WHEN: Today, Thursday, November 9, 2023
WHERE: “CNBC Leaders: John Malone”
Tonight, CNBC’s David Faber sat down exclusively with Liberty Media Chairman John Malone for a wide-ranging interview to discuss the future of live & entertainment content, bundling, state of streaming, sports rights, future of ESPN, big tech and more. Following are excerpts from the unofficial transcript of the interview on “CNBC Leaders: John Malone” today, Thursday, November 9. Video will be available on CNBC.com.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
PART I
DAVID FABER: Well, a year ago we talked and you were not a believer necessarily in the ad supported streaming tiers as much.
JOHN MALONE: I am not on entertainment, okay, because I think most people feel that the big breakthrough of Netflix was no ads. So you notice Netflix is not getting a huge take of of save a couple bucks and take ads. Now Amazon right now on Prime is thinking about going the other way, put ads in everything right? Because they’re building a big ad business.
FABER: They already have an enormous ad business I mean at Amazon.
MALONE: Netflix tried to outsource their ad business to Microsoft and so far, I don’t think it’s created any big buzz. So you have an Amazon monster but I think the question that you and your viewers have to focus on is the distinction between library entertainment services and live whether it’s sports or news or other kinds of talk shows. Things that are like you, okay. Financial news, live, real time.
FABER: Of course. Completely necessary at all times John.
MALONE: Well here you have a real anomaly, okay. Because when it comes to live, which is really always been the backbone of the broadcast and broadcast continues to survive, but under real pressure as big tech competes for sports. So whether the economics of sports, continuing to drive broadcast, the anomaly is that that network neutrality, the government policy creates this, this crazy world in which Amazon can go buy Thursday Night Football for multiples of what the industry has been paying and for the distributors like Charter or Comcast instead of being one linear channel which consumes, you know, which is everywhere and consumes perhaps 1,000th of the 1% of the capacity of the network, suddenly it becomes 30 million streams, okay, on Thursday night, essentially choking the networks with and forcing the distribution companies to spend a lot of money on expanding capacity rapidly. And yet, it costs Amazon nothing for the transport. So what we’ve created here is an open path for big tech to essentially decimate let’s call it.
FABER: Not to mention their endless balance sheets anyway which—
MALONE: Well, yeah they can—
FABER: And then get judged on I mean—
MALONE: Well, they have what they have. They have two things when you really look at it from an antitrust point of view, they have cross synergies. So they can argue that they’re not underpricing. This isn’t the loss thing, you know, because they get synergies with Prime out of adding this and they make so much money with Prime that the money they lose, looked at on a standalone basis. And they also have cross subsidy. So yeah, they make a lot of money, they get a big balance sheet and pick some of that and they can buy the Thursday Night Football.
FABER: Or Sunday ticket on YouTube.
MALONE: Or Sunday ticket. So you can see the conversion. What’s happening now is the fight is no longer for entertainment library services. That is kind of settled down to where you know one company is making the money.
FABER: Netflix.
MALONE: Netflix. Warner Brothers now is making money. Not a lot but they’re making money. And then you have Disney losing a lot of money. Peacock losing a lot of money. Paramount losing a ton of money that they can’t afford. You know, at least Brian can afford to lose the money. He makes a lot elsewhere.
FABER: Yeah, it’s not fun losing two and a half billion a year though.
MALONE: It isn’t but, you know, until he sees light at the end of the tunnel, I mean, that’s where he’s at. And so he’ll be trying to figure out solutions too and, and all the other guys are just seeing their viewership. They’re still only in the linear space. They’re seeing their revenue streams and their viewership in a steady decline.
FABER: So how do you pay for the NBA, for example, if you were Warner Brothers Discovery.
MALONE: Very difficult. you look for a big tech partner basically. You look for somebody else who can share.
FABER: So you’re gonna pay the same amount for less probably.
MALONE: Correct. That’s what you’ll end up with. You’ll end up being this is the dilemma of the fact that the government has allowed big tech to cross over into another industry. And I noticed there’s been a movement in complaints at the FCC about small broadcasters who are having a hard time making sense out of it right. We now have a situation where broadcasting is likely to be over the years destroyed frankly by trying to compete with big tech that has no distribution costs. I mean, look, if you wanted to start a premium sports channel, you’d have to come to the distributors and make a deal. You’d have to split the revenue, right? And you might get distribution over time from all the players. But if you go on the internet and stream it, it costs you nothing and it takes you no time, right.
FABER: So this is a losing battle.
MALONE: It’s a losing battle. Yeah. So, I think, you know, eventually maybe there’ll be regulatory—
FABER: Relief of some kind?
