Thang Nguyen 555

Mr. Malone.

Coming to peace with his past.

Wild ride and wild West. Friend of both Left and Right, Ted Turner and Ruppert Murdoch, sponsor of MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour.

Under the rumbles of (Media) landscape change, I was crushed underneath, while he thrived. That’s the big difference between 30,000 feet view and near 6 feet under.

John loves the outdoors (Colorado) and learning about land conservation through friendship with “mouth of the South”.

When he was doing deals – luckily not with AOL – I struggled with job hopping MCI, Teligent, ATT. Via Gary Kim, I heard of John Malone.
“I wouldn’t bet against John Malone” at the time, at TCI.

Now looking back, with Liberty Media track record surpassed by a very few (Warren Buffett?), he can ride into the sunset, doing what he and his wife love to do.

American success story. No down. With a lot of sweat and tears, penny pinching and tied knots in the stomach.

High rollers. High rewards. Looking to getting out.

Just one more chance. Another dance.

His love for horses, for seeing things as they are, juggling all the balls (regulatory, competitors, consumers and stakeholders) in the dry air out West.

Today’s Big Tech stand on Cable’s shoulders, streaming and sucking up bandwidth enabled by cable cowboys, protected under Net Neutrality without paying the extra dime.

If coming away with anything in the book, let’s just learn to deFAANG (facebook, apple, amazon, netflix and google).

Not that anyone can do it. But at least we know who, at what size and how often we are dealing with. Again, at 30,000 feet global view, what they see are quite different from what we do, day to day. Struggling with gas price, loaf of bread and bills that automatically deducted while we sleep.

Decent folks come across decent. And in the end, despite their obvious success and wealth, comes a note gratitude, to end all notes. His started at Bell Labs, and end at Cable Labs.

This writing, if ever reached your eyes, is transmitted via Spectrum cable upload, once Verizon, once MCI, once Vint Cerf, at some point bounced off TCI and M&A deals with balls hitting one another. Some even jumped off the “pool” table. To write memoirs from the cold hard floor, uncompensated and uncounted in a war of media and money efficiency.

Knowing that Tesla himself died in poverty doesn’t make me feel any better. It just that at Chicago World Fair, the world, our ancestors, saw what to them had been impossible: “like heaven” as uttered by one of the spectators as recorded by our historian.

What more to come for our children’s children with AI, predictive and suggestive ads, match.com and match made in Heaven of our own making.

I come away knowing that with success comes enormous sacrifice and cost (of time away from home and loved ones).

I finished Born to be Wired on St Patrick Day, quite appropriately, to respect an investor who respects others’ OPM. After all, we all are stewards of our allotted time on Earth. Keep it simple and see through the complexity. Noise vs signal, truth and lies, stove pipe and nuance.

It’s expensive to put down your chips. It’s also very expensive not to (and pay the opportunity cost).