Born to Be Wired: Lessons from a Lifetime Transforming Television, Wiring America for the Internet, and Growing Formula One, Discovery, Sirius XM, and the Atlanta Braves - Hardcover

Malone, John

 
9781668051535: Born to Be Wired: Lessons from a Lifetime Transforming Television, Wiring America for the Internet, and Growing Formula One, Discovery, Sirius XM, and the Atlanta Braves
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668051532 ISBN 13: 9781668051535
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

If you’ve ever streamed a show on HBO Max, seen a Formula One race, hummed a tune on SiriusXM, bought concert tickets via Ticketmaster, or watched an Atlanta Braves game, you’ve crossed paths with John Malone. You just didn’t know it.

John Malone remains a stranger to most people, though millions have been touched by the technologies and content he made possible.

In Born to Be Wired, this legendary “cable cowboy” shares stories from behind the scenes of the most transformative deals in media, entertainment, and technology. He recounts the extraordinary saga of how America was wired—how a single copper strand evolved from a rural TV antenna service into a high-speed backbone powering the internet and clearing the path for Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Malone offers an insider’s account of launching television’s first cable networks—including Discovery, TBS, QVC, and BET—and the strategy behind era-defining mergers, from Warner Bros. Discovery to Live Nation Entertainment. His Liberty Media ventures, including Formula One, have delivered long-term returns often compared to Berkshire Hathaway. More than a business story, this is a personal reflection—from a quiet kid with a mechanic’s curiosity to a media visionary confronting the costs and consequences of disruption in an industry he helped reshape.

Trained at the storied Bell Labs and gifted with a mathematical mind, Malone saw patterns in complexity. Where others saw chaos, he saw systems—and reconfigured companies with the precision of an engineer, unlocking value no one else could see.

Sweeping, revealing, and deeply human, Born to Be Wired offers a rare glimpse into the logic—and the life—behind the screen.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Malone is chairman of Liberty Media, Liberty Broadband, and Liberty Global. He was chief executive officer of Tele-Communications Inc., the largest cable operator in the US, from 1973 to 1999, when its merger closed with AT&T Corp. He is a TV, internet, and digital pioneer widely recognized for his leadership role in media and telecommunications. A philanthropist in medicine and education, he is today one of the largest landowners in America, with most of it set aside for conservation. Malone is also an avid rancher, land manager, conservationist, hotelier, and horse trader. John Malone was a merit scholar at Yale University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and economics. He later received a master’s degree in industrial management and a PhD in operations research from Johns Hopkins University.

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Chapter 1: Keys on the Table CHAPTER 1 KEYS ON THE TABLE
I had done this a hundred times before in a dozen different bank boardrooms, and each time the scene was the same: a cavernous, wood-paneled room with a long mahogany table polished to a sheen. Around it sit a dozen or so aging men in starched white shirts and neckties, frowning and looking up periodically from the financial numbers on the documents in front of them.

But on this afternoon in 1975, the banks had requested the meeting, not us, and far from a polished boardroom, it was in our brown, flat, single-story office building in the long shadow of the Rockies. I knew this meeting would be different.

The past couple of years had been pure hell for both of us. Bob Magness was the chairman of a struggling cable company on the outskirts of Denver named Tele-Communications Inc., and he had brought me in as the new CEO two years earlier.

TCI had been a bright young star in the rapidly growing cable television business. We were hanging coaxial cable across the country to provide rural areas with better reception of broadcast signals from CBS, NBC, and ABC, and eventually hundreds of new TV channels and the internet.

One day, this would lay the foundation for the largest cable operator in the U.S., serving one out of every four homes, and give rise to a robust, two-way digital communications network in the U.S., providing the platform for the likes of Amazon, Facebook, and Google, and unlocking immense value in a new digital economy.

Bob and I had no idea of any of that potential back then. That morning, we merely were hoping to survive the day. Bob, a World War II vet and part-time rancher and cottonseed broker, had launched his cable company in Memphis, Texas, in 1956, after a chance conversation with two strangers in a cotton gin, where Bob did business.

Sold on the idea, Bob and his loving and loyal wife, Betsy, sold their cattle, mortgaged their house, and jumped in. He and a small team of friends started climbing telephone poles and hanging wire, with Betsy stationed at the kitchen table as head of accounting. Several years later, Bob moved operations to Denver and took TCI public in 1970.