MALONE: Relief of some kind. It’s clearly unfair. The broadcasters clearly used to have a lot of politics and as they started to really feel the pain, they may, they may be able to get some relief.
FABER: Well, meanwhile, they—
MALONE: Well again, sports is that, sports is the thing to watch. Some big tech companies are going to try and create their own sport right and own it, own the rights so that they, in a normal world in my opinion, big tech would have already bought old media, acquired them, swallowed them and it would have been a smooth transition. But because of antitrust concerns—
FABER: It’s not going to happen.
MALONE: It’s not going to happen.
FABER: By the way, even because of antitrust Comcast, Warner Brothers Discovery, I should say, sorry, NBCU Warner Brothers Discovery might not happen if they wanted it to happen.
MALONE: No, that’s right.
FABER: So consolidation of any kind seems to be off the table to a certain extent.
MALONE: Yeah until there’s loss. In other words, there is an exemption to the antitrust laws on a failing business.
FABER: That’s not pretty for anybody though.
MALONE: Well, it made us a lot of money with Sirius.
FABER: Yes it did. Yes it did.
MALONE: But, but, but so at some point of distress, right, then some of the restrictions get looked the other way. But I think the last big media purchase was MGM by Amazon. And since then, I think big tech has been content to just out bid old media for anything that they think they can use to drive market share or for whatever promotional reasons they want. So you know the fastest growing video, linear video company right now I believe is YouTube.
FABER: Yeah, it’s a giant.
MALONE: If you look at it from the distributors point of view, from what used to be the cable company we now call it broadband. So if you’re a broadband company like Charter or Liberty Global, Liberty Latin America, or Comcast, okay, what you’re looking at is these guys are all going to buy all this sports content, they’re all going to stream it. There’s going to be an enormous appetite for capacity on the network. And that’s us. Wireless can’t do that. So this fixed wireless thing that has a caused a little—
FABER: It’s caused a hiccup in broadband sub additions—
MALONE: And valuations.
FABER: And valuations.
MALONE: That’s just not going to be able to handle. They don’t have enough spectrum. They’re not gonna have the capacity to handle this massive growth in streaming. And therefore, the broadband companies will at worst be a duopoly with the incumbents who are trying to overbuild. Now the overbuilders, in my opinion will mostly go broke because they can’t get a return at today’s interest rates capital costs. They’re just not attractive so—
FABER: Do you include AT&T as an overbuilder?
MALONE: Yes, yeah. They made a commitment in order to get some deals done that they were going to build, overbuild themselves with fiber, and they’ve done some of that. And so I think all the business models that Brian has, that Rutledge had, were all based upon expectation of a fiber competitor on some portion of the footprint. I think that has all slowed down even with the incumbents because of their other financial pressures. So, you know for Verizon or AT&T, they’re paying horrendous dividend ratios right now to support their stocks.
FABER: They are. You know, Verizon has gone in on fixed wireless even though they had Fios.
MALONE: Well, they always were. When I was at Direct TV, when I was chairman of Direct TV, we were experimenting with Verizon on fixed wireless.
FABER: Right.
MALONE: So the concept—
FABER: But it’s capacity constrained. It can’t—
MALONE: It’s totally capacity constrained.
FABER: And eventually you’re going to want to want to use that for your wireless.
MALONE: Correct. And therefore I think that that is a technological competitor. It’s a little overblown right now. But it has slowed. They haven’t customers so much as they’ve slowed growth and I expect that the broadband companies also saw a little growth that came out ahead of time because of COVID so there’s probably still a little catch up going on there where people are saying if I had a cheaper alternative I’d take it.
FABER: Right
PART II
FABER: How are you feeling about Warner Brothers Discovery?
MALONE: Well, here’s what I feel, you know, and I, we caught a lot of flack for doing the deal. I mean, a, we didn’t have the opportunity to do enough diligence. And I think when, when the merger took place, we were surprised at at how deteriorated its the cash flow of the business was and how large the commitments were on content. So it was in substantially worse shape than our diligence because we had to rely on public filings. And like, you’re talking about a subsidiary of a very large company.
FABER: Do you feel like you were misled?
MALONE: Yeah, I think, I think we were we were somewhat misled. We were some kind of somewhat naive. And then also, I think the whole attitude about streaming, okay, suddenly turned south. Okay. So it was a whole bunch of things. But what we walked into was an over levered balance sheet. Okay, very much so. You know, I think probably the initial leverage spot on that day was probably five and a half times. Now, we were lucky that when we financed it, we financed it as an investment grade balance sheet, and therefore the debt stack is