John Malone Quotes
100 John Malone Quotes
1 2 3
The concept that cable television looked more like real estate than it did manufacturing was always obvious… to me, anyway
John Malone
It was almost like building one brick at a time.
John Malone
Entrepreneurs will always be able to take an asset, leverage it up, operate it tightly and make it worth money to them and get good equity returns.
John Malone
God help us if we think we can pick winners and losers when it comes to making movies.
John Malone
The question really is, ‘What's the revenue model?’
John Malone
The MediaOne deal ... that was the Rubicon that they crossed that they shouldn’t have crossed…
John Malone
I think consolidation was an absolutely necessary evolution in the business.
John Malone
[On consolidation in cable] You hate to see the entrepreneurs disappear because they were fun guys. But they all made a lot of money…
John Malone
There was this huge sucking sound, and it wasn’t Ross Perot’s jobs going to Mexico.
John Malone
The cable industry created so many rich guys. It was the combination of tax-sheltered cash-flow growth that was, in effect, growing faster than the interest rate under which you could borrow money.
John Malone
Predictable income streams are much more valuable than volatile ones. 'Cause you can leverage them…
John Malone
I've done lots of bad deals…Yeah, I've done some horrific deals.
John Malone
I've done some horrific deals… usually not when I stuck to my knitting…
John Malone
I’m anti-social and apolitical.
John Malone
I was running the largest division of General Instruments, but - that would’ve been 1972, so I was 31 years old - and they thought I was too young to be the CEO of GI.
John Malone
I found myself for the next five years in an industry that was not financable because of both the general economic conditions and the specific problems related to TelePrompTer’s scandal. ... It really dried up financing for the industry for a number of years. The first five years out here were really a financial struggle.
John Malone
[On what he learnt through five years in an industry that was not financable] To not expose yourself to one financial source, diversification of every kind, isolation of financial risk, and how to bootstrap.
John Malone
It taught us a lot of things. It taught us survival skills, I think that is the No. 1 thing.
John Malone
We were able to keep TCI independent and viable despite the fact there was no external financing available for an extended period of time. It certainly toughened up the financial team and made us all battlefield buddies, you might say.
John Malone
It’s not about earnings, it’s about wealth creation and levered cash-flow growth. Tell them you don’t care about earnings.
John Malone
TCI and others were expanding by leverage… we were buying assets for cash… It made our earnings look awful, but it meant were sheltered from income tax and we weren’t diluting that common equity.
John Malone
In the cable industry, if you start generating earnings that means you’ve stopped growing…
John Malone
There were many deals we all put together as partners… It was a very collaborative industry and we were not really competitive with each other in most ways.
John Malone
The alarm bells really started going off for us… when MTV decided it was probably going to go public. Up until then, it had promoted itself as a free service - free to the cable operators and advertising supported.
John Malone
We have to be careful we don’t create a monster that eats us out of house and home.
John Malone
[Through the 80s and 90s on 40-50 partnerships he put together] We would put up 80 percent of the capital, they would get a 20 percent ownership and they would manage it. We did many deals like that, sometimes 50-50.
John Malone
A great, very far-thinking CEO at Bell Atlantic, Ray Smith, who saw that the telephone industry had limits and thought that the grass was greener on our side of the fence. He was kind of coming over to us in a sense.
John Malone
We were going to take the cable business and put it together with the consumer part of the telephone business and the consumer part of the cellular business, plus this emerging [Internet] data business called @Home and a new technology, ... voice over Internet, which was something we thought we had a big lead in technologically… That was the theory.
John Malone
It should’ve been a great deal. It fell apart on execution.
John Malone
I don’t see how cable could possibly compete with the telephone industry and the satellite industry. I think it would’ve been toast.
John Malone
The MediaOne deal ... that was the Rubicon that they crossed that they shouldn’t have crossed - they didn’t have a currency to buy MediaOne and to out-compete Comcast, so they did it with a very cash-heavy guaranteed deal: guaranteed their stock price, put too much cash in it and financed all of it with short-term money, all of which was a disaster and led them to have to, basically, liquidate all of AT&T.
John Malone
Great strategy and terrible execution led to what I would regard, personally, as a fiasco.
John Malone
Once the government passed retransmission consent, there was this huge sucking sound, and it wasn’t Ross Perot’s jobs going to Mexico. It was wealth going from the cable industry to the programming conglomerates, whether it was Disney or News Corp.
John Malone
It’s the law of nature. Big bubbles get bigger, small bubbles disappear…
John Malone
There’s no national brand for the cable guys…
John Malone
If speed is the killer, than speed will be a cable asset…
John Malone
How fast is fast enough really becomes the engineering catch phrase.
John Malone
Would you sacrifice speed for mobility, or will you buy both? In high-income households, folks will buy both.
John Malone
Our skills here… are very much in financial engineering.
John Malone
The first thing you do is make sure you have enough juice to survive and you don’t have any credit issues that are going to bite you in the near term…
John Malone
1 2 3
Return from John Malone Quotes to Quoteswise.com