John Malone, the cable pioneer, iconic investor, David Zaslav mentor and major shareholder of Warner Bros. Discovery, said crippling debt plagued the conglom post-merger but it slowly is starting to see some light. At an event in New York, he opined on the recent election, what he thinks the incoming administration’s top priorities should be and media M&A — and also expressed a wish to know more about Elon Musk‘s mind.“Unfortunately, Warner Bros. Discovery got in with a lot of leverage when they combined and so they had to struggle a little bit, using a lot of their energy to drive down their debt,” he said during a Q&A at the Paley International Summit in Midtown. The Liberty Media chairman rarely appears in public but has been a fixture at this event, interviewed by his colleague Mike Fries, CEO of Liberty Global.They appeared virtually from Denver and London, respectively. The two have an easy relationship, and questions veered to the personal. Fries asked, “Is there anything you want to learn more about next year, something you want to dig deeper into, understand better?”“How Elon Musk’s brain works,” Malone answered.“That could take some time,” Fries responded.The Tesla billionaire and owner of X (formerly Twitter) was ubiquitous throughout the presidential campaign, supporting President-elect Donald Trump, attending rallies and offering $1 million giveaways to voters in swing states.On Warner Bros. Discovery, Malone said, “I do believe now they’re starting to experience what the original theory was — to take underexploited Warner Bros. programming content, library content, create a brand and distribute it globally.” Discovery has large global footprint, and Max is in the midst of an aggressive global expansion.In a lightning round, Malone was asked rapid-fire what stocks he likes.He’s a buyer of Comcast, Charter, AT&T and all the big tech companies. On Paramount, he said: “Larry Ellison is one of the smartest guys on the planet, so I might speculatively own some.” David Ellison’s Skydance is acquiring Paramount a deal expected to close in 2025. Malone is neutral on Disney, which “still has problems to solve.” Netflix stock is “probably a little overpriced in the market, so I wouldn’t be an owner of it, but I respect the hell out of it.”Turning to a new Trump presidency, he said: “There are really three things Donald Trump campaigned on. One was ‘protect the border.’ I would love to see that expanded to fixing the immigration system.”No. 2 for him is fix the economy, to “try and grow our way out of this staggering level of national debt that we have.“And probably No. 3, probably the most important, is to try and get peace in the world,” Malone added. “Whether it’s through intimidation, talking it down, whatever you can do to settle disputes internationally.”He urged vigilance around “a united front that’s forming against America, reaching from Russia, Iran, China and North Korea. It’s very dangerous. And the BRICs effort to undermine the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency, I think, is very dangerous for the American economy. So I think that requires a lot of focus.”The BRICS nations – originally Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – want to establish a new reserve currency backed by a basket of their respective currencies.Also, “just a forlorn hope that the two political parties can actually work together for once, solving these issues instead of kicking each other in the shins, taking most of their energy.”Asked about the stock market’s ongoing strength in the face of high interest rates and economic uncertainty, he called it an odd phenomenon driven by the biggest tech companies. “What’s happened is there has emerged a certain set of businesses that are — I don’t want to call them monopolies, but they’re almost monopolies. They’re global in scale. They have enormous breadth … and they have been the principal beneficiaries in recent years of the equity rise. You could add the AI shift on top of it, which clearly the biggest tech companies are in the best position to benefit most from. And so this concentration of economic value and power, in the hands of relatively few global industries. I think that’s quite a phenomenon, and an enormous challenge for regulators.”Speaking of regulators, he’s not alone in hoping authorities will allow more deal flow — with DirecTV and Echostar’s Dish first up. The industry needs it, he said.He believes that with interest rates at historic lows until relatively recently, “the very cheap money of the last 10 years led to way too much competition based upon just cheap capital, and as a result, I think the industry is kind of plagued with excess. Defensive capital spend is the way I would define it.“I believe that that Dish and DirecTV should have been allowed to merge five years ago. I think consolidation is really the right direction,” Malone added. “You don’t damage competition, what you try and reduce is excess competition, at least a wasteful capital spending.”
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