News Corp.

""Rupert Murdoch holds 15% of the shares of News Corp., but 39% of the voting rights; even better, John Malone, with only 3% of the shares of Liberty Media, can rely on 28% of the voting rights; and it goes up to 53% for Facebook, of which Mark Zuckerberg [the founder] has only 15% of the shares.""

"When he sold assets, he almost always sold for stock (the reason that, to this day, Liberty has large holdings of News Corp., Time Warner, Sprint, and Motorola stock) or sheltered gains through accumulated NOLs, and he made constant use of the latest tax strategies. As Dennis Leibowitz said, “TCI hardly ever disposed of an asset unless there was a tax angle to it.”10 No other cable company devoted remotely as much time and attention to this area as TCI."

"Sometimes in business, a strategy doesn’t appear to work at first, but the knowledge you gain is more valuable because it informs decisions down the road. In late 1988, Rupert called with a very particular request. “John, you know about computers and networks and so on, and there’s a company called Prodigy…” We had been closely watching the “computer information services,” as they were called back then. Rupert wanted to explore joint acquisitions using TCI’s networking and News Corp.’s programming. “There must be something here for us,” he said."

"News Corp. Chairman Emeritus Rupert Murdoch, who at various times has been my competitor—or my consigliere, gave me a master class in business strategy. I am still learning the black magic of programming from Barry Diller, who is a bona fide genius and a maestro of television and internet content. And I am reminded of my own ambition when I counsel Mike Fries, who is one of the hardest-working, team-building, risk-taking entrepreneurs I ever have seen, helping to build one of the biggest broadband companies in the world with Liberty Global."

"If business is war, and it certainly feels like it sometimes, I was thrilled we had a new weapon in digital compression, but it was not ours alone. Soon others would exploit its power, too. And as I looked at the broader North American battle map, our flank was exposed. The most immediate threat was the satellite companies—not the makers of the big ten-foot C-band dishes, but a new generation of smaller dishes and powerful satellites that could leverage digital compression from space—without the need for wires. One early gambit, called Sky Cable, promised 108 channels, twice as many channels as most cable systems back then, to a dish a mere eighteen inches in diameter—about the size of a pizza pan. The venture drew deep-pocketed backers, including General Motors’ Hughes Communications; General Electric’s NBC; News Corp., owner of 20th Century Fox Studios; and Cablevision Systems Corporation. Lucky for us, just a year later, the high-cost Sky Cable partnership imploded."