In his recent interview on CNBC, John Malone explained how bad luck meant he didn’t invest in some great growth stocks. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
MALONE: Some of these, yeah, some of these structural discounts are, are starting to go away which we knew they would with time, but patience in order to be able to structure things properly, you know, some of these things have taken, have taken a period of time. If you took the Big Techs out of the, out of the indexes, I don’t think you would see the indexes have performed all that well.
So, you should be asking me, John, why didn’t you invest more heavily in Google or Facebook or Amazon? Why did you stay with the old, these old businesses you were in? You know, and I plead guilty to that, you know, I tried to buy Netflix when from Robert Reed Hastings when the stock was eight bucks, but he wouldn’t sell it to me. You know, damn that bad luck.
The other thing you really have to ask when you’re looking at the indexes is how did you miss those massive oligopolistic tech companies? I mean, there, there is the challenge. They are big, they are highly profitable, they’re getting bigger, their market powers are growing, not shrinking and if you compare anything to that, it’s not, it’s not going to look good.
FABER: But my old libertarian friend here, you know, what do you want? You want them to get regulated somehow?
MALONE: I think they are natural monopolies, and they need to be regulated in some way. I’m not sure, I’m not sure that I understand the right way that they should be regulated. But they shouldn’t use their market power to, to prevent competition. But there’s no look, Jeff Bezos is a genius with what he’s created.
You know, Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have been masterful at what, these have been brilliant business create, Reed Hastings, these are brilliant businessmen who have seized an opportunity, seeing the power of global scale and have exploited it.
You can read the entire transcript here:
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