The King Of Content

Media mogul John C. Malone is one of the Bahamas’ most notable billionaires.

- Keith Gordon

When considering the pantheon of entrepreneurial titans, we often find that an individual’s success was due to their brilliance and superior understanding of a specific field or industry, and the development of new markets as technology advances. Whether that’s Bill Gates or Steve Jobs in personal computing or Henry Ford’s innovative development of the modern automotive industry, we’ve long come to identify these icons of business directly with their sphere of dominance and the era in which it occurred.

So it’s understandable that a similar thing could happen to John C. Malone. He could have forever been the man who helped build the cable television industry and also helped lay the groundwork for the vast content marketplace that now exists. Referred to by some as the “Cable Cowboy”, Malone did indeed make his biggest mark in the development of the cable television business from a disorganized network of companies in the 1970s and ’80s into the conglomerates that dominate the landscape today.

But to simplify the man as simply a visionary in the cable world is to ignore the way that Malone continues to personally evolve along with the media business. Where some saw the massive paradigm shifts in the media as a threat, Malone saw opportunity. Which is why more than five decades after beginning his illustrious career, he is still considered a scion of the media landscape, and looks poised to thrive in the digital age just as strongly as he did during the age of cable.

With an estimated net worth of $7.2 billion, Malone is now the largest private landowner in the United States, with 2.2 million acres—more than both Delaware and Rhode Island—to his name. His property not only ranges from the woodlands of Maine—he is said to own five percent of the state—to ranches in Wyoming and New Mexico, in addition to holdings in Ireland and South America, but the Bahamas as well.