John C. Malone and Mark Robichaux at a Paley event on Sept. 4. Courtesy of The Paley Center for Media Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment It takes a lot to make the richest man in the world burst into tears, but a "no" from John Malone was enough to do it to Bill Gates. Barry Diller, the entertainment mogul and IAC chairman, recalled the moment over lunch Thursday, telling attendees at the Paley Center for Media that the only time he saw Gates cry "is when John told him, no, we are not going to let you control the cable industry. "Bill had laid so much pipe and tried so hard to pull this off, and it was in the back of a car going somewhere, and when you finally said 'it's not gonna happen,' he burst out into tears," Diller said to Malone, sitting a few feet to his left. Related Stories Business John Malone Says He Advised David Zaslav on Warner Bros. Discovery Compensation Package, NBA Rights Business James Dolan and David Zaslav Appear as "Two-Second Characters" in the Sphere's 'Wizard of Oz' Malone, the billionaire Liberty Media chairman and one of the defining media moguls of the 20th and 21st centuries, was the center of attention at the Paley Center media council lunch, joined onstage by three proteges-turned moguls themselves: Diller, Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries, and Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, in a conversation moderated by journalist and author Mark Robichaux. The quartet swapped stories about Malone's exploits and dealmaking, as audience members that included James Dolan, Robert Kraft, Ken Lowe, Jennifer Witz, Roger Lynch, Paul Gould and other boldface names listened intently. But back to Gates: Malone had been talking to Microsoft about building the operating system that would enable broadband internet through cable at a time when the world was still using dial-up. But Malone pursued a deal with Kleiner Perkins instead, which he thinks may have brought out the emotion in Gates. "It was a very tender thing, because I didn't understand at the time the level of animosity between Silicon Valley and Seattle, that is like two worlds," Malone recalled. "When we decided to go with Kleiner as our organizational partner, that was anathema, because that brought in Sun Microsystems, all those kind of guys." Over the course of nearly two hours, Malone and his colleagues talked about dealing with regulators ("the Justice Department had a conference room just for us, I asked one time, will they let me go see it to see if there's anything I forgot about?" Malone quipped at one point) the big deals they made, and some that never happened, about the disruptive power of technology, and the meaning of loyalty. "This term, "Cable Cowboy," it implies sort of seat of the pants, entrepreneurialism, and all this stuff," Fries said of Malone. "But cowboys are also authentic, humble and modest and loyal, and that's the kind of cowboy this guy is." "To me, the most impressive thing that shines through is John's humanity," Diller added "It ain't the complications of the deal, it's the humanity that got me." Not that it has always been smooth sailing. "My first personal meeting with Barry was a huge disappointment," Malone said, causing Diller to smile. "Barry was running Paramount at the time. We had been skulking around trying to figure out how to build a competitor to HBO, and we had put together Paramount, Universal and Disney, and we were going to call it Hollywood Home Theater. "These are early days, and Barry advised us to come out to his house, where we can meet with him and [Universal chief] Sid Sheinberg and talk more about this plan," Malone continues. "Barry takes us aside, and he says, 'well, we've decided that we're not going to do Hollywood Home Theater. We've decided that we're going to do exclusivity deals with our content, and we're going to do an exclusivity deal with HBO.' And so that was the end of that." And then there is Warner Bros. Discovery, which brought together Discovery, led by Zaslav and backed by Malone, and WarnerMedia, which had assets that Malone had a role in shaping, including CNN and TNT. "I called John, and I said made this whole pitch to [AT&T CEO] John Stankey about why we should come together, that we were both stuck in the middle of a lake, and that Netflix was on the other side, and Disney was close, and there were a bunch of people behind us, but we're not going to make it. Together, we can get to the other side," Zaslav recalled. "And I called [Malone] afterward, and he said, 'it's a fantastic opportunity, to pick up HBO and Warner Brothers, but I just don't see that it's going to happen. We're 25% of the size of them. It's just tough.' And I said it's meant to be. "And throughout that transaction, as it was falling apart and didn't look like it was going to happen, I would be talking to John