Liberty

"“John Malone is not the kind of guy that walks through the halls of Liberty and puts his head down when people are coming towards him. He’s a very approachable guy, just like John is. Very charismatic.”"

"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."

"• ⁠ To accomplish these goals, I sketched out a second list: • Retire from TCI. • Reduce outside public board memberships from 11 to 4. • Remain chairman and controlling shareholder in Liberty. • Remain chairman of CableLabs. • Stay on the Turner board. • Get the government off TCI’s back. • Generate predictable income by deferring TCI compensation payments with stock dividends, which should produce sufficient cash to maintain our lifestyle. • Say nothing publicly about the contemplated change until Bob Magness is comfortable."

"For me the creation of Liberty was capital allocation, but more simply, creative problem-solving. Sometimes a complex problem deserves a complex answer. In many ways, Liberty represented a clean canvas to draw on and freedom from regulators poring over TCI. Liberty would become a vehicle to build personal wealth and the progenitor of everything we run today."

"Paul was a bona fide futurist, a believer in the societal benefits of a wired world, and by 1998 he would buy a controlling stake in one of the largest U.S. cable operators, Charter Communications, in which I own a substantial stake today. Years later, Liberty would buy Paul’s stake in Ticketmaster."

"Most of the boats I have owned over the years—*Liberty, Ragtime, Leslie Ann*, and others—passed for a traveling boardroom of sorts. Peter, Paul Gould, Gordon Crawford, Gerry Lenfest, or some different cadre of investors would set sail on a long trip, from the Bahamas up to Maine, or back down to Florida. You get to know people pretty well on a long boat ride. There was freedom to explore new ideas about the future of programming, potential combinations, or threats on the horizon."

"Only about a third of the TCI investors swapped their shares for Liberty stock. After my talk with Ted, I bought as much of Liberty Media as I could, swapping in a third of my TCI shares for what amounted to nearly 9 percent of Liberty shares in return. After borrowing $25.6 million to exercise the options I was given, I would come to control 20 percent of Liberty’s class B stock, which was allowed ten votes per share. And using rights Bob transferred to me, I would control close to 40 percent of the shareholder votes at Liberty."

"Investing in networks would turn out to be a smart investment, which the price of all programming stocks reflected, including Liberty. Liberty initially traded at $256 a share and more than tripled to $770 in less than a year of trading. By the summer of 1993, the shares would be worth $3,700 unadjusted for splits. My own investment of $42.1 million, most of it borrowed, grew to more than $600 million in the tax-free stock trade."

"To his credit, Bill conceded he had been blindsided by the government’s onerous restrictions and overconfident about the Microsoft Network in the early days of online. “Yeah, John, you know, I’m really sorry about that. Why don’t I just return your Liberty shares?” And that’s exactly what he did, returning the shares in Liberty in 1996, even though Liberty shares over the same two-year period had increased dramatically as well. Bill saw past the profit and saw more in the gesture. He was fair, which is one of the highest compliments one CEO can give another in the blood sport of dealmaking."

"I then called Larry Tisch. “Congratulations, Barry—you just made a lot of money,” he bellowed at me with his booming voice (the QVC stock I had bought for $25 million was now worth $125 million). He must have gotten their proposal over the wire a few minutes before. Now I was doubly stunned. I quickly said we could easily compete with the Comcast offer and I was sure John Malone and Liberty would back our deal instead of just selling out. Tisch interrupted me, saying, “If you think I’m going to overbid them, you’re smoking something. I’m going to the board dinner right now and I’m going to tell them we should authorize a one-point-five-billion-dollar dividend instead of doing this deal because we’re not going to get caught up in some bidding contest for a home-shopping company.”"

"The prerequisite for my agreeing was that John Malone would give me a bulletproof lifetime proxy on Liberty’s controlling interest in Silver King as well as a large ownership stake in it and eventually HSN. Control, my hard-ass mantra, would be hardwired, but it sure was small beer."

"Moreover, 2010 is developing into an extremely successful business year for him. With his Liberty fund, he has invested in the Spanish media conglomerate Prisa."