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| John and Leslie Malone 2014 |
Not quite, according to Bloomberg.
The 77-year-old billionaire, who helped build the pay-TV industry and now sees it threatened by cord cutting, remains on the boards of eight public companies and has no plans to leave them. He’s still the largest shareholder of Charter, the No. 2 U.S. cable company. Two of his deputies are still directors at Lions Gate, an independent studio. And when he calls, executives still listen. Nothing is really changing, he says.
“My primary effort has been reducing business travel as much as I can so my wife is alone as little as possible,” Malone said in a phone interview. “And I’m getting old. What else do people expect? Am I going to jump off all these boards all of a sudden? No.”
Malone has long been a reluctant mogul. He relished being a chief executive officer, but never liked the jet-setting that took him away from his high-school sweetheart Leslie -- “my life’s companion.” He has been promising he’d be home more since he took over as CEO of Tele-Communications Inc. in 1972 and helped build it into the world’s largest cable company, according to Mark Robichaux’s 2002 book “Cable Cowboy.”
He quit being a CEO for good 14 years ago after his wife developed a serious heart condition. Instead, he became an investor, a board member and cheerleader for his companies, as well as a tireless dealmaker. He’s worth $9.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Liberty Media, which Malone spun off from TCI in the early 1990s, has expanded over the years through investments in a range of companies where he has varying degrees of control, including satellite radio company Sirius XM Holdings Inc., Charter and Formula One, the racing circuit. He’s a major shareholder in cable channel owner Discovery Inc. and chairman of Liberty Global. He sold TCI to AT&T in 1998 for $48 billion.
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