Pop quiz: Which media mogul backed Rupert Murdoch’s launch of Fox News, supported Ted Turner’s plans for CNN and helped lay the groundwork for the internet revolution that powers Instagram, TikTok and Google?
Need a hint? He’s also the second-largest private landowner in the United States, with 2.2 million acres.
Of all the captains of industry who have transformed what we read, watch and talk about over the last half century, John Malone is among the most influential and the least understood. An engineer turned omnivorous investor, Mr. Malone, 84, guides his expansive kingdom from a remove, serving as a behind-the-scenes consigliere to the executives at Warner Bros. Discovery, Formula 1, LiveNation, the Atlanta Braves and Sirius XM.
“I would pay a lot of money to avoid a cocktail party,” he said this month, aboard a yacht bobbing in the tranquil slip of his compound in coastal Maine.
But Mr. Malone is stepping into the spotlight next month with his autobiography, a book that recounts his climb from a small cable company to a perch atop a sprawling media empire. (The book was written with the help of the journalist Mark Robichaux, who’d written a previous book about Mr. Malone; he said Mr. Robichaux talked him into the memoir.) Mr. Malone largely offers an unsparing view of himself, noting that he was frequently “cast as a ruthless villain,” even ticking off all the pejorative nicknames he amassed over the years: Genghis Khan. Robber baron. Darth Vader. (That last one was bestowed upon him by Al Gore, then a Democratic senator from Tennessee.)
Mr. Malone’s personal history is a chronicle of American media, tracking the rise and fall of cable TV, the ascendance of tech giants like Netflix and how Americans have become glued to their phones. (His companies laid the cable and fiber optics that connect millions of homes to the internet.) Along the way, the memoir, “Born to Be Wired,” pulls back the curtain on an industry still very much shaped by the ambitions, whims and rivalries of a small group of powerful men.
Those industry titans pushed TV news away from its original public-interest mission toward entertainment, which many now say helped erode American culture and politics.
“As he and other cable advocates knocked down the rules and regulations of the broadcasting era, television news increasingly focused more on entertaining viewers to deliver more corporate profits rather than informing citizens to fulfill public interest responsibilities,” said Kathryn Brownell, a history professor at Purdue University and the author of “24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America From Watergate to Fox News.”
Is the world a better place now than it was decades ago before Mr. Malone backed CNN and Fox News and wired America for the internet? “Clearly not,” Mr. Malone said, though he argued that was not necessarily the media industry’s fault: If political leaders “had unifying messages, we’d all be happy to listen to them.” Besides, Mr. Malone noted, if he and his peers hadn’t created the current media environment, someone else would have.
“It was very clear this is what the public wanted,” Mr. Malone said. “Somebody in a capitalist society was going to make a business of it.”
‘Different Wiring’
As he revealed over the course of a leisurely morning, Mr. Malone remains in the middle of the action: He discussed deals with David Ellison, the new owner of Paramount, at the annual “summer camp for billionaires” in Sun Valley, Idaho, in July. He calls or texts David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, on a daily basis. And he offers advice on high-stakes negotiations , encouraging Mr. Zaslav last year to stop spending billions on rights to National Basketball Association games. It’s not idle chatter. As a major shareholder, Mr. Malone has the ability to sway big decisions.
Decades before anyone had heard of streaming, Mr. Malone wired together a network of cable companies through hundreds of deals — one every two weeks, on average — eventually signing up roughly 20 percent of U.S. households to his cable colossus, Tele-Communications Inc. “Trust me, there’s no fun as much as running a monopoly,” Mr. Malone cracked, referring to his tenure at the top of that company.
Sometimes, he played hardball: After Vail, Colo., canceled TCI’s cable franchise in 1973, Mr. Malone pulled the plug on the town’s cable system about 10 minutes into the Steve McQueen flick “Bullitt,” replacing it with the names and numbers of local politicians. That was a Friday night. “By Tuesday, we had hammered out an agreement with the council,” he writes.
