‘Ruthless villain’: The secretive billionaire who backed Rupert Murdoch opens up

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, Malone, 84, guides his expansive kingdom from a remove, serving as a behind-the-scenes consigliere to the executives at Warner Bros. Discovery, Formula One, LiveNation, the Atlanta Braves and Sirius XM.

“I would pay a lot of money to avoid a cocktail party,” he said recently aboard a yacht bobbing in the tranquil slip of his compound in coastal Maine.

But 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 journalist Mark Robichaux.) 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 then-Senator Al Gore.)

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 fibre optics that connect millions of homes to the internet.) The memoir, Born to Be Wired, pulls back the curtain on an industry still very much shaped by a small group of powerful men — the industry titans who pushed TV news away from its original public-interest mission toward entertainment.

Is the world a better place now than it was decades ago before Malone backed CNN and Fox News and wired America for the internet? “Clearly not,” Malone said, though he argued that was not necessarily the media industry’s fault.

“It was very clear this is what the public wanted,” Malone said. “Somebody in a capitalist society was going to make a business of it.”

As he revealed over the course of a leisurely morning, 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 CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, on a daily basis.

Decades before anyone had heard of streaming, Malone wired together a network of cable companies through hundreds of deals, eventually signing up roughly 20 per cent of US households to his cable colossus, Tele-Communications. “There’s no fun as much as running a monopoly,” Malone said.

He sold TCI to AT&T for $US48 billion ($73.4 billion) at the turn of the century, then embarked on a second act as an investor, an entrepreneur and a CEO, helping to pull off the $US43 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.

Malone also did business with many of the defining media figures of the 21st century, according to his memoir. Turner, clad in a suit and tie, dropped to his hands and knees and begged Malone’s executives to carry his channels. (Later, Malone lent Turner money for a divorce, Malone said.) Before Murdoch started Fox News in 1996, he called Malone and sought his advice. Even Bill Gates made a cameo in his career, talking Malone out of a major investment in AOL.

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. Malone, who tried unsuccessfully to persuade Netflix founder Reed Hastings to merge that company with one he chaired, says that cable giants “consistently underestimated” Netflix “at every turn.” 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 Malone did business with, like Murdoch and 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.

“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,” Diller said.

Murdoch is similarly effusive. “John is the most brilliant businessman I have ever met,” he said in a statement.

He has also drawn his share of detractors, including Gore, who once called Malone the “king of the cable Cosa Nostra.”

But the relationship that looms the largest over Malone’s professional life is the one with his father, who worked for General Electric and did classified work for the US Navy during the Korean War. Over time, Malone said, he realised that both he and his father had autistic traits — that they had “different wiring.”

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 colourful TCI founder Bob Magness. After Magness died in 1996, Malone began seeing a therapist and realised he would never be able to continue winning the approval of his father, surrogate or otherwise.

Instead, Malone has become a mentor to the next generation of moguls. One of them is Zaslav, a former corporate lawyer whose relationship with Malone helped catapult him to the top of the media industry. In his memoir, Malone acknowledged the criticism of Zaslav’s stewardship of Warner Bros. Discovery but called it “noise,” adding: “I trust him to get this right.”

Another rising mogul Malone recently conferred with is Ellison, the Paramount CEO who is setting out to remake the company after orchestrating an $US8 billion merger. Malone said he had met with Ellison to “talk about further consolidation in the media industry,” declining to be more specific.

Malone speculated that the Ellison family could be crucial to the future of the media industry. He noted that Oracle — the company co-founded by Ellison’s father, Larry — already had a relationship with TikTok, which could put the Ellisons in pole position to somehow fuse streaming and social media, Malone said.

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 Malone reveals in his memoir he considered buying from AT&T in 2020 after Turner suggested a deal. Malone says in his memoir that CNN is now “a shadow of what its founder had envisioned.”

Malone’s reflections on the state of the media industry have led him to some surprising conclusions. Although he has opposed government regulation over the decades, Malone writes in his memoir that he favours increased regulation of tech giants. (In a follow-up email, Malone qualified his remarks, saying regulation should “protect innovation.“)

As he contemplates retirement, Malone says he and his wife, Leslie, are redoing his estate plan. 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.

“You can hold on too tightly to something, to anything, for too long,” Malone writes in his memoir. “Anyone who lives to their 80th birthday knows there comes a time for letting go.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.