Copyright The Hollywood Reporter
The pioneering media mogul John Malone is stepping aside from the empire he created. Malone announced Wednesday that he is stepping down as chairman of his holding companies Liberty Media and Liberty Global, effectively capping off a half-century plus career that helped create and define the modern media and telecommunications business. Malone will shift to a new role as chairman emeritus of his companies. Liberty vice chairman Robert R. (“Dob”) Bennett will become chairman of Liberty Media. “Founding Liberty Media and serving as its Chairman has been among the most rewarding experiences of my professional life,” said Malone in a statement. “With the successful simplification of our portfolio in recent years and our operating businesses in positions of strength, I believe it is an appropriate time to step back from certain of my obligations, and I am very pleased to have Dob Bennett, my partner and colleague of 35 years, stepping into the Chairman role. Dob has been involved in all key decisions throughout Liberty Media’s history, and I am confident that Liberty is well-positioned for the future. I look forward to remaining actively engaged as a large Liberty shareholder and a strategic advisor to our management and Board.” His holdings across the media, entertainment and telecom business are vast, spanning Charter Communications, Warner Bros. Discovery, SiriusXM, Live Nation, Formula 1, HSN and QVC owner Qurate Retail, the Atlanta Braves, and other businesses. As he chronicled in his autobiography, he was closely involved in nearly every big media deal spanning decades, helping advise Ted Turner after the fiasco that was the AOL-Time Warner merger (“Honestly, Ted, I think you’ve been screwed,” Malone told Turner after he found out he was losing operational control), competing with and confiding in Rupert Murdoch, helping to bankroll Barry Diller and IAC, and working with David Zaslav to create Warner Bros. Discovery. The mogul has been slowly stepping aside from the business, exiting his role as director emeritus at Charter last year, and moving to a new role as chairman emeritus at WBD earlier this year, effectively giving up board responsibilities. His Liberty Media business, now led by Derek Chang, is now largely focused on F1 and other live sports, and Liberty Global is operated and led by Mike Fries. But it all started with cable and wires. “It is a rather astonishing business tale. One of the most sophisticated networks in the history of humankind was first laid out by a ragtag group of risk-takers, idealists, and ‘cable cowboys.’ They strung wire across the country, driven by their own aspirations for a better life and fueled by vivid dreams of success in a free market,” Malone wrote in his memoir. “Few of those cable cowboys stringing wire from the mountains could have imagined they were laying the infrastructure for the profound transformation in society that continues even today. I know, because I was there in the beginning.” But Malone, at a Paley Center lunch last month, reflected on many of his deals alongside Fries, Zaslav and Diller, and took stock of the current state of media and tech. “Cable got reinvented as an internet delivery mechanism, and now hopefully cable will reinvent itself yet again, as a combined service, the ability to deliver full connectivity seamlessly across wired and wireless and and content being a simple component of that delivery,” he said. But Malone has also been acutely aware of where things are going, and the survivability of the businesses he has played in. “Most businesses, at least the ones I’m involved in, have a life cycle,” he said at the Paley Center lunch. “And most of them don’t reinvent themselves, they disappear.” Now Malone seems ready to disappear himself, and leave his vast network of businesses to his many proteges.