He sold TCI to AT&T for $48 billion at the turn of the century, then embarked on a second act as an investor, an entrepreneur and a chief executive, helping to pull off the $43 billion deal for Warner Bros. and building an international cable company, Liberty Global, which has become one of the largest broadband providers in the world.
Mr. Malone also did business with many of the defining media figures of the 21st century, according to his memoir. The CNN founder Ted Turner, clad in a suit and tie, dropped to his hands and knees and begged Mr. Malone’s executives to carry his channels. (Later, Mr. Malone lent Mr. Turner money for a divorce, Mr. Malone said.) Before Rupert Murdoch started Fox News in 1996, he called Mr. Malone and sought his advice. Even Bill Gates made a cameo in his career, talking Mr. Malone out of a major investment in AOL.
Mr. Malone acknowledges some missteps in his career, particularly as Netflix disrupted the cable industry. As Netflix exploded in popularity, traditional media companies sold the streaming service the weapons it needed to compete with them: great movies and TV shows. Mr. Malone, who tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Netflix founder Reed Hastings to merge that company with one he chaired, says that cable giants “consistently underestimated” Netflix “at every turn.” Mr. Malone also says he shouldn’t have stuck around at AT&T after selling TCI, advising other entrepreneurs to learn from his mistake: “Do not go on the board. Do not hang around. You will be trapped.”
Some of the famous figures Mr. Malone did business with, like Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Turner, became friends. Barry Diller, the maverick chief executive of IAC, is now an occasional yachting shipmate, after a long and at times complicated friendship that included a lawsuit briefly pitting them against each other over a corporate spinout. (Mr. Diller and his cloned dogs have since visited Mr. Malone’s compound in Maine, where Mr. Malone greeted a reporter from The New York Times from behind the wheel of a seriously formidable all-terrain vehicle.)
“While he often says he’s just an engineer, he has been by far, very far, the most creative-thinking executive in every part of the media universe over the last decades,” Mr. Diller said.
Mr. Murdoch is similarly effusive. “John Malone has been a great friend,” he said in a statement. “More importantly, John is the most brilliant businessman I have ever met.”
He has also drawn his share of detractors, including Mr. Gore, who once called Mr. Malone the “king of the cable Cosa Nostra.”
But the relationship that looms the largest over Mr. Malone’s professional life is the one with his father, a distant mechanical whiz who worked for General Electric and did classified work for the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. Over time, Mr. Malone said, he realized that both he and his father had autistic traits — that they had “different wiring.”
Mr. Malone spent much of his childhood working for his father’s approval, just as he devoted the first decades of his professional life to pleasing the man he regarded as a surrogate father, the colorful TCI founder Bob Magness. After Mr. Magness died of brain cancer in 1996, Mr. Malone began seeing a therapist to help ward off depression and realized he would never be able to continue winning the approval of his father, surrogate or otherwise.
Instead, Mr. Malone has become a mentor to the next generation of moguls. One of them is Mr. Zaslav, a former corporate lawyer whose relationship with Mr. Malone helped catapult him to the top of the media industry. In his memoir, Mr. Malone acknowledged the criticism of Mr. Zaslav’s stewardship of Warner Bros. Discovery (the share price has sunk about 50 percent since its debut three years ago), but called it “noise,” adding: “I trust him to get this right. You don’t shoot the captain of the ship because the seas are stormy.”
Their tight relationship has extended to a sensitive issue for Warner Bros. Discovery: Mr. Zaslav’s compensation. He has been featured in lists of the most highly compensated executives in corporate America, a distinction that embarrassed a faction of board members appointed by AT&T, its former corporate overlord, Mr. Malone said.
He said he had recently advised Mr. Zaslav on a new contract that maximized his potential for generating long-term wealth while trying to minimize public criticism, keeping the headline figure “skinny.”
“It doesn’t look like it’s all that generous, but in reality, it’s your path to meaningful wealth,” Mr. Malone said.
That package is based on the performance of the company’s stock, Mr. Malone said, which he believes will encourage Mr. Zaslav to think like a shareholder. (Later, a spokesman for Mr. Malone said he was not on the compensation committee of Warner Bros. Discovery and did not decide on Mr. Zaslav’s pay. Warner Bros. Discovery declined to comment but said in June that Mr. Zaslav’s new package “will significantly reduce” his annual compensation.)
