The Billionaire Shell Game: How Cable Baron John Malone and Assorted Corporate Titans Invented a Future Nobody Wanted

This book is the single best book summarising the history of cable and its influence on our lives.

This book is well written and interesting but seems to lean a bit too much on secondary sources such as the material in Ken Auletta's The Highway Men.

Reading that AT & T had just paid a reported $70 billion to buy TCI, I wanted this book to do two things for me. 1) Explain what TCI offers that is worth so much blessed money! 2) To grasp why the cable industry is so bad and how it will be so great in the future. Davis does a good job laying out what TCI was up to. He confirmed the lunacy of Bell Atlantic's thinking that TCI was the answer. Malone fascinated me with his use of debt to buy up cable outfits by the bucketful, relying on the beautiful allure of the 500 channel future to make him a "liquid" player. As to the second part of the quest, I guess Armstrong and At & t will have to give us the look at the @home future that is fast approaching...I guess! I enjoyed the book overall and it a compelling recapitulation of a crazy series of events. Certainly a good choice forbusiness reading!