John C. Malone

So Evan Drellich for The Athletic wrote a story saying that there is one of 20 shareholders who own the most non-voting shares in a public company called, "Hey, we own the Braves." It's sort of the same thing as you buying shares in the Green Bay Packers and then framing those shares and saying that you own the Packers, because when people come over for cocktail parties, they can say, "Holy cow, you're an owner." Well, the fact of the matter is the Braves are an actual public company.

The Braves' majority shareholder is a guy named John Malone.

He owns the most outstanding shares.

The other people who have shares, it's not as bad as the Packers, sort of, but you get no say in anything.

The reason why we know the top 20 investors are in the Braves is that it is public.

When a public company has ownership of 5% or more, that is a disclosed stake in the underlying asset and company.

Well, this Braves investor is saying to John Malone, the owner of the Braves, who can do whatever he wants, including play guitar or pick his nose.

He can do whatever he wants with the Braves, and he does not have to listen to those other in- investors for anything.

because the top sponsor of MTV said, do not play this video or we will pull our sponsorship from your channel.

Okay, so John Malone, who was like the president of TCI, Telecommunications Inc., I mean, it's a cable provider, right? And so MTV is only good if people can hear them and see them.

That's right.

And if the cable provider that puts them out into the world says, we're going to pull your channel off of our cable system, that's a big freaking deal.

So John Malone is like, do not play this music.

Do not play this video.

And then they get David Geffen then who's calling and is like, Guys, this is the next stage of rock and roll.

I want to ask you a bunch of stuff, but I want to ask first, how do you like the NCTA? It's kind of at the crossroads of every big issue in America.

It is, you know, as a Colorado guy that has such a great history in the state with the telecom industry, some of the earliest cable pioneers, John Malone, Bill Daniels, Bob Magnus, all of these people, Glenn Jones in Colorado, getting to see their work and then to work with the legacies of their companies that helped get America's economy shifted online during the pandemic and entire economy.

as a result of this industry.

It's pretty remarkable to see the work they do.

Then he'd tender for enormous blocks all at once when the stock got very cheap.

John Malone did something similar at TCI.

He took over in 1973 when it was a small, heavily indebted cable operator and spent the next 25 years turning it into the largest cable company in America, largely by using debt and depreciation to keep reported earnings and therefore taxes low, while cash flow kept compounding underneath.

He set out entire cycles before buying cable systems at prices competitors simply couldn't justify.

We're joined by Tej Azad, who is a neurosurgeon currently at UC San Francisco, but will be coming back to Johns Hopkins where he did his training.

Suchi Saria, who is the John C. Malone Associate Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins.

And Devin McGraw, who is the Chief Regulation and Policy Officer at Citizen Health.

And we're going to be talking about a commentary, a very provocative commentary they published in the journal last year that is about the potential privacy and ethics concerns of medical AI using patient data.

Um, last week I spoke about this a little bit.

It's a little reminiscent of, uh, what John Malone did actually in, in the '80s.

He, um, started TCI, and in that period, he wanted to i- increase the, um, cable network subscription, and with that he invested in Warner.

He...

John Collison, our own John Collison, bought one of the most glamorous estates in the country, in, in Abbeyleix, supposed to have the oldest oak forest, uh, uh, here.

John Malone, who, um, uh, p- people might know from, uh, ultimately from Virgin Media, cable billionaire, he's supposed to be the biggest landowner in America.

He has two big properties here, Humewood and Castlemartin, which used to be owned by Tony O'Reilly.

Castlemartin might be the grandest estate in Ireland.

This is ticker tape.

[upbeat music] Okay, John, champagne aside, what does it actually mean to invest in luxury?

Well, Caroline, luxury is one of the stranger corners of the stock market.

Most companies wanna sell you as much as possible.

Um, the company, uh, basically, um, had been around since 1950.

Ferrari was one of the original racing teams involved there, Mercedes being the other one as well.

But it was really in 2017 that Liberty Media, which is the John Malone group of companies, came in and took a company which was really running, um, in, in, in, i- in a less sustainable manner and, and, and really brought it into the modern marketing era.

Uh, which is to bring in things like focus on sponsorship, uh, streaming rights, and viewership, and then also all that goes around in terms of enhancing the team, uh, income and advertising revenue.

Last year, I think it was, Zuckerberg expressed an interest in buying Castle Martin House and estate in Kildare.

But that was rebuffed at the time by John Malone, who was a US telecoms billionaire, as

we know.

Also a big player in tech in the telecoms place more than anywhere else, the cable industry.