

The result was that Malone and his fellow shareholders didn’t have to pay the tax bill that inversion would normally generate.

“Malone threw a multi-billion dollar left hook at the Treasury Department,” said Samuel C. Thompson, a law professor at Pennsylvania State University. “They didn’t see it coming.”

The U.S. Treasury Department amended its rules in April to prevent a maneuver like Liberty Global’s from happening again. However, it permitted the deal to stand.

Can’t Challenge

Liberty Global “turned a provision that was supposed to be punitive into something they used for their benefit,” said Willens, the independent accounting analyst. “When you do that, the IRS can’t challenge it. How can the government disavow a provision it worked on for a long time?”

Meanwhile, Liberty Global’s new U.K. parent company is taking steps to avoid the risk of incurring U.S. corporate taxes on cash from its foreign units. That’s because such funds might have to pass through a U.S. subsidiary.

In a filing last April, Liberty Global disclosed that a U.S. subsidiary will pay at least $7 billion in tax deductible interest to its new U.K. parent over the next decade. Such payments are known to tax lawyers as “earnings stripping,” because the big interest deductions strip profits out of the U.S., thus cutting any U.S. tax obligation.

Earnings Stripping

Earnings stripping is considered the most common way for inverted companies to cut their taxes. The Obama administration is working on proposals to limit it, according to a Sept. 22 Treasury Department notice. Democratic Senators Charles Schumer of New York and Richard Durbin of Illinois have introduced a bill to stop the practice.

Liberty Global’s moves are just one facet of Malone’s propensity for tax-free deals.

In the past two years, he has bought four properties in Ireland, which his ancestors left in the 1830s. They include an 8 million euro, 15 bedroom castle in Wicklow, about 90 minutes south of Dublin. He has also spent a combined 130 million euros ($163 million) to buy three of Dublin’s most central hotels: the Westin, the Trinity Capital Hotel and the Hilton Dublin, according to CBRE Global Research and Consulting.

A tax break paved the way. In early 2012, Ireland introduced a capital gains tax holiday for investors buying Irish real estate who hold onto it for seven years.

In an interview last year, Malone talked about his motivations for buying the castle. He did not mention the break on Ireland’s 33 percent capital gains tax.

“A combination of cheap money and a gloomy view of the future gives rise to opportunity for those who aren’t quite so gloomy,” he said.

Read more: Bloomberg

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by John Malone

One winter, when I was about thirteen or fourteen, my father and my uncle Clancy Horton decided to build racing dinghies up in the loft in my grandfather’s barn in Moon Township, Pennsylvania. They each bought a pre-cut, ready-to-assemble kit from Douglass and McLeod, the designers and builders of the hot new one-design Thistle Class sailing dinghy. Clancy was a naval architect and boat builder from Massachusetts who had started building boats when he was a teenager, so Papa and I counted on him to guide us through the process.

Like a lot of do-it-yourself projects, building a Thistle from a kit turned out to be a lot harder than it looked when we started. Also, working winter weekends in that unheated barn was no picnic. Then, in the spring when we were finished and ready to take the boats out and load them on trailers, Clancy accidentally dropped a heavy block and tackle on Papa and almost killed him. Narrowly missing his head, the block struck a glancing blow on the back of his neck. Clancy then had the effrontery to shout down from the loft, “Hey, Jack, are you all right? The next time, don’t forget to duck!” Papa went around for weeks wearing one of those stiff collars around his neck. That was the worst thing that happened that winter, but it was only the first in a long series of adventures and misadventures involving me, my family and our sailboat.

But first, let me tell you about my Papa and Uncle Clancy. They were both married to younger daughters of Kirtland C. Gardner, the Vice President (later President and then Chairman) of United Engineering and Foundry Company, a conglomerate that built and operated steel mills and foundries all over the world. Granddaddy Gardner’s aristocratic father owned the first steam yacht on the Great Lakes and was a three-term mayor of Cleveland and, for a short while, a business partner of John D, Rockefeller. Papa and Clancy came from much more modest backgrounds. My other grandfather, Walter Malone was a self-made business man who started out as an office boy after graduating from high school and became a partner in an industrial supply warehouse in downtown Pittsburgh. Clancy’s father was a wholesale butcher, as was his grandfather.

