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Post Malone

Everyone in the industry seems to think that cable cowboy John Malone, a WBD board member whose parentco owns a large minority stake in Charter, engineered a tidy affiliate package between his two entities. But what if the reality is a little more complex?

john malone
If John Malone wasn’t pulling the strings, though, why would Charter do this deal a year early? Photo: Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
John Ourand
September 17, 2024

For many longtime cable heads, last week’s news of Warner Bros. Discovery’s distribution deal with Charter was unequivocally the talk of the town. The Journal, after all, reported the news with a press-release-adjacent story featuring a subhead that heralded the “stable fees” for the mediaco despite the inevitable reality that it is going to lose its NBA rights after next season. Talmudic interpreters of the topic, however, sensed the invisible hand of John Malone—the pioneering so-called cable cowboy, who sits on WBD’s board and owns a 26 percent stake in Charter via his Liberty Media. Malone, it seemed, had manifested a prosperous truce.