John Malone

John Malone is CEO of AT&T Cable (formerly TCI or Tele-Communications Inc.), which had large investments in TNT, CNN, BET, The Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel among others. Credited as the founder of the cable industry, he is known as the man who said "no" to Ted Turner's plan to buy the Financial News Network. An engineer by training, Malone has also played a role in such technological development as digital compression, which allows remarkable increases in the number of channels currently available to broadcasters. Malone's ideas include having pay-per-view movies every 15 minutes and a VCR service so one can watch missed episodes of favorite series. In the fall of 1993 he attracted considerable attention with TCI's proposed merger with Bell Atlantic, the largest such merger in corporate history and a union which would have created America's sixth largest corporation. Variously named as one of the most important and influential men in the entertainment industry (by such diverse publications as USA TODAY, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY and VANITY FAIR), Malone was also a key figure in the 1995 acquisition of Turner's cable empire by Time Warner.