When Papa and Clancy married the two younger Gardner girls, Isabel and Louise, Granddaddy gave each daughter a piece of his country estate as a wedding gift. He wanted to keep them nearby, and he succeeded. Papa and Clancy each built houses on the western side of “Springbank”, Granny and Granddaddy’s big house where we all gathered each Sunday for dinner after church. Both of them felt overshadowed by the Gardner side of the family. Papa answered the door one day to receive a package delivery for my mother from Joseph Horne Co., a Pittsburgh department store. The delivery man smiled at Papa and greeted him, “Package for your wife, Mr. Gardner!”

Given their common predicament as “Gardners-in-law”, it was no surprise that Papa and Clancy would become buddies, in spite of a ten-year age difference. They shared a lot of interests and talents that their two Gardner brothers-in-law didn’t. They both loved to build model ships and airplanes, were fond of European cultures and languages and got pleasantly drunk on the weekends. Both had gone to sea as engine room cadets during their youth. Papa loved the sea and always envied Clancy’s superior boating skills and knowledge. Try as he might, though, he was never able to get the knack of sailing small boats, something at which Clancy excelled and seemed to possess in his very blood and bone. Papa never stopped trying, though.

It was only natural, therefore, when Clancy decided to buy a kit and build a Thistle in the Gardners’ barn, that Papa would follow suit and buy one too. He offered to help Clancy build his boat if Clancy would help us build ours. I say “ours” because I was recruited at a very early stage to be the “gopher” for the project. I was delighted to be included, because in those days I gravitated strongly toward Clancy and my aunt Louise, a.k.a. “Weezie”. Before the boat-building project got underway, I used to hang out at their house on weekends, helping them listen to their collection of 78 rpm records and eating sandwiches. Clancy and Weezie would snuggle on their living room couch, drinking beer, kissing and petting while the music played. They didn’t seem to mind having a curious adolescent nephew as their audience.

I thought it quite remarkable that grownups would carry on like that. Papa and Mama never did. I remember sometimes hearing strange muffled sounds through their locked bedroom door on weekends, and once, while exploring my father’s toiletries in his dressing room, coming across a box of his condoms. (I had no idea what they were at the time!) But the idea of the two of them spending a weekend afternoon petting on the living room couch was unimaginable. Not that Mama wouldn’t have liked it. She was a very touchy-feely type, always grabbing me and my sisters and trying to hug and kiss us. When she had a few drinks, she would try to grab Papa too, but he never seemed to reciprocate, at least not when I was around. I think it made Mama sad and frustrated that Papa didn’t like her “public displays of affection”.

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A Cable Giant Loses Its Way and Finds Recovery Difficult

By Geraldine Fabrikant and Mark Landler

• Dec. 9, 1996

It was a startling comeback. After a year of playing the elusive chief executive, the cable titan John C. Malone suddenly appeared at a Bear, Stearns media conference on Oct. 24 and told major shareholders of his company, Tele-Communications Inc., ''It's not true that I have no interest in cable; it's fun being Darth Vader again.''

Mr. Malone's jaunty tone elicited few smiles from this crowd. The 55-year-old executive, who had dropped out of sight for almost a year, was taking back the reins only after a steep slide in the share price of the nation's largest cable company.

What is more, Mr. Malone proceeded to announce a wholesale retreat in his corporate strategy -- sowing doubt about his vision and about his ability to wield again the sort of power in the industry that once earned him comparisons with the fearsome villain of ''Star Wars.''

The rise of satellite-delivered television has broken cable's three-decade monopoly on pay television. Cash is extremely tight at Tele-Communications, forcing Mr. Malone to slash capital spending on advanced digital services, to cut programming costs by dropping several cable networks, to sell all four of the company's planes, to freeze executive salaries and to lay off 2,500 people, 6.5 percent of the work force.

Investors are relieved that Mr. Malone is finally tackling TCI's problems. The company's shares, after languishing near the 1996 low of $12 a share for weeks, rose to $15.50 on Friday, including the value of TCI's satellite assets, which the company spun off to TCI shareholders as a separately traded company last Wednesday.

