A Billionaire Explains Why American Business Now Feels like the Mafia

BIG by Matt Stoller

SubscribeSign in

A Billionaire Explains Why American Business Now Feels like the Mafia<br>In his autobiography "Born to Be Wired," Warner board member and billionaire John Malone describes how he helped turn America into a society focused on greed and market power.<br>Matt Stoller<br>Jun 05, 2026

769

24<br>168

Share

In 1981, a consultant named Elmer Smalling, an expert in pay-TV systems, was negotiating on behalf of Jefferson City, Missouri, to see about better prices for residents. Across the table was an executive for a giant corporation named TCI, which had 25% of the U.S. cable market and was known for the hard-charging tactics of its CEO, John Malone. The negotiations were not going well, because the city was thinking of taking away the franchise and going with someone else. Paul Alden, one of Malone’s subordinates, lived up to that reputation.<br>“We know where you live, where your office is and who you owe money to,” he told Smalling. ”We are having your house watched and we are going to use this information to destroy you. You made a big mistake messing with T.C.I. We are the largest cable company around [.] We are going to see that you are ruined professionally.”<br>A few years later, Malone did it again. Frustrated at regulation, he mused publicly about shooting Bill Clinton’s Federal Communications Chair, Reed Hundt, in order to deregulate the industry, and speed up the deployment of advanced telecommunications networks. At the time, this joke about murdering his overseeing was quite controversial; Malone had to apologize.

After this litany of threats, I’d like to say that Malone was pushed out of American business in disgrace, a would-be mobster. But Smalling lost clients, TCI got its Jefferson City franchise renewed, and the media and broadband were deregulated. Today, Malone is one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world, a culture-definer for American business, and a “legend” in deal-making, according to Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. You may not have heard of him - an intentional choice on his part - but he matters.<br>One of the things you start to hear a lot when you write about monopoly is some variant of the comment, “Wow, that seems like the mob.” The arbitrary coercion that is now a part of commerce was not always normal; it certainly wasn’t routine in the 1950s, when the mob, with its control of gambling, was very distinct from legitimate business.<br>But when did this transition happen? And who organized it? Part of the story is the Chicago School academics who took over policy, the Robert Bork shift in antitrust frameworks towards the efficiency of capital. But there were also men in business who orchestrated it in how they wrote contracts, how they hired people to string wires, and how they reorganized the American media. They used the new legal frameworks to amass vast wealth and power, and reinforce what Bork was doing.<br>John Malone is a leader of these men, whose likes include Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, Craig McCaw, Sumner Redstone, and Ted Turner. This group bridged the era of middle class control of politics to today’s oligarchy. And they built their fortunes in the media and cable systems, which were transforming in the 1970s from a New Deal model to the deregulated framework of today. They are the predecessors of today’s tech oligarchs, the Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk’s, who were born after the Bork revolution had won. Malone walked, so Zuckerberg could run.<br>I watched Malone interviewed six months ago on CNBC, and deferential does not begin to describe the approach of the anchors. They addressed him as a lordly figure, sitting on his every word, like a lesser known Warren Buffett. As Deadline wrote, “The semi-reclusive mogul is probably the closest thing the media business has to an oracle.”<br>While Malone normally eschews publicity, that day he was on CNBC because he was doing us a favor. He was releasing his autobiography, Born to Be Wired: Lessons from a Lifetime Transforming Television, Wiring America for the Internet, and Growing Formula One, Discovery, Sirius XM, and the Atlanta Braves.<br>And this book, while not honest, is as close as I’ve ever seen to getting to the core of how the billionaires who took over American society really think. Malone’s book helped me understand the generation of media billionaires, before the tech oligarchs, who had to contend with the dying embers of New Deal regulations. And they knew a world where it wasn’t ok to do what they were trying to do, and yet they did it anyway, with energy, creativity, and a malevolent zeal to make the world safe for capital.<br>I don’t normally do book reviews for BIG. But this time, I’m making an exception. Because Malone has given us an explanation of what we are really up against.

The first thing to understand about Malone is that he is not a liar exactly, but he is also not a credible narrator. The...