John Malone: The Cable Cowboy Quietly Wiring the World—And Billing It Monthly
The Last Emperor of Cable: John Malone’s Quiet World Domination Tour
By Our Man in Luxembourg, still wondering why his hotel TV has 900 channels and nothing on
Somewhere between the fjords of Norway and the favelas of Rio, your monthly broadband bill is being stage-managed by a 83-year-old Coloradan who looks less like Darth Vader and more like the affable uncle who forgets where he parked the Death Star. John Malone—media mogul, land baron, cord-cutter’s bogeyman—doesn’t own the planet outright, but he’s certainly drawn up the lease agreement.
Start with the obvious: if cable television were the Roman Empire, Malone would be its Augustus, only with better tax lawyers. Through Liberty Global, he commands networks that stretch from Warsaw to Santiago, a transcontinental nervous system pumping reality shows and Champions League matches into 11 million homes. While European regulators were busy arguing about cookie banners, Malone quietly stapled together the Continent’s fragmented cable outfits like a kid finishing a jigsaw puzzle no one else wanted. The result? A single remote control now rules from Dublin to Bratislava, which is either progress or the plot of a low-budget Bond film, depending on your taste for parliamentary hearings.
But Malone’s genius lies not in mere ownership; it’s in the art of the carve-out. He spins off assets the way other men shed hair: Discovery becomes Warner Bros. Discovery, then half of it reattaches itself to his AT&T detritus, and somehow he still ends up with a board seat and a Cheshire grin. Analysts call it “financial engineering.” Everyone else calls it watching a three-card monte game played with billion-dollar chips.
Meanwhile, the developing world wonders why it should care about a cowboy billionaire in Denver. Answer: because Malone’s satellites decide which telenovela Nairobi binge-watches on Friday night. When he shifted StarzPlay into the Middle East, Saudi censors suddenly had to debate whether “Power” was too racy for the Kingdom. (Verdict: it wasn’t, but only after strategic pixelation of 43% of Omari Hardwick’s torso.) Cultural imperialism used to arrive on gunboats; now it streams in 4K with optional Arabic subtitles.
And then there is the land. Not content with owning the airwaves, Malone is America’s largest private landowner—2.2 million acres of pine forest, cattle range, and whatever else looked lonely on Google Earth. Environmentalists grumble that one man shouldn’t control a principality-sized chunk of the Rockies. Malone shrugs, notes he’s put the acreage into conservation easements, and keeps the mineral rights just in case the apocalypse starts running behind schedule. Somewhere, a prepper feels both vindicated and deeply outbid.
Global implications? Picture a Venn diagram where media oligopoly, telecom infrastructure, and raw geopolitics overlap in a shape that looks suspiciously like a dollar sign. Malone sits at the nexus, flanked by regulators who speak seventeen languages and share one common phrase: “subject to approval.” When the EU frets about American Big Tech, it’s really fretting about Malone’s fiber optics under Belgian streets. When Latin American presidents promise “digital inclusion,” they mean cutting a deal with the guy who already owns the ductwork. In the grand chessboard of 21st-century power, the king is wearing a flannel shirt and holding a cattle prod labeled “synergies.”
The darkest joke of all: for a man who perfected the cable bundle, Malone has become the patron saint of cord-cutting. Every time a millennial cancels Comcast, somewhere a Liberty subsidiary sells the broadband that delivers Netflix. It’s the capitalist equivalent of selling both the heroin and the rehab clinic, then invoicing for the ambulance.
As the sun sets over another continent-wide fiber-optic ring, Malone will likely be found on his Colorado ranch, plotting the next spin-off by starlight. The rest of us will keep streaming, scrolling, and paying—sometimes in euros, sometimes in riyals, always under the long shadow of an empire built on coaxial cable and compound interest. The emperor has no clothes, but the bandwidth is excellent.
