WHEN: Today, Thursday, November 20, 2025
WHERE: CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street”
Following are excerpts from the unofficial transcript of a CNBC exclusive interview with Liberty Media Chairman John Malone on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” (M-F, 9AM-11AM ET) today, Thursday, November 20. Following are links to video on CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/11/20/liberty-media-chairman-john-malone-we-need-smart-global-regulators-to-monitor-big-tech.html and https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/11/20/liberty-media-chairman-john-malone-on-streaming-and-antitrust.html.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
MALONE ON STREAMING
JOHN MALONE: I believe that streaming is not a category. Television viewership is a category, subscription, you know, eyeballs might be a category, but if you if you’re going to broaden the category to that, you got to take in YouTube and, and the Facebook and the social networks, TikTok and those are huge in terms of their viewership and their share of audience. So the question really is, you know, how would antitrust regulators look at number one acquiring number four in streaming, right? I mean, that’s really the question. Is streaming a category? Are, are studios a category that that there’s not enough competition between studios, and is that going to get looked at hard. These, these regulatory things, are a little bit difficult to predict.
MALONE ON TECH REGULATION
DAVID FABER: Well, I want to go to the book actually you’re speaking of because there was something towards the end here that at least now I’m not overly surprised, given our previous conversations around this, but it is you saying this, “We need a new regime of government regulations designed to rein in and monitor the gigantic companies of big tech, the biggest, most powerful corporations ever to rule media, entertainment and personal communications around the planet.” John Malone asking for more government regulation.
MALONE: But I don’t know how—
FABER: What are you thinking?
MALONE: Well, what I’m thinking is these guys are now global and and very, very powerful, and what needs to be protected is innovation. Okay? I don’t know if we can find regulators, you know, global regulators, people smart enough to be able to do that, but for sure, when, when enterprises become as powerful as monopolistic, you know, when Google owns 90% of search, for instance, you got to say, can they, can they stomp out innovation, a competitor? Can they just buy, you know, control by just making sure that Apple will only do business with Google, or that, you see?
FABER: It’s kind of funny because we just had a judge rule on this, as you know, Judge Mehta he decided, kind of no, in part, because of the likes of OpenAI now and others.
MALONE: That there will be enough competition. That’s really the question is, is, I think that innovation is what’s very important for the country, for the society, that competition from innovators continue and people challenge the dominant player. I think that’s a very important thing. I think that these are all important societal questions that that if you’re in a democracy, you really need to have a forum where you explore these societal issues. I mean, look, let’s face it, social network operators are brain chemists now, and with AI, they’re going to be better and better and better at it.
FABER: To your point, we’re just at the outset of the AI era.
MALONE: Yeah, and who’s going to police that? And what? What government?
FABER: Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, yeah. These are the, these are the people who are—
MALONE: What, what government agency exists, like, I was calling for a government agency on efficiency of our society. Why are we wasting capital, duplicating things when we could work together and do better? You know, as a competitive nation, you got the same thing. How are you going to regulate these technologies in terms of their impact and their ability to manipulate everything from politics to social behavior to, you know, I mean, this is a very serious kind of question, and I’m not sure our political system, which seems very dysfunctional to me right now.
FABER: It does, it does not appear to be equipped to deal with—
MALONE: Yeah, how are—
FABER: The simplest of things, let alone something as complex as this.
MALONE: I think this is, you know, I’m almost 85, this is a very serious societal question I think that the technologies can well take over for traditional culture, traditional—
FABER: Well and then you also point out, and we have discussed this in the past the and I talk about it all the time, the size of these companies is just remarkable. It’s breathtaking.
MALONE: They can crush, they can crush anybody. They can get in anything they want.
