April 24, 2006
Braves New Owner
It looks like the Braves are about to be transferred to a new owner:
JOHN Malone’s Liberty Life has swapped almost his entire 4% stake worth $3bn (£1.68bn, E2.43bn) in American media giant Time Warner in return for ownership of the Atlanta Braves baseball team, some cash, and a 50% holding in American cable network Court TV. The deal is expected to be announced this week.
How much are they valuing the Braves? Court TV is supposed to be worth $1 billion, so that leaves $2.5 billion to be divided between cash and the Braves. Forbes values the Braves at .38 billion. So that leaves 2.1 billion is cash, which seems like more than "some." I wonder if the deal includes TBS and Turner South?
Posted by David Pinto at
07:51 AM
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The article I read said Liberty Life wasn't selling all of it's Time Warner stock. Just that they were swapping some for the 50% stake in Court TV, the Braves and cash.
Turner South was bought by Fox.
Malone is likely to be a short-term owner. He's got a speculator's set of cognates, spinning and re-forming and re-stucturing and re-packaging to buy and sell companies and pieces of them. He's a visionary with a degree in engineering (and the mindset of an engineer).
His companies are best known as having no customer service/ethic and for investing in future-looking technologies. Very innovation-oriented, not people-oriented. Any Braves fan who was ever a customer of his TCI (Telecommunications, Inc.) is likely cringing right now.
More background here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2094402/
Again, though, I suspect this is a ttransitory holding...like the one of the six Sid Bream duplicate cards you tried to trade for a Chipper Jones at *just* the right moment.