The ‘King of Cable’ Behind a Charter-Time Warner Cable Deal

When Charter Communications announced the acquisitions of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, its news release did not mention John Malone’s name. He was not on the investor call. Yet there is little doubt that Malone is behind the scenes, orchestrating an upheaval of the industry he helped create two decades ago.

Malone shaped the cable television industry in the 1980s and ’90s, selling TCI — which he built into the country’s largest cable operator — to AT&T for $48 billion in 1999. (That is about $68 billion in 2015 dollars.) He walked away from the business that made him a fortune and went on to control a disparate collection of media companies, including the satellite radio provider Sirius XM, the Atlanta Braves baseball team, the QVC home shopping channel and big telecommunications companies in Europe. Though seemingly unrelated, the companies Malone has preferred share some qualities: They tend to have stable, recurring revenues. They are capital intensive, making it hard for new entrants to pose a challenge. And they have allowed him to engage in famous bouts of financial engineering, taking on leverage, spinning off subsidiaries and creating tracking stocks, much to the delight of enriched shareholders.