But Mr. Malone's rapid-fire actions have left some shareholders confused as to what kind of communications company TCI will become. After championing the idea that TCI would deliver a single bundle of television, telephone and Internet services over its wires, Mr. Malone is now undoing much of that strategy. Rather than barreling full bore into the digital age, Tele-Communications is hedging its bets with an uncharacteristically tentative approach.

Although Mr. Malone maintains that TCI will offer Internet and phone service in a few markets, he seems, for now, to be turning away from his vision of cable as a one-stop shop for communications.

TCI may reap the benefits of Mr. Malone's cost-cutting in the short term. Yet several analysts wonder if the company will lose out in the long run as competitors like AT&T, MCI and Bell Atlantic continue their drive to offer a unified package of communications services.

''The question remains whether Mr. Malone can build a competitive business that regularly introduces new products,'' John Tinker, an analyst with Montgomery Securities, said.

Even longtime supporters of Mr. Malone on Wall Street express some confusion as to where he is taking TCI.

Mr. Malone declined to comment for this article.

It is not just Mr. Malone's strategy that has investors worried. Several media experts noted that he spent long periods away from the company's Englewood, Colo., headquarters at his vacation home in Maine or on his yacht just when the industry was entering a period of fierce competition and heightened capital demands. Mr. Malone has never bothered to offer any public explanation for his absences, but other company executives have said he was freeing himself of administrative routines to focus on long-range strategy.

''When you have had a monopoly, it anesthetizes you to what is going on in your business,'' said one investment banker who insisted on not being identified. ''When you are on the edge of bankruptcy, you are wide awake. But when you are minting money, you're off on a boat.''

Mr. Malone's hands-off approach may have led to some damaging miscalculations. Last winter, Tele-Communications decided to put through a 13 percent rate increase for its 14 million subscribers. Other cable operators had passed along rate increases gradually. But TCI held off the increases because Congress was deliberating the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

When the company decided in June to put through its increases in one package, the size of the increase worried Gordon Crawford, an influential money manager at Capital Research, a company whose investment funds own 5.6 percent of Tele-Communications stock. Mr. Crawford called Mr. Malone to express his concerns, but Mr. Malone immediately referred him to Brendan Clouston, the president of TCI's core cable company and one of Mr. Malone's newly empowered deputies.

Mr. Clouston would not listen to Mr. Crawford either. And when Tele-Communications raised its monthly bills an average of $3.50, the company lost 70,000 basic subscribers in one three-month period. Analysts said that at least some of those subscribers fled to direct-broadcast satellite services like DirecTV or Prime Star, of which TCI is a 21 percent owner.

The slower growth in cable revenue, coupled with sharply higher expenses, led TCI to report a $136 million loss in the third quarter, compared with a $32 million profit in the period a year earlier. The disappointing results led Mr. Malone to a recent series of strategic shifts.

Among the most curious, he announced a plan to create three classes of subscribers, only one of which will receive the range of services that Mr. Malone once promised all customers.

The first group consists of seven million subscribers in urban areas, who are in various stages of receiving advanced video services. In the second group are six million subscribers in rural areas like Bozeman, Mont., whose cable systems will not be upgraded. To receive new channels, some of them will have to subscribe to a direct-broadcast satellite service being started by TCI's new spinoff, TCI Satellite Entertainment.

The final group consists of one million subscribers in Hartford, San Francisco and Arlington Heights, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. They will have their systems upgraded to receive combined television, telephone and Internet services.

Executives at Tele-Communications said the segmentation would allow the company to use its capital prudently by offering new services to only those customers who demand, and will pay, for them.

Some experts said this strategy underscored Mr. Malone's ability to adjust to changes in digital technology. Christopher Dixon, a media analyst at Paine Webber, said Tele-Communications no longer had to upgrade all the coaxial cable in its network because a new generation of digital set-top convertor boxes would enable TCI to deliver the same number of channels without replacing the existing cable pipeline.

But other analysts said Mr. Malone was simply putting a shiny gloss on his Draconian cutbacks. ''The cable industry always made promises about rolling out new services,'' Mr. Tinker of Montgomery Securities said. ''Malone has totally changed the terms of the debate.''

