WHEN: Today, Tuesday, September 2, 2025
WHERE: CNBC’s “Squawk Box”
Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC interview with Liberty Media Chairman John Malone on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” (M-F, 6AM-9AM ET) today, Tuesday, September 2. Following is a link to video on CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/09/02/media-mogul-john-malone-on-his-memoir-state-of-the-media-landscape.html.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Welcome back to “Squawk”. We are joined now by a very, very, very special guest, a legend in the business, media titan, chairman of Liberty Media, and the man behind some of the biggest deals in media of our time, John Malone, author of “Born to be Wired: Lessons from a Lifetime Transforming Television, Wiring America for the Internet, and Growing Formula 1, Discovery, Sirius XM and the Atlanta Braves”. It is out today, and we want to welcome John for joining us today. John, it’s great to see you. Congratulations on the book. It’s a fabulous, fabulous book. And there’s so many stories in it about so many unique characters that make headlines that we talk about virtually every day. I want to talk about the book, and then I want to get into what’s going on in the media landscape that we know today. But just take me back to the beginning of even deciding to write this book, why you did.
JOHN MALONE: Well, there was a previous book called “Cable Cowboy”, which really was a misnomer because it was really written, should have been written about my mentor, Bob Magness. But anyway, it stuck to me. The writer of that book approached me and said, you should do a sequel because it’s been 25 years and you’re not dead yet. And so, he was going to write a sequel, and we started working on it together, and it became increasingly my autobiography as opposed to his view of me. And that’s why it got written. I probably — if I had known how much work it was going to be, I probably wouldn’t have done it.
SORKIN: It felt to me like this was an emotional book because you talk about the various relationships and how important those relationships have been in your life and frankly, to the business. You go through a great sequence, which I’d love to get your thoughts on today about Ted Turner and your relationship with him, and frankly, your hope that you had wished you could have bought Turner at the time?
MALONE: Yeah. Long history with Ted. He came to us with the idea of his superstation. It took some convincing, but we ultimately launched it, carried it across our cable footprint. When Ted got in a bit of trouble trying to buy MGM, we had to get together, the industry got together. I was proud to lead the effort, and we raised, I don’t know, 600 million bucks, which was real money back then, to get him out of the clutches of Kirk Kerkorian. And Ted was on our board for many years at TCI. So, we had a very long history, and we were pretty good personal friends, too. I traveled with Ted quite a bit. Goodwill Games in Russia, for instance. Great, great stories. Ted was and continues to be quite a character. I’ve become the godfather of his Atlanta Braves baseball team, and trying to nurture it along. I know he’s very proud of — of the team. So, we have a lot of things in common. We have ranches that are back-to-back in New Mexico. I — I went quail hunting with he and Jane a number of times. You know, all kinds of things. Great stories, great history. He’s a hell of a character and a very sound businessman.
SORKIN: Well, let me ask you about another businessman who I think you respect deeply. And there’s a fascinating sequence in the book about it. And we had actually spoken to this gentleman earlier in the year because he had his own book out, which is Barry Diller. And you two got in, maybe a scuffle is maybe too polite a term, because you went to court, and it almost broke the relationship. And then you wrote him a letter. Take us back to that moment because it was an emotional moment I remember when we had Barry on the show talking about what had happened.
MALONE: Well, what happened was my CEO at the time, at Liberty Media, Greg Maffei, had a rocky history with Barry. And when Barry decided to break up IAC, a collection of businesses, and distribute some of the businesses, not reflecting our control structure that we had in IAC that had been in place for a number of years, we decided to ask the court how to interpret my original agreement with Barry. It was a very unusual agreement. Barry was such an incredible talent. The only way I could get him to work with us — I don’t think for us — work with us was to give him a proxy on my control of the company we were going to create together, and I did that. That was, I don’t know, 35 years ago, something like that. And he’s done a — he did a fabulous job of building a business, starting out in home shopping, mutating into — into content, and then once again mutating into internet services. Really pretty unique performance. But as he was about to split the company into multiple pieces, there was a question, a legitimate legal question about what the intent of the original agreement was. And I wanted to go to court and ask a judge to interpret that agreement for us. Unfortunately, the legal situation got out of control, and it became almost a Kozlowski type of set of disputes, which I didn’t want any part of. And I was really embarrassed by how far out of control our litigation had gotten. And I wanted to apologize to Barry personally for not having paid close enough attention and kept it on the rails. So that was the genesis of that.
