Liberty Media, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Liberty Media comes up
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired
- ▶ 4:30:50 David Rosenthal To our friends Ravi Nandan at A-Twenty-Four, Chase Carey at Liberty Media and Fox, and to Mitch Lasky at Benchmark.
Ferrari: What happens when you staple a luxury brand to a sports team? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:22:23 David Rosenthal Thank you, Liberty Media and their stewardship of Formula One.
Formula 1: Fast cars, celebrities, and B2B software (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:35 Ben Gilbert That is Liberty
- ▶ 1:37 Ben Gilbert And against all odds, Liberty has managed to turn the sport, the teams, and the drivers into real, viable businesses.
- ▶ 1:53 David Rosenthal I was gonna save this for, um, later in the episode, but do you know what else, among the many other, like, hundreds of companies that Liberty has owned, do you know what else they owned?
- ▶ 1:28:07 David Rosenthal This continued until Liberty takes over in 2017.
- ▶ 2:00:29 Ben Gilbert So he said, prior to Liberty's acquisition of F-One, there had been many discussions and even attempts at a breakaway series.
- ▶ 2:42:33 David Rosenthal So in September of 2016, it finally gets announced that the American media company Liberty Media is acquiring F-One for 4.4 billion dollars of equity value and assuming all of the outstanding debt that the company has for a combined total…
- ▶ 2:42:58 David Rosenthal Uh, Liberty and John Malone and Greg Maffei, we've talked about Liberty
- ▶ 2:43:22 David Rosenthal And then they actually changed the whole name of Liberty media, the company, the publicly traded company into the formula one group, create a new tracking stock to track the value of F one group F
- ▶ 2:43:57 Ben Gilbert The completely fascinating thing about Liberty media today is it sort of doesn't exist anymore.
- ▶ 2:44:14 Ben Gilbert At this point, like, 90% of Liberty itself is Formula One, and the stock is actually Formula One.
- ▶ 2:46:40 David Rosenthal So pretty quickly when Chase and Liberty come in, um, it becomes clear that there's not enough room for two bosses in F-One of Chase being chairman and Bernie remaining as CEO.
- ▶ 2:47:03 David Rosenthal After they had announced the acquisition the previous fall, Liberty announces that Bernie is stepping down as CEO.
- ▶ 2:47:20 David Rosenthal So in other words, Liberty fires him.
- ▶ 2:48:31 David Rosenthal And he and Liberty know they have their work cut out for them.
- ▶ 2:49:47 David Rosenthal So number one priority is they got to fix the teams, which they do in the first Concord agreement that Liberty negotiates.
- ▶ 2:55:51 David Rosenthal So that's obviously priority number one for Liberty is we gotta fix the teams to fix the sport.
- ▶ 2:56:46 David Rosenthal I mean, when Liberty came in, there was so much mistrust with the race promoters that other than the just straight economic fee payments, none of the races shared.
- ▶ 3:01:41 Ben Gilbert And what he had that he brought into Liberty's office was a stack of cease and desist letters.
- ▶ 3:02:03 David Rosenthal So Liberty immediately is like, yes, please Lewis post as much as you want on your Instagram.
- ▶ 3:02:33 David Rosenthal Shortly after Liberty acquires F-one, that studio gets acquired by Electronic Arts, makers of Madden and FIFA that do billions of dollars of revenue for EA and their league partners every year.
- ▶ 3:02:48 David Rosenthal Liberty works with them.
- ▶ 3:07:10 Ben Gilbert So Netflix and Liberty start talking.
- ▶ 3:07:26 Ben Gilbert But hilariously, F-One and Liberty control the actual track rights.
- ▶ 3:07:50 Ben Gilbert Liberty comes back with that bid in hand to Netflix and says, hey, can you guys match this?
- ▶ 3:08:45 Ben Gilbert So Liberty goes for it.
- ▶ 3:14:23 David Rosenthal And this is where the modern media business model that Liberty came in embraced.
- ▶ 3:14:59 David Rosenthal So one part of the Liberty strategy that we hadn't hit yet because we were saving it for drive to survive was bring this sport to America.
- ▶ 3:17:34 Ben Gilbert One, uh, quote I heard in research was that Liberty helped F-one move away from the male stale and pale audience.
- ▶ 3:17:45 David Rosenthal So, staying on the America strategy for Liberty and F-One, obviously adding races in the U.S. is a big priority here.
- ▶ 3:17:57 David Rosenthal Yeah, and Austin obviously launched before Liberty bought the sport, but they make it a priority.
- ▶ 3:19:38 Ben Gilbert And Liberty and F one really go for it at this point.
- ▶ 3:19:44 David Rosenthal So pretty quickly after Liberty buys the league, they start working on adding another race in the U S uh, and that becomes Miami, which launches in the 20, 22 season.
- ▶ 3:21:24 David Rosenthal Totally transformed since Liberty's acquisition of F-one.
- ▶ 3:26:48 David Rosenthal Well, to put a bow on the Liberty strategy, or at least the
- ▶ 3:26:56 David Rosenthal Right after Liberty takes over in 2017, they do a deal with ESPN, much like Bernie's original European Broadcasting Union deal.
- ▶ 3:27:09 David Rosenthal Liberty says, will you please show all of the F-one races on the calendar on ESPN?
- ▶ 3:30:30 David Rosenthal But this is real money for, again, a geography that was zero when Liberty took over, was a huge deal to get ESPN up from zero to call it 80 to 90.
- ▶ 3:51:06 Ben Gilbert Now remember Liberty bought in 2017 the company for eight billion with 4.4 billion of that being equity value.
- ▶ 3:51:20 Ben Gilbert So Liberty has done quite well turning 4.4 billion of equity in 2017 into five X that
- ▶ 3:53:33 Ben Gilbert So the key question you should all be thinking about is, are teams getting their share of the overall dollars compared to what Liberty gets?
- ▶ 3:55:05 David Rosenthal And I, I think it's because what's going on is Liberty is investing in the sport.
- ▶ 4:05:30 Ben Gilbert So now let's ask like a more literal question, uh, which is just the, the seven powers framework applied to the Liberty media formula one entity today.
- ▶ 4:09:36 David Rosenthal Now that said, the flip of that is they absolutely have the opportunity, like Liberty identified, to make those 22 races into 22 Super Bowls, which they're well on their way to doing.
- ▶ 4:13:00 Ben Gilbert If you're an investor, one reason why you might not give it the multiple that it used to have, like Liberty bought it for, I can't remember, 18 or 20 times earning, something like that.
- ▶ 4:13:17 Ben Gilbert A lot of the low hanging fruit that was available for Liberty to do is levers that they have pulled.
- ▶ 4:25:07 Ben Gilbert To Greg Maffei, the former CEO of Liberty Media, when they, of course, bought Formula One from CBC.
- ▶ 4:25:39 Ben Gilbert To Pawan Gami, Alex Knight, and Jimmy Fairbanks, who are equity investors and analysts who really helped me understand the investor perspective on Formula One Group and Liberty Media.
- ▶ 4:27:08 David Rosenthal And just one more on my end to Chase Carey, a board member now of Liberty and Fox, but obviously former CEO of the F-One Group.
Charlie Munger (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:00:46 David Rosenthal I mean, you witnessed its rise with Malone and TCI and Liberty when EBITDA was invented as a concept, right?