What I learned from reading Cable Cowboy: John Malone and the Rise of the Modern Cable Business by Mark Robichaux.
In the american cable industry, one man has, over the last several years, seized monopoly power using bully boy tactics and strong arming competitors, suppliers, and customers.
That man has inflicted antitrust injury on my company and virtually every american consumer of cable services and technologies.
That man is John C.
Malone.
Malone seeks to exert monopoly power over key stages of the delivery of cable programming to the american consumer.
Control over the creation of programming in studios, control over cable programming services, control over the mechanics of transmitting programming by satellite, and control over the delivery of programming to the home.
At every stage in this process, the consumer has paid and will continue to pay a monopoly tax to John Malone.
That was an excerpt from a lawsuit that Malone's one time rival, Summer Redstone, filed.
And it is found in the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is cable John Malone and the rise of the modern cable business.
And it was written by Mark Robichaw.
So before I go to the actual book, I want to read some highlights from this fantastic Twitter thread written by this anonymous account called Loadline Finance.
It was written a few years ago, and I think it gives a fantastic overview of John Malone's philosophy on company building.
And I think knowing this, before we go into some of the highlights, it actually enhance your understanding of the highlights as we go through.
So the first idea, Malone believed in building long term value through leveraged cash flow.
Earnings didn't count.
He was not constrained by quarterly expectations the entire time that he runs TCI.
It's a public company.
And so he would tell his stockholders, if you're going to ask about quarterly earnings, you're at the wrong meeting and you probably own the wrong stock.
I'll go into a lot more detail about his philosophy once we get to the book.
Malone built the pipes, then bought the water that flows through them.