JOE KERNEN: Hey, John, as someone that people follow so closely and obviously legendary in media and in all different aspects of it, another kerfuffle was right before Discovery was going to merge with Warner Media. And I think you made some comments about, I think, to our own David Faber here about CNN hiring some actual journalists. Now, since then — I know. That was quite a moment. And that did result in some changes at CNN. And then I don’t know if some even more changes after that. And we’ve seen what’s happened with CBS and, you know, the Stephen Colbert and pressure from the Trump administration. I’ve always said that almost any mainstream media entity, you could have almost made the same comments about, John. Do you think CNN has changed to the point where you’d like, where you are seeing actual journalism now? Do you see it across mainstream media anywhere?
MALONE: No. And in fact, it’s very difficult. I — I get it. You know, I get — I was around when you guys were created. Zaslav basically created CNBC.
KERNEN: Yes.
MALONE: You know, I was around — I was partners with Rupert when they created Fox News. We used to own MacNeil-Lehrer as a public service. We supported that effort on public broadcasting for many years. So, you know, I’ve been in and around the news delivery game for a long while, and I’ve always struggled with the question of news — just give me the news, the factual news. And how do you separate news from the impossible bias that the journalist has? They always come to it with preconceived attitudes. When Rupert pitched Fox News, it was going to be that we’re going to have a true news division. That will be just the news. And I guess you would say that’s Bret Baier today. But then we’re going to have essentially entertainment programing focused on news and current events and culture and so on. And that was his formula. And CNN decided to stay and try and be just news, as opposed to news and comedy and entertainment. My view was that you should have — that it was okay for Fox to do what they did, as long as you labeled opinion as opinion like the newspapers did. You know, you have journalism, you have the facts and then you have editorial opinions, and then you may have guest editorials. I mean, and you can make it all interesting and entertaining, but what you’re calling factual news, it would be nice to be just factual news. Now, I know how difficult that is. CNN has great journalists. They always have had great journalists. They have a large organization that does the best job of covering breaking news worldwide. That clearly is a big strength for them. The reality is that journalism schools turn out people who are tend to be reformers. They tend to want to fix the world from the journalistic perspective. So, they tend to be, quote/unquote, “progressives” personally. And it’s impossible to separate that sort of personal opinion structure from the way they — they cover news, the kind of adjectives that come to their mind when they are reporting a story. Now, I never had much to do with CNN — you know, I was chair of the governance committee at Warner. I stepped off that board this spring and became executive, a chairman emeritus. But — so that they could keep me tied up and, you know, I could continue to be involved, but not be a voting member of the board. Even during the period, the three years when I was on the board of the combined company, I had zero to do with the governance of CNN. That was — that was David and his efforts to bring in leadership, new leadership. It’s a — it’s a — as you guys well know, the linear television business of which news is part is suffering from the rapid decline of viewership of the big cable bundle. And that’s putting a lot of pressure on these organizations—
SORKIN: Right.
MALONE: Financial pressure. And they’re going to have to figure out where it’s appropriate to morph to be more relevant in a streaming world.
SORKIN: Right. Hey, John. So, you know, I don’t think we’ve had a chance to talk since the announcement of the breakup between Warner and Discovery and what your thoughts are about it, what you think the prospects are for — for both businesses? Do they remain independent? Do they ultimately get sold? Does a business like CNN get sold? I don’t know if they can, given the debt load. How do you think about the breakup? And does it suggest at all that the original plan to merge them made sense or didn’t?