MALONE ON BROADBAND
MALONE: We got here because of network neutrality requiring massive capital spending by the connectivity industry without any connection to revenue. And so it’s like asking Walmart to build shelf space for their competitor and not participating in any of the revenue, and also not even knowing what the competitors putting on the shelves. That’s, that’s what that did to the connectivity industry. It’s driven up CapEx enormously to keep up with capacity. As a result, free cash flow has been under pressure. And then, if you add to that competitive technology pressures like fixed mobile or satellite in the future, over build, you got way too much CapEx going in, competing for what is essentially a matured business, trying to share shift. So it’s like, almost like the discount airline business, right? So, so the question is, why is this good for any, any society, to have all this wasted capital? Then, if you look at somebody like Charter, one of the problems is that if its primary return of capital to its shareholders is buyback, and its principal control of shareholders are selling into the buyback, why would an institutional investor want to stick around when the most knowledgeable owners of the business are selling in and shrinking. Okay, so I think there’s just a core structural issue that. I’m still a big believer that the business, you have, you can’t paint with a broad brush. You have to say, each situation, each geography, each business, is different. There are very real opportunities in the business that that relate increasingly to undervaluation. There are things that get so cheap, it’s hard not to want to own them. Right?
FABER: Are they there?
MALONE: They are there. They are there. There are businesses that are closer to duopolies than oligopolies or crazy competition. And I think you have to be very selective, but it’s the same old game for in my mind, if you read my book, it’s the same old story, levered cash flow, shelter growth and and if you can put the pieces together, there is still meaningful return in opportunity. Now, if you look at Comcast, or you look at Charter, if they were to take their levered free cash flow, be a little more diligent about their CapEx spend, they could pay a very attractive dividend out of levered free cash flow and sustain it indefinitely and grow it. So I believe that they’ve got to rethink return of capital at Comcast and it and at Charter, and they’ve got to think about, do they believe they got a business that can pay a sustainable dividend. And if they do, they may have to do like Verizon, which which carries a higher valuation than the cable guys and pays out almost all of its free cash flow as a dividend, right? So some of this is just in the nitty grittys of financial reward to shareholders, in my opinion. When, when a Warren Buffett Berkshire, I don’t, I’m not going to blame Warren. When he decided to sell down his Charter stake, okay, that was sort of a signal to institutional investors that, you know, is, is this a thing to be in for the long run, and they didn’t, it’s one of those sell offs that didn’t bounce. You know, the dead cat bounce didn’t happen.
FABER: And they’re in the midst, obviously, of acquiring Cox, a very large deal.
MALONE: Yes. Now here’s the dilemma. Cox and the Newhouses have a better deal on a repurchase of their shares than they do on a dividend, better tax outcome. So there is some pressure to stay in a company like that—
FABER: As opposed to doing what you are describing—
MALONE: Instead of doing what I’m describing. I do think that if you want credibility in the marketplace, you’re going to have to demonstrate you can pay a dividend out of free cash flow and and these businesses should be utilities. They will be over time, David, in my opinion, there’ll be enough aggregation, enough consolidation, to where the economics of these investments makes economic sense.
FABER: Well on—
MALONE: And at that point, they become utilities on.
FABER: And the on the subject of consolidation, I mean, it’s what is, it’s over 30 years ago, you were about to sell TCI to Bell Atlantic, right?
MALONE: Correct.
FABER: I mean, do we ever go down that road again? Comcast and—
MALONE: We should, we should.
FABER: And Charter both have growing wireless businesses. It’s one of the only things they can point to that’s growing—
MALONE: This, this is all in regulatory, anything that will be more efficient for this, for the industry and the society at large, should be considered by the regulators, whether it’s you guys should stop over building each other and share. Whether it’s you know, why don’t you, why don’t you merge, you know, what are you, why are you like two cats over a clothesline kicking each other’s guts out? You know? Why don’t you figure this out. This is wasteful capital spending. The trucking companies aren’t required to build their own roads, okay? The airlines aren’t required to build their own airports. Why is it that communications companies can’t sit even with regulators in the room and work out ways to be more efficient.
MALONE ON OPPORTUNITIES THAT WERE MISSED
MALONE: Well, there are opportunities that that went by you that you didn’t go after right, which I have to say I had, have had so many opportunities that I’ve missed that I really almost have to apologize to my shareholders for being, you know, for missed these things, like we could have taken over Amazon in 2001 with their convertible debt. We had the cash. Their stock was, their converts were selling, like, 14 cents on the dollar.
FABER: I remember it.
MALONE: I mean, and Jeff was, you know, on his—
FABER: He was scrambling for money.
