John C. Malone is the chairman of Liberty Media Corporation. Prior to its acquisition by AT&T in 1999, he was the chief executive officer of Telecommunications, Inc. (TCI), until that time the largest operator of cable systems in the United States. Malone oversaw TCI’s phenomenal growth from the time of his arrival at the company in 1973 and in the process came to be regarded as one of the most powerful people in the television industry. He has been praised by many for his outstanding business acumen and his technological foresight, but at the same time he has also acquired a less flattering reputation for his hardball style of business practice. Among those who have been openly critical of Malone in this latter vein is Albert Gore Jr., who once dubbed Malone the “Darth Vader” of the cable industry.

Malone began his career at AT&T Bell Labs in the mid-1960s before moving on to become a management consultant for McKinsey and Company in 1968. He received his Ph.D. in industrial engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1969 and soon joined the General Instrument Corporation, where he became president of its Jerrold cable equipment division. It was here that he first established ties to many of the ca- ble industry’s pioneers. In 1972 he turned down an of- fer from Steve Ross of Warner Communications to head its fledgling cable division, opting instead to leave the East Coast to accept an offer from TCI founder Bob Magness to run the small cable company from its Denver, Colorado, headquarters.

Malone joined TCI just before it fell into very difficult times. Malone’s first major success at TCI was in negotiating a restructuring of the company’s heavy debt load. Once freed from the burden of this debt, Malone embarked on a conservative growth strategy for TCI. Rather than attempting to expand its holdings by building large urban cable systems at great expense, as many other cable companies did in the late 1970s, Malone focused TCI’s growth efforts on gaining franchise rights in smaller communities, where the costs to build the systems would be far less onerous. The wis- dom of Malone’s strategy soon became evident. TCI was able to grow without encountering the exceedingly high costs associated with building capital-intensive urban cable systems, and in the early 1980s it was able to purchase several existing large-market systems, such as those in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and St. Louis, Missouri, at bargain prices from companies that had financially overextended themselves in the construction process.

As TCI grew throughout the 1980s, so did its power within the television industry. The company invested heavily in programming services and eventually came to hold stakes in more than 25 different cable networks under the arm of its Liberty Media subsidiary. However, TCI’s success was sometimes overshadowed by the public’s perception of it as a heavy-handed company that occasionally would resort to bullying tactics to achieve its desired ends. For instance, in TCI’s ear- lier days, some of its systems were known to replace entire channels of programming for days at a time, leaving these channels blank except for the names and home telephone numbers of local franchising officials. The strategy aimed to gain leverage in franchise negotiations. Fairly or not, Malone came to personify TCI and its negative public image.

Despite the company’s poor public relations record, few would deny that Malone and TCI were among the most powerful forces shaping the television industry in the late 20th century. Like William S. Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and David Sarnoff of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) an earlier era, Malone exercised great control over what American television viewers would or would not see. At TCI’s peak, nearly one in four cable subscribers in the United States was served by a TCI system, and these viewers were directly affected by the decisions Malone made. Even those who were not TCI sub- scribers felt Malone’s influence because access to the critical mass of viewers represented by TCI’s cable systems was crucial to any programmer’s success. Programmers needed carriage on TCI systems in order to gather the audience numbers that provide solid financial status. Malone assumed the position of a gate- keeper, wielding enormous influence over the entire television marketplace, which explains another nick- name that was sometimes applied to him: “The Godfather” of cable television.

Malone first hinted at his ultimate ambitions for TCI when he attempted to merge the company with the regional telephone operator Bell Atlantic in 1993. Al- though the deal was scuttled only four months after it was announced, it foreshadowed Malone’s eventual plans for TCI’s place in the future television market- place. In 1999 Malone was able to successfully negotiate the purchase of TCI and its programming arm, Liberty Media, by AT&T for a staggering $54 billion. The acquisition allowed AT&T to assume a central position within the cable television industry, while Malone was able to command top dollar for TCI shareholders in exchange for what were, in many instances, older cable systems with infrastructures that were technologically inferior to those of many other cable services. In the meantime, Malone stayed on af- ter the acquisition as Liberty Media’s chairman.

AT&T struggled in the cable operations business, and the relationship between Malone and AT&T Chair- man Michael Armstrong grew increasingly rocky until 2001, when AT&T divested its stake in Liberty Media and agreed to sell its cable systems to Comcast Corp. With its newly found freedom from AT&T, Malone led Liberty Media into a new round of asset acquisition, most notably by reentering the cable operations busi- ness by buying stakes in European cable systems. In so doing, Malone gave every indication of his intention to be as dominant a force in shaping the 21st century’s global telecommunications marketplace as he was in influencing the direction of U.S. television in the last quarter of the 20th century.