MALONE: Well, I guess the only thing personally that didn’t make sense is I should have bailed out of my Discovery shares before we put the companies together. The reality is that all these linear businesses were going to come under enormous pressure as streaming became the favorable way for consumers to consume programming. So, Discovery, had we kept it isolated, would have faced the same headwinds and probably ended up roughly in the same place that the combined company is. That is trying to deal with a streaming world while still being heavily encumbered by contractual relationships in the old linear world. And so, for instance, when AT&T tried to do CNN+, it was a streaming service that did not include CNN, which they couldn’t include for contractual reasons. So, you know, we’re in the midst, I think, of watching a transition in consumer consumption. Right now, you guys—
SORKIN: Right.
MALONE: As well as — know as well as anybody that you are lashed your wagon to a linear business that’s losing about 8 percent of its customers a year. That is a pretty heavy headwind. And that’s been going on now for probably four or five years. And so, eventually, you’re going to have to transition to where you’re a random access service. Now, the good news for you guys and for news generally, is that you have a stream of live information and content that the public is always going to be interested in.
SORKIN: God bless you, John. What are you — what do you make of the prospects for — you know, Comcast is going to separate from this — from these assets in Versant? I know that’s something you talked to Brian Roberts about — you’ve spoken about before. What do you make of the prospects for Comcast? Do you think it ever gets a chance to merge with a Charter, which I imagine something you’d like to see. And where do you think about a Paramount in all of this? When you look at the chess pieces on the board?
MALONE: Well, as you know, I mean, unfortunately or fortunately, I — I get myself in the middle of all these discussions about what fits with what and how is it going to work, and how can Brian Roberts retain meaningful control of an empire that his father ceded to him — it’s very important to him — meet the regulatory hurdles of consolidation? For one thing, the industry, the old media industry, both transport and content, needs to continue to consolidate, to get scale, to be efficient. There’s too many streamers for sure, and obviously, broadcasting is morphing into sports distribution, at least for now, keeping it alive if not highly profitable. So, news and sports live, which really, frankly, just requires one channel and instead with streaming, is consuming millions of channels, which is a whole different story. But, you know, there’s this re-allocation, let’s say. At the moment, big tech has the upper hand. Distribution for big tech is free on the internet, thanks to network neutrality, a regulatory decision that was put in by the Obama administration and really did cripple the traditional cable media alignment.
BECKY QUICK: Are you hoping for that to be overturned at some point, John?
MALONE: Well, I would love for regulators to take a look at live streaming. It’s absurd to me that you tie up 40, 50, 60 million channels of internet transport to transport one football game, which can easily be transported on one channel. So, you know, to me, that’s where the regulation runs afoul of common sense and puts enormous capital pressure on the internet in terms of capacity, which, incidentally, then has to be paid for by the consumer. And since the FCC’s original approach was everybody has to pay the same. So light users of the Internet don’t get a break relative to heavy users, then everybody is subsidizing big tech as they drive sports into streaming and primarily benefit from advertising sales, which generate 2 to 3 times the revenue that the linear advertising represented. So, this is really financially driven by advertising potential and being taken advantage of by big tech, primarily both to capture scale in streaming, but also to drive an immense move in advertising revenue.
SORKIN: So, John, we only have one more minute left. But if you — if you — if you could buy or sell the big media companies today, which ones would you buy? Which ones would you sell?
MALONE: Oh, boy. That’s a — that’s a really tough one. I think everything’s relative. The market is pretty efficient in pricing these businesses. So, I don’t know that there’s a lot of difference amongst them. The market has figured these out pretty well, and it’s going to be a function of performance from here. You know, are we guessing right that a — that a Warner Studio streaming library—
SORKIN: Right.
MALONE: Run by David Zaslav is something the market is really going to value highly.
SORKIN: Right.
MALONE: Okay? If they do, will they value it highly enough to raise enough equity capital to make the entire collection of Discovery Warner—
SORKIN: That’s the big question.
MALONE: Economically viable?
SORKIN: John, unfortunately, we could talk forever. They’re playing us out. We got to turn it over to our friends on “Squawk on the Street” in just a moment. The book is called “Born to be Wired”. It’s a fabulous book, John. Congratulations on it. We look forward to hopefully talking to you again very, very soon.
For more information contact:
Jennifer Dauble
CNBC
t: 201.735.4721
m: 201.615.2787
Stephanie Hirlemann
CNBC
m: 201.397.2838