When I first accepted the offer to come work for Bob, the pitch was solid: Come out West and run one of the largest cable operators in this new industry! Long-term contracts to wire big cities were worth millions of dollars. This set off a land grab across the country, and TCI had taken on crushing debt to finance furious growth. Around this time, TCI reached more than 621,000 subscribers through 151 systems in 33 states, with annual revenue around $34 million a year—and $84.8 million in debt.

Almost immediately after I arrived in 1973, several things started breaking the wrong way for us: oil prices quadrupled, the inflation rate shot up to double digits, and interest rates skyrocketed to 12 percent in July 1974, more than doubling borrowing costs year over year. That hit the cable business especially hard, because for us more debt was like rocket fuel. The variable cost of stringing wire from pole to pole above ground had doubled, thanks to new regulations and price increases from suppliers. In big cities, where cable had to be buried underground, the costs could run as high as tens of thousands of dollars per mile.

Now the banks were balking at any more lending, yet we already had pledged TCI to pour half a billion dollars into new construction to win cable franchises from local governments in Tennessee, Washington, and elsewhere. On top of that, in return for franchise agreements to operate there, we had inherited promises made by systems TCI bought to build community centers and parks.

Despite healthy revenue gains and operating margins of 40 percent, our debt was closing in fast, and for the first time in my career, I was scared. To consolidate the loans he had already accumulated, Bob had drawn a $77.5 million bank line of credit in 1972, just before I joined. And we had borrowed $76.5 million of it.

A week earlier, I had called a loan officer to arrange the meeting where we would ask to borrow the final $1 million. Before I could even get the words out, he cut me off.

His tone on the other end of the line struck me as a little rude: “By the way, don’t ask for that other million. If you don’t want the house of cards to come down, don’t ask.”

What was I thinking? I was educated at Yale, I had worked in the most famous laboratory in the world at Bell Labs, I had trained at the fabled McKinsey & Company, and I had been CEO at Jerrold Electronics, the dominant (and highly profitable) supplier and financier to the cable industry. I had turned down a plush job with an absurdly big salary in New York, with a car and driver, to take this job instead.

I had joined a bunch of cowboys and a near-bankrupt former cottonseed salesman who had bet his farm, literally, on a newfangled business called cable TV. I had uprooted my family, moved across the country, and taken a pay cut—on a promise. I had risked everything.

I even had taken out a $60,000 loan from the Bank of Denver to buy TCI stock at $7 a share when I joined—a year later, the stock had fallen to $3, weighed down by high interest rates, wild inflation, and an unrelated industry scandal, briefly bottoming out at 78 cents. My start date at the company should have been my first clue: April Fool’s Day.

We were minding every nickel at the office, and my wife, Leslie, and I were counting pennies at home, using coupons at the grocery store, never eating out, and going for a month without a home phone at one point.

The vise grip of home and work was squeezing my brain. We had already started slashing salaries at the office, and we were doubling up in hotel rooms and flying economy to every new city. I had not expected this.

The worst, though, was that I wasn’t the CEO people had expected me to be, the father I had wanted to be to my kids, or the husband I had promised to be for my wife.

In honest moments, Leslie would let her frustration show: “You promised me after McKinsey and Jerrold you’d be home more, and that we’d have dinner together like a family, and you’re not, and we don’t.”

As we waited for the bankers to arrive, I realized that this one meeting would determine the fate of the company, our employees, and my career. The imminent risk of losing the company and going bankrupt was an existential threat that had resurrected old demons of self-doubt, particularly the fear of letting everyone down.

As the bankers arrived, they fanned out around the table in our cramped conference room. The only friendly face among the gaggle of them was that of Donne Fisher, our treasurer at TCI, and he looked like a man in the back of a long line at the DMV—irked and impatient, yet keeping it all in check.

I opened the meeting with an introduction heavy on promises and light on numbers, because I knew the numbers couldn’t save us. Then Donne and I left them to deliberate privately.

Bob walked into my office and asked how things were going. He still looked every inch the laconic cottonseed salesman he had been a decade earlier, with a molasses-slow Texas drawl and dressed, almost always, in a white Western dress shirt, a bolo tie, and a cowboy hat that was perched atop neatly combed white hair.

As Donne and I gave him a read on the room, he just stared off into the distance. In Bob’s eyes I couldn’t tell if I saw fear or despair that afternoon, maybe...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668051532
ISBN 13 
9781668051535
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
432
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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