The Billionaire Shell Game: How Cable Baron John Malone and Assorted Corporate Titans Invented a Future Nobody Wanted

By L.J. Davis

Book Overview

In 1992, John Malone, the brilliant, hard-nosed, and widely feared CEO of cable giant TCI, announced that the 500-channel information superhighway was imminent, and he was going to build it.??The... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385479271
• ISBN13: 9780385479271
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Cable Barons

This book is the single best book summarising the history of cable and its influence on our lives.

Fun to read but more like a series of essays

This book is well written and interesting but seems to lean a bit too much on secondary sources such as the material in Ken Auletta's The Highway Men.

One shell of a book

Reading that AT & T had just paid a reported $70 billion to buy TCI, I wanted this book to do two things for me. 1) Explain what TCI offers that is worth so much blessed money! 2) To grasp why the cable industry is so bad and how it will be so great in the future. Davis does a good job laying out what TCI was up to. He confirmed the lunacy of Bell Atlantic's thinking that TCI was the answer. Malone fascinated me with his use of debt to buy up cable outfits by the bucketful, relying on the beautiful allure of the 500 channel future to make him a "liquid" player. As to the second part of the quest, I guess Armstrong and At & t will have to give us the look at the @home future that is fast approaching...I guess! I enjoyed the book overall and it a compelling recapitulation of a crazy series of events. Certainly a good choice forbusiness reading!