John Malone is an American businessman and philanthropist who has an estimated net worth of $7 billion. He was the chief executive officer of cable and media giant, Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI) for 24 years from 1973 to 1996. He became the interim CEO of Liberty media until he was succeeded by former Oracle CFO Greg Maffei. He surpassed Ted Turner as the largest individual private landowner in the United States as of February 1, 2011. He owns 2,100,000 acres (8,500 km2) of land mostly in Maine. As of today, Liberty Media owns stakes in Sprint, Nextel, Live Nation, Barnes & Noble and the professional baseball team, Atlanta Braves. It also owns a stake in Discovery Communications, a spin-off from Liberty Media in 2005.
Born John C. Malone on March 7, 1941, in Milford, Connecticut, he graduated from Hopkins School in New Heavens in 1959. He graduated from Yale University in 1963 with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Economics. He was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and a National Merit scholar. He graduated from John Hopkins University in 1964 with M.S. in Industrial Management. In 1965, he also has M.S. in Electrical Engineering from an NYU program at Bell Labs before receiving his Ph.D. in Operations Research from John Hopkins in 1967.
John Malone’s Liberty Global agreed in February 2013 to buy British cable company Virgin Media for $16 million. A month before, Liberty Media completed the spin-off of its Starz Entertainment group into a separate company. He also won his fight to take control of satellite radio company Sirius XM Radio when the FCC approved the takeover. He was once called Darth Vader by U.S. Vice President Al Gore and has squared off against other formidable opponents including Viacom’s Sumner Redstone over the years. He unwound his 17-year partnership at InterActiveCorp in 2010 with Barry Diller. In 1999, as a former partner of TCI Cable founder Bob Magness, he sold what was then the nation’s largest cable company AT&T for $54 billion.
