John Malone’s sprawling interests are being scrutinized by U.S. regulators reviewing the deal he helped broker to merge Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications, where he is a leading shareholder, to create the second-largest U.S. cable company.
The likelihood that Charter Communications’ takeover of Time Warner Cable will close before the end of the year — as the companies predicted earlier — now “feels ambitious,” the chief executive of Time Warner Cable said Thursday. Federal regulators are now scrutinizing Charter’s pair of deals totaling $67.1 billion for Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. If approved, those mergers would create the country’s second-largest cable operator, with about 24 million customers in 41 states, after Comcast.