MALONE: So there were many, Netflix, I had, we could have gone aggressive on Netflix. I bought some personally, but I couldn’t get DirecTV to go and—
FABER: Talked about that.
MALONE: So a whole series of these, you know, that would have—
FABER: Coulda, woulda, shoulda
MALONE: Wonderful opportunities, AOL, buying AOL from Paul Allen, early for nothing, you know, but, but in terms of things I actually did that, that that, that I regret, I think the AT&T deal, I have to really apologize to my employees for that one because for the shareholders, it was a home run. You get a 40% premium into a liquid stock, you know, I mean, boom. If you were stuck—
FABER: You hung on of course.
MALONE: Yeah, I hung on. I hung on, really, to protect the Liberty side of it, but for my employees, they then went to work for a company that really didn’t know what it was doing, and it was very disruptive for them, and they saw their stock, which was the principal asset they had in their stock plan, go from like 88 bucks down to 14 or something. So they got creamed. So did I, but I had diversification, they didn’t. So, yeah, so I felt bad about that. No, I think look, Ted Williams batted 400 his best year, 40% that’s pretty damn good. I’m just grateful for all the people who’ve helped me, all the opportunities I’ve had, on average, it’s worked out.
FABER: It has—
MALONE: You know, I chased the first girl I really fell in love with. She stuck with me for 67 years.
FABER: You talked about Leslie many times.
MALONE: Don’t get better than that?
FABER: No it doesn’t. That’s probably the best decision you can make, right? I’m curious, from your business career, again, best period. When you think about something and, you know, it’s a, it’s a period that was the most, I don’t know—
MALONE: The 80s, when we were essentially a monopoly. It was like, you know that the movie “King of the World.” You know that the bond trader, when, when things are really going well, you know, there’s that sense that you can do no wrong. And the roll up of the early cable industry and and being able to cut all these deals that, you know, an average deal every two weeks, merger deal, acquisition deal, financing deal, the banks throwing money at you — Mike Milken you know, working in your behalf, that was pretty heady stuff, right for a young guy. And I thought that was, that was probably, probably the most interesting.
MALONE ON RETIREMENT
MALONE: I’m going to be a very involved control shareholder. Okay.
FABER: Very involved, okay.
MALONE: Very involved control shareholder.
FABER: Which means what?
MALONE: Trying to—
FABER: Talk to your CEOs every day?
MALONE: Well, now you got to back up here, David, because I look at these businesses as my boys, right? Rapino is one of my boys. I was the first chairman when they put that thing together. He’s done a fabulous job. He doesn’t, these are like your adult sons, right? They want to be independent. You still have a bit of a string on them, right? They come talk to you once in a while, and sometimes you can give them good advice. But the reason I have control is very clear in my mind, and I really can’t say this enough, With the control that I have, I can say no to a bad deal in a down cycle, one that’s not good for the shareholders. I can say yes to a good deal that the shareholders want to do, and I can make it happen, right? And I can give the management team time to work out issues or difficulties, you know. So if Terry McGuirk tells me in the Braves that baseball is going to be fabulous in another few years, I can say you got the time. We, nobody can force us to sell this thing. We think we got a plan. We think the plan is going to work. We we can protect it. So that’s why I have control and I try very hard to not be in a position of being offered massive premiums for control because I’ve turned those down. I consistently turn those down. I could sell my control of Formula 1 for a huge premium. I have no interest in doing that.
FABER: And that is because?
MALONE: It’s because I don’t need the money. It’s not the right thing to do. Right? I feel like I’m leading a collective. A lot of these people have been working in around me for forever, right? We’re together. My whole philosophy of building businesses is this, the management, the executives that are actually doing the work should be my partners. They shouldn’t, they shouldn’t be my employees. And if I’m going to do well, they’re going to do well. That’s how I done everything.
FABER: So you just described retirement for John Malone to me?
MALONE: Well, it’s not retirement, it’s, it’s being like, like dad with the boys. You know, you’re involved, you’re enthusiastic, you’re like, you’re like a coach, you’re like a cheerleader, maybe occasionally you can throw a few bucks in if things get tight, you know, maybe they need a little of your resources. You know, maybe they need a little advice. Who knows, I intend to be very involved and I don’t intend to become passive, and I don’t intend to to back away.