Cable Cowboy

Beschreibung

An inside look at a cable titan and his industry John Malone, hailed as one of the great unsung heroes of our age bysome and reviled by others as a ruthless robber baron, is revealedas a bit of both in Cable Cowboy. For more than twenty-five years,Malone has dominated the cable television industry, shaping theworld of entertainment and communications, first with his cablecompany TCI and later with Liberty Media. Written with Malone'sunprecedented cooperation, the engaging narrative brings thiscontroversial capitalist and businessman to life. Cable Cowboy isat once a penetrating portrait of Malone's complex persona, and acaptivating history of the cable TV industry. Told in a livelystyle with exclusive details, the book shows how an unassumingcopper strand started as a backwoods antenna service and became thedigital nervous system of the U.S., an evolution that gave U.S.consumers the fastest route to the Internet. Cable Cowboy revealsthe forces that propelled this pioneer to such great heights, andcaptures the immovable conviction and quicksilver mind that havedefined John Malone throughout his career.

Autor*in

Mark Robichaux

Themen in »Cable Cowboy«

Business & Management Business & Society Kabelfernsehen Wirtschaft Wirtschaft u. Gesellschaft Wirtschaft u. Management

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Robichaux, an editor of the Wall Street Journal's "Weekend"section, covered cable television for the paper from 1989 to 2001.Here he draws on interviews and published sources to produce awell-written account of John Malone. In the early 1970's, at theyoung age of 29, Malone took over a small cable company on the edgeof bankruptcy known as Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCl), which headeptly turned around and in 1998 sold to AT&T for $48 billion,making it the largest media merger in history. The author weaves anintricate tale of the cable industry and TCI as he reveals thebrilliant deal-making strategies that built the largest cablecompany in the world. A typical strategy would be to swap stock,which defers recognition of profit on the deal whereby taxes wouldnot have to be paid. Using these tactics, Malone acquired hundredsof companies and was viewed as a monopolist, creating a politicalbacklash in Washington that caused him to be called Darth Vader,Genghis Khan, and the Godfather rolled into one. Readable and wellresearched, this work is unauthorized but was written with Malone'scooperation. Recommended for media collections in public librariesand those interested in the "art of the deal." --BellindaWise, Nassau Community Coll. Lib., Garden City, NY (LibraryJournal, January 15, 2003)
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