Malone: Scale as Virtuous Cycle, Tax as Obsession

"Malone, the engineer and optimizer, realized early on that the key to creating value in the cable television business was to maximize both financial leverage and leverage with suppliers, particularly programmers, and that the key to both kinds of leverage was size."

"In fact, Malone’s one extravagance in terms of corporate staff was in-house tax experts. The internal tax team met monthly to determine optimal tax strategies, with meetings chaired by Malone himself."

"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."