Gulf+Western

"Standing here before you tonight, I can say that the greatest single pride that I have, the greatest single asset that I have, are the people who worked with me with full dedication to make Gulf+Western work."

"In this and all other issues, my aging cowboy boss, Bob Magness, was glad to hand the reins over to me. He had borrowed big-time to buy or build more than two hundred cable systems in twenty-one states, with all the headaches of running them. Those headaches were all mine now—meeting with seven banks to get credit for TCI, five banks for a subsidiary called NTA, and two banks for a cable company called Athena, which Magness had bought from Gulf+Western a few years earlier."

"Magness looked up at an old ranch dog, a lethargic mixed beagle named Tiger, sleeping by the fire. “About the only one we can trust in the whole world is Tiger…,” Magness said. I laughed. Then… lightning struck. TCI, too, had a sleeping asset that could save the day. By happenstance, we had an unrestricted subsidiary that was not on the balance sheet of TCI, a small cable system down in Brazoria, Texas, that for some reason was not covered by the bank agreements. If we could leverage the balance sheet of that company to purchase stock, we could buy the shares back at a bargain and redeem them into the treasury. And that is exactly what we did, buying back almost 20 percent of the company at a big discount, redeeming shares, and shrinking the equity through an entity called Tiger Inc., which included the stock held by Gulf+Western and Kaufman & Broad. The move allowed us to keep more than 40 percent of TCI shares in friendly hands. We later moved the Tiger shares over to Jerry O’Brien, publisher of *The Salt Lake Tribune,* an early TCI investor and Magness friend."