As it happens, Mr. Malone may have a window in which to vindicate his new strategy. DirecTV and similar satellite services are scaling back their growth projections for 1996. And the regional Bell telephone companies, which once threatened to roll out ambitious video services by next year, have pulled back to focus on the long-distance business.

But even if Tele-Communications gets a competitive breather, some analysts question whether Mr. Malone's skills are suited to today's business environment. ''John never had to pay much attention to operations,'' said one communications executive who insisted on anonymity, ''He could always make up for problems by doing savvy deals.''

Clearly, Mr. Malone still views such deals as a tonic for his stock. TCI announced last week that it would consider spinning off two other affiliated companies, Tele-Communications International and Liberty Media Corporation, which owns TCI's programming assets.

But cable stocks are under such a cloud that no amount of wheeling and dealing may reassure investors. Still, a few investors have bought recently, calculating that having been brought so low, TCI cannot help but rise over the coming months.

One wild card in the stock's performance is how Tele-Communications will handle the stock holdings of its late founder and chairman, Bob J. Magness. Mr. Magness, who died on Nov. 15, owned roughly 42 million shares of Tele-Communications, a holding that represented 26.2 percent of the shareholder vote and was worth about $555 million at his death. Several people close to the company said Mr. Magness left 90 percent of the stock to his children, and 10 percent to his wife and a foundation.

If so, the heirs may have to sell a good chunk of the stock to pay estate taxes. If they were to place that big a block of shares on the open market, it could further depress the share price. Mr. Malone, who himself controls 17.8 percent of Tele-Communications' vote through his stake, is exploring how he or the company might buy it.

The Kearns-Tribune Corporation, a publishing company that owns stock that represents 7 percent of TCI's vote, has the right of first refusal on the stock. The company's president, Dominic Welch, has said the company has no plans to buy all of the Magness stake, but might be interested in a portion of it.

Given Mr. Malone's determination to retain control of Tele-Communications, analysts said that he may be preoccupied with settling Mr. Magness's estate. And that, some shareholders fear, could make it difficult for this most prolific of deal makers to stay focused on fixing TCI.

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Synergy is the driver. There are two levels of synergy: there are operating synergies, which, you know, you'd have to be stupid not to try to take advantage of, and then there are strategic synergies. In other words, in what positions you would be more sustainable, more long term, and so on.

What you really are afraid of is that you're competing against somebody who is rich and irrational. I mean, it used to be a given, a saying in the industry: Don't ever bid against Rupert Murdoch for anything Rupert wants, because if you win you lose. You will have paid way too much.

Recently somebody said, "Hey, you lost weight," and I said, "Yeah, thirty-five pounds and three and a half billion dollars." So I'm quite a bit lighter and more flexible than I was.

Synergies are something that the CEO basically has to force to happen, because organizations are, generally, like bodies in motion that tend to stay in motion. It's very hard to get big organizations to change. And it takes really a very powerful mandate to force things to happen.

I think private ownership is generally superior to public because you care about the land more and it doesnt get trashed.

It will allow us to control all the communication needs of a household with one device.

The fact that equities are being sold down, despite the lowest interest rates in recent history, simply means that the market doesn't see growth ahead for -very many businesses.

The public doesnt particularly care for advertisements.

There's an old saying that the government is your partner from birth, but they don't get to come to all the meetings.

The curse of the cable industry over all these years as an operating reality is that every year the debt goes up (and) all the money generated gets reinvested, and then some.

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SiriusXM’s $3.5 billion Pandora deal is helping the satellite radio company evolve for the digital future — here’s how its ‘cable cowboy’ chairman became one of the US’ richest people

SiriusXM announced Monday that it is acquiring digital streaming company Pandora for an all-stock deal worth $3.5 billion. Liberty Media is Sirius' largest shareholder, with a 70% control of the satellite radio company — and its chariman, John Malone, has had his hands in some of cable and entertainment's biggest deals of the past decade.

And even while you might not know his name, chances are you’ve used a service or watched a channel with connections to Malone, who is one of the US' largest landowners. His other interests are as far-flung as race cars, the Discovery Channel, and the Atlanta Braves.