Another rising mogul Mr. Malone recently conferred with is Mr. Ellison, the Paramount chief executive who is setting out to remake the company after orchestrating an $8 billion merger that put him in the driver’s seat. Mr. Malone said he had met with Mr. Ellison at Sun Valley to “talk about further consolidation in the media industry,” declining to be more specific. He said he had been encouraged to take the meeting seriously by Mr. Ellison’s father, the Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
Mr. Malone said he found the younger Mr. Ellison to be “very bright” and “pretty arrogant,” wryly noting that “if your dad is worth $400 billion, I guess you can be arrogant.” But he credited Mr. Ellison for founding Skydance, saying he would “bet on that guy.”
Mr. Malone speculated that the Ellison family could be crucial to the future of the media industry. He noted that Oracle already had a relationship with TikTok, which could put the Ellison family in pole position to somehow fuse streaming and social media, Mr. Malone said.
No ‘Succession’
As the tech titans keep an eye on TikTok, traditional media companies are scrambling to distance themselves from the decline of cable TV. In June, Warner Bros. Discovery announced it would split into two companies, with one owning the HBO Max streaming service and the other its cable channels. One of those channels is CNN, which Mr. Malone reveals in his memoir he considered buying from AT&T in 2020 after receiving a message from Mr. Turner suggesting one last deal. (They decided against it, believing the network might falter financially outside its parent company.)
Mr. Malone, who identifies as a libertarian, says in his memoir that CNN is now “a shadow of what its founder had envisioned,” though he adds that it still has “some of the best journalists in America.” One problem with CNN, he said, is that the network’s employees — whom he described as being largely “left of center,” — “express their opinions too much in their news.” He said Mr. Zaslav had been “unable to have any meaningful impact” in fixing what he viewed as the channel’s partisan tilt, a problem he said affected every news network.
“They can’t help themselves,” Mr. Malone said. “And so what you’ve got is a left-leaning, anti-Trump news service.”
The network’s next plan, he said, will be a paid subscription service that will allow viewers to stream hours of CNN video without a cable subscription. A CNN spokeswoman said in a statement that the network’s chief executive, Mark Thomson, “has made it clear from day one that he believes in a CNN that is fair-minded and biased in favor of the facts rather than any political party or interest.”
“In the nearly two years he has been C.E.O. and editor-in-chief, he has never experienced any attempt by anyone inside or connected to W.B.D. to improperly influence CNN’s journalism in any way,” the statement said.
Mr. Malone’s reflections on the state of the media industry have led him to some surprising conclusions. Though he has opposed government regulation over the decades, Mr. Malone writes in his memoir that he favors increased regulation of tech giants.
Of course, “where you stand depends on where you sit,” Mr. Malone acknowledged in the interview. “If you’re representing an industry that’s doing really well and doesn’t want to get regulated, you’d want less regulation.” In a follow-up email, Mr. Malone qualified his remarks, saying regulation should “protect innovation.”
As he contemplates retirement, Mr. Malone says he and his wife, Leslie, are redoing his estate plan, winnowing it down to make it easier for his survivors to sort through. His vast land holdings will go into a conservation trust, so that they can be used by the public. He does not plan for either of his two children to succeed him at Liberty Media, his media colossus.
The death of Mr. Magness, the TCI founder, led to a messy tug of war between his widow and his surviving children. There have been similar generational squabbles involving Sumner Redstone, the irascible founder of Viacom, and Mr. Murdoch at Fox. Mr. Malone has not watched the HBO series “Succession,” and the plans for his own empire don’t resemble the show.
“You can hold on too tightly to something, to anything, for too long,” Mr. Malone writes in the final chapter of his memoir. “Anyone who lives to their 80th birthday knows there comes a time for letting go.”
Benjamin Mullin reports for The Times on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact him securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or at [email protected].
The post He Paved the Way for CNN, Fox News and the Internet. He’s Not Sure We’re Better Off. appeared first on New York Times.
