By Dom Serafini
John Malone, who, not long ago, was considered a modern-day Godot because he was widely talked about but rarely ever seen, has an autobiographical book out: Born to Be Wired. The book (published by Simon & Schuster) gave him an opportunity to open up to the press, and now he’s becoming visible to the public in order to promote his memoir.
Born to Be Wired (written with the assist of Mark Robichaux, a former WSJ reporter) also recalls his days at TCI, a large cable company that at one point served 20 percent of U.S. households (and was sold to AT&T for $43 billion), and his subsequent running of Liberty Global, now one of the largest broadband providers in the world.
In the book, Malone discusses how he favored a-la-carte cable-TV pricing, but was unable to eliminate bundling pricing.
VideoAge will be reviewing the book in our November (MIP Cancun 2025) edition, but for now we have to rely on other publications that have already reviewed it, including a Sunday, August 31, 2025 New York Times article where he’s quoted as saying: “I would pay a lot of money to avoid a cocktail party.”
In the book, Malone, who’s 84 years old and has been chastised by The Wall Street Journal for his “oft-criticized aloofness,” describes his “whopper” of a mistake when he sold his TCI to AT&T in 1999. He then proceeds to write about the fatal AOL-Time Warner 2001 merger (his Liberty Media had Time Warner shares) that “doesn’t begin to describe the scope of value destruction.”
In addition, Malone, who had stakes in the Discovery Channel, criticized the AT&T merger with Discovery for Warner Media. “Was I stupid to do the WB deal?” he asked during a talk at Bloomberg Television (pictured above). Discovery closed a $43 billion deal to buy WM from AT&T, and at the Paley Media Council talk in NYC he said: “We could have done a better diligence job to understand what we were merging with.”
And finally, Malone’s greatest regret: to have “consistently underestimated” Netflix. Despite all, Malone managed to amass a personal net worth estimated at $10 billion and maintained his influence over media moguls such as Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, Barry Diller, David Zaslav, and today, David Ellison, the new owner of Paramount.
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