Here's just a small taste of his diverse investments:

• He is largest stakeholder of Liberty Media, which is worth $24 billion.
• He owns 28% of Discovery Communications, which just sealed a $14.6 billion deal for Scripps .
• He owns a quarter of Liberty Global, the largest international cable company with 29 million subscribers.
• He owns 8% of the publicly traded Atlanta Braves.
• He owns 2.2 million acres of land, making him the single largest landowner in the US.

But the media mogul wasn’t just born into his $8.99 billion net worth. Here’s how one of the richest and most powerful people in American business rose to prominence.

John C. Malone was born to parents of Irish descent on March 7, 1941, in Milford Connecticut, a suburb about two hours north of New York City.

He attended the prestigious Hopkins School in neighboring New Haven, graduating with a National Merit Scholarship in 1959.

A post shared by Hopkins School (@hopkinsschoolct) Feb 2, 2016 at 8:15am PST

The school, founded in 1660, is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the country. But Malone didn't always feel that he fit in.

"I was neither a preppy nor a town kid," Malone said in 1994 . "So I put a lot of energy into athletics." He got letters in fencing, track, and soccer. "It was raw drive, not skill," he says.

He has since donated $25 million to fund school's science center, which bears his name .

After high school, Malone stayed in New Haven and attended Yale University. He graduated in 1963 with a degree in electrical engineering and economics.

He has since donated $50 million to the university's engineering school, where some professorships bear his name.

Sticking with the Hopkins name (but no relation), Malone headed to Baltimore to study industrial management at Johns Hopkins University, receiving a master's in 1964.

In 2011, Malone made the largest donation to the university. His $30 million donation has funded construction of a new, 56,000-square-foot research building for the Whiting School of Engineering.

Malone’s introduction to the telecoms industry came as a student in the electrical-engineering program at New York University and Bell Labs.

Now owned by Lucid Technologies, Bell Labs is named for the telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell. The lab is credited with developing many telecom innovations, including the laser beam, the programming language C, early calculators, and radio transmission.

Malone returned to Johns Hopkins in 1967 to do a doctorate in operations research.

Ph.D. in hand, Malone joined the prestigious consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in New York.

In his three years consulting for large companies such as General Electric and IBM, Malone quickly learned of Wall Street's disdain for cable companies.

As any consultant will tell you, it's not easy work. Tired of the constant travel, Malone left McKinsey, and took a huge pay cut, to join General Instrument in 1973.

Malone ran a GI subsidy know as Jerrold, which produced minicomputers like the one above, for the burgeoning cable TV industry. GI would be sold to Motorola years after Malone's departure.

At Jerrold, Malone met Bob J. Magness, who in 1973 offered him the job of CEO of his almost bankrupt cable company, Tele-Communications Inc.

So Malone and his wife, Leslie, headed west to Colorado to try to save the company, which had only 400,000 subscribers and $12 million in annual sales. Worse, the company owed creditors $132 million. Malone wasted no time getting to work.

By 1990, Malone had successfully grown TCI into the biggest cable company, with 8.5 million subscribers.

In 1993, TCI and Bell Atlantic proposed a merger that would have been the largest in American telecommunications history. Then-Vice President Al Gore supported the merger as a way to improve American infrastructure. But the companies could not agree on the terms of a merger, and the deal to fell through, as The New York Times reported .

Instead, Malone shopped a merger to AT&T, which purchased TCI in 1998 for $32 billion.

In today's terms, the sticker price of AT&T's acquisition was $48.5 billion. The buyout was a bold step for AT&T, giving it a shot at offering local phone and high-speed-internet service to millions of homes across the country.

TCI's subsidiary, Liberty Media, would remain a separate publicly traded company, with John Malone still at the helm.

From his corner office in Englewood, Colorado, just south of Denver, Malone has served as chairman and briefly as interim CEO. He is largest stakeholder in the company after nearly three decades.

Under his watch, Liberty's reach has expanded from providing cable service to owning the networks broadcast on its infrastructure. Over the years, Malone has gobbled up the Discovery Channel, Virgin Media, QVC, Lionsgate (which owns Starz), Game Show Network, and more.

His ruthlessness angered regulators, who often criticized the company for its near monopolies in many markets. Al Gore called him Darth Vader, according to a profile by Ken Auletta in a 1994 issue of The New Yorker.

Malone's reach goes well beyond cable networks. Liberty Media acquired the Atlanta Braves MLB team in 2007 and spun it off as the separately traded Liberty-Braves Group, with Malone owning 8%.

Liberty Media acquired Formula One, the top car-racing series, for $4.4 billion in 2016. Malone owns 2% of the separately traded Liberty Media Formula One Group.

The sport had previously been run for decades by Bernie Ecclestone, who was criticized for not embracing new forms of media. With its acquisition , Liberty hopes to expand the circuit's reach and viewership, especially at home in the US.

Over the years, Liberty Media's holdings have almost always beat the market average. With two-thirds of the shares, Malone's wealth has skyrocketed. He's ranked 164st on Bloomberg's billionaires index.

Inspired by a summer spent on a family farm in Pennsylvania, Malone decided put his money in land.

Bell Ranch in Colorado was one of the first purchases made by Malone on his path to becoming the  largest individual landowner in the US. He also owns land in New Mexico, Wyoming, Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, Maryland

He owns just over a million of acres of woodlands near Boothbay, Maine and into neighboring New Hampshire, where he maintains a home keeps his sailing yachts.

Many locals, however, were worried about how Malone might use the land, given his conservative tendencies. Malone sits on the board of the libertarian Cato Institute  and has donated large sums to Republican political campaigns.

All these deals — and his 2.2 million acres of land — have earned Malone the nickname 'Cable Cowboy.'

His prize-winning race horses almost certainly contributed to the nickname as well.

Malone purchased 800-acre Bridlewood Farms in Florida for $14 million in 2013. Tapwrit, owned by Malone, won the 2017 Belmont Stakes. 

When not running a massive media conglomerate, Malone enjoys the finer things in life, like his Florida beach house.

Malone purchased a seaside mansion in Florida built by the Playmobil founder Horst Brandstätter in 2015 for $38 million. It even has a rotating living room.

Beyond land and houses, Malone has returned to his family's roots, buying up multiple high-profile hotels and castles in Ireland.

Malone acquired the 32,668-square-foot Humewood Castle — located on 427 acres in County Wicklow in Ireland — for $11 million. He also owns hotels in Dublin.

As media companies continue to consolidate, there's no doubt that John Malone will be involved.

In July 2017, Discovery announced it would purchase Scripps Networks Interactive for $14.6 billion , adding HGTV, Travel Channel, and Food Network into Malone's media arsenal.

In May 2018, Vodafone  announced  that it has agreed to acquire Liberty Global's operations in Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania. The deal consists of €10.8 billion ($12.7 billion) in cash paid to Liberty Global and €7.6 billion ($8.9 billion) of existing debt that Vodafone will take on.

Meet Patrick Drahi, the little-known French billionaire who's buying up telecom everywhere >>

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Trump Donor John Malone Could Soon Be Calling Shots at CNN

John Malone told CNBC ( 11/18/21 ) he’d like to see CNN “actually have journalists”—citing Fox News as an example of a channel with “some actual journalism.”

What will CNN become under John Malone ?

“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” the media billionaire Malone told CNBC ( 11/18/21 ) in November.

“I do believe good journalism could have a role in the future portfolio that Discovery / TimeWarner ’s going to represent,” he went on.

In the interview with CNBC ‘s David Faber, Malone also said:

Fox News , in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have news news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions.

Brian Flood of right-wing Fox News ( 11/19/21 ) said of Malone’s CNBC declaration:

Liberty Media chairman John Malone, who sits on the Discovery, Inc. board of directors, wants to see left-wing CNN revert back to nonpartisan journalism following the completion of a merger that would put the liberal network under the Discovery channel.

More than a board member

Malone, in fact, is more than a Discovery board member; he’s its chair and largest shareholder. CNN , started by Ted Turner and now owned by AT&T , is part of an $85 billion acquisition by Discovery , expected to be finalized this year.

Malone’s links to politics include being an active supporter—he’s currently a board member—of the Cato Institute , the Washington-based libertarian think tank that espouses the privatization of numerous US government agencies and programs, including Social Security and the Postal Service.

His Liberty Media empire was among the big contributors to Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration festivities in Washington, DC, with personal and corporate contributions adding up to $1 million.

However, in 2019, in another interview with Faber on CNBC ( 11/21/19 ), Malone said:

Look, I think a lot of things Trump has tried to do—identifying problems and trying to solve them—has been great…. I just don’t think he’s the right guy to do it. Half the people that he’s hired and thrown under the bus are now trying to kill him. I mean, what kind of thing is that?

Malone then said he would vote for former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg for president in 2020.

No ‘coward’s way out’

Brian Freeman of right-wing Newsmax ( 11/21/21 ) said:

CNN will be the key news property in the merged company, one that will be dominated by entertainment programming. There had been rumors that CNN might be spun off or sold, but Malone indicated [in the CNBC interview] that’s not likely.

Malone, Freeman said, described such a move as a “coward’s way out.”

Freeman asserted that “Malone has cause to worry about the left-wing network,” because

CNN ’s ratings have collapsed over 50% in the past year and may be suffering from a credibility gap with viewers…. Last March, a Hill /HarrisX poll found that 47% of registered voters believe CNN holds a liberal bias in reporting.

(In the same poll , 48% of respondents said they believed Fox had a conservative bias—but who’s counting?)

Steve Straub of the right-wing website the Federalist Papers ( 11/22/21 ) said of Malone’s CNBC comments:

CNN ’s soon-to-be new owner just made a startling admission, one that has been obviously apparent to us and many others for some time, that the so-called news network has no actual journalists.

‘The most powerful man you’ve never heard of’

Gentleman’s Journal called Malone “one of the most powerful, yet unknown, individuals in America.”

“John Malone… Meet the Most Powerful Man That You’ve Never Heard Of,” was a heading of a 2018 piece on the website of the British-based Gentleman’s Journal . Malone owns

services and TV channels you’ve most likely used or watched…yet the name John Malone still draws a sea of blank faces…. One of the most powerful, yet unknown, individuals in America…as Liberty Media ’s chairman and largest stakeholder, John Malone is one of the world’s most influential media magnates.

In addition to being part-owner of the Atlanta Braves, the website noted,

he currently owns more land in America than anyone else: 2.2 million acres to be precise…. Malone has a net worth of around $9.22 billion, and thanks to his buccaneering role in media deals and land ownership, he’s been nicknamed the “Cable Cowboy.”

The article related how Malone, born in Connecticut, has a Ph.D. in operations research from Johns Hopkins University, and

joined the worldwide management consulting firm McKinsey & Company in 1968. However, fatigued from the constant traveling his job required, he left after five years to join General Instrument; while at GI, he ran Jerrold—a subsidiary which produces minicomputers for the cable TV industry—and was eventually offered the role of CEO of Tele-Communications, Inc … [which] only had 400,000 subscribers and owed creditors $132 million…. Malone was only 29 at the time. Within 17 years of snapping up smaller operators and acquiring minority stakes in other channels, TCI , under the management of Malone, had accumulated 8.5 million subscribers and grew into the second largest cable company after Time Warner . Because of his business deals in the byzantine world of cable TV, Malone was compared to “Darth Vader” by former US Vice President Al Gore…. At the helm of Liberty Media , the young American changed the organization from just providing cable services to actually owning the networks broadcast on its infrastructure, including the Discovery Channel , QVC and Virgin Media .

‘CNN could face a reset’

Variety ( 2/8/22 ) says former CNN president Jeff Zucker (left) “pushed CNN to be blunt and unstinting in its efforts to hold feet to the fire,” while Discovery ‘s David Zaslav (right) is “behind the scenes a relentless operator.”

The headline last week in Variety ( 2/8/22 ): “ CNN Could Face a Reset Under Discovery Control.” The article by Brian Steinberg spoke of how under its recently resigned president, Jeff Zucker, “ CNN became more swashbuckling, more colorful…”

But Discovery is “a media company that tries to maintain a quieter corporate demeanor.” Zucker

changed the culture of the news outlet, shoving it into more direct competition with Fox News Channel and MSNBC …. Will Discovery change the recipe? There are signs that executives at the company see Zucker’s departure as an opportunity for a reset at CNN .

The piece spoke of those who “argue Zucker’s strategies have been good for CNN —and for people who have been helped by its aggressive accountability journalism in Washington.” The article concluded:

Executives charged with leading CNN in the wake of Zucker’s exit have vowed to staffers in internal meetings that his vision for the network will remain intact, but chances are Discovery will dim Zucker’s flash.

That would not be good news.

The future of democracy in the United States is at stake amid the polarization and deadlock of the political process in Washington. Media are increasingly under the control of right-wing zealots like Rupert Murdoch and those behind Newsmax , etc., who are poisoning communications.

Critically needed now is an independent, honest, credible press providing, yes, aggressive accountability journalism—a light to enable people to find their way out of this mess. Instead, the nation’s oldest cable news channel will soon be under the control of someone who appears to want it to follow the “interesting trajectory” of Fox News .

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Karl Grossman

Karl Grossman for 45 years has been a professor of journalism at the State University of New York at Old Westbury. He is a FAIR associate.

February 17, 2022 at 4:14 pm

[A]ggressive accountability journalism” at CNN …

How would that be defined, given what turns up in a search on the name at this site?

February 17, 2022 at 6:57 pm

CNN tries to make left wingers and liberals upset about nonsense for adverisers. Fox does the same for conservatives. They’re not actually political organs.

February 17, 2022 at 7:47 pm

The new owners at NPR made it terrible. It’s almost click bait now.

February 18, 2022 at 8:55 am

Very important article. Just now posted a link to it in Daily Kos, a major progressive website with hundreds of thousands of members.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/2/18/2080996/-Scary-headline-Trump-Donor-John-Malone-Could-Soon-Be-Calling-Shots-at-CNN

August 19, 2022 at 8:16 pm

Good article, but what has happened since February?

August 19, 2022 at 8:17 pm

I didn’t mean to respond to your comment. Sorry!

February 18, 2022 at 5:03 pm

Cato Institute used to say that cigarette regulations are tyranny and that assistance to the poor causes crime.

I’m glad they’ll be getting more influence. /S

February 18, 2022 at 8:14 pm

“. . wants to see left-wing CNN revert back to nonpartisan journalism . ..”

There’s nothing left-wing about CNN. They may be non-right-wing. But they’re certainly neoliberal/neocon. That’s not Left.

February 19, 2022 at 8:59 am

There’s simply no need for FAIR to pick sides in corporate media branding decisions. Pretending CNN is “better” than FOX or MSNBC is absurd. This piece seems to be nothing more than residual Trump Derangement Syndrome.

February 19, 2022 at 2:43 pm

I disagree. If Fox distorts the news 75% of the time and CNN does it 30%, then it’s useful to know which is which, and it only helps them get away with lying more if we pretend it’s all the same amount.

In other words, the typical CNN viewer is much more likely to grasp reality than a Fox one. And you can Google the study they did on this.

February 26, 2022 at 10:59 am

What were the numbers for people who don’t watch either?

March 30, 2022 at 8:41 pm

You NEED TO FIX YOUR SOUND. IT KEEPS SKIPPING. DO NOT LET MALONE RUN THINGS AT CNN. HE IS A TRUMPY. YOU KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN.

September 3, 2022 at 8:37 am

There shouldn’t be any sound here. You must have something else playing/auto-playing.

August 20, 2022 at 1:00 am

john malone and david zaslav are two fascists billionaire whom like the world work just the they like it. They do not hesitate to destroy anybody who has different ideology.

August 22, 2022 at 1:07 pm

JUST BOYCOTT these RW Anti-Amerikans! The RICH RW Corp’1%, OWN 99% of MEDIA! Know this & “BOYCOTT” ALL! Don’t believe anything you hear coming out of these TRAITORS & TERRORISTS! Watch Independent Media sources & always chk who OWNS them! TY!

September 3, 2022 at 1:33 pm

Fox news calls itself an “Entertainment Company,” not a News Company. The majority of their “news” announcers are giving their opinions on what’s going on in the world, which are anything but true news at times, but without telling which is which. In other words, often just plain lies and insinuations. This country does not deserve one more powerful liar.

September 4, 2022 at 7:31 pm

Keep up the good work John… Petoskey Great Lakes!

What’s FAIR

FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation. We work to invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press and by scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints. We expose neglected news stories and defend working journalists when they are muzzled. As a progressive group, we believe that structural reform is ultimately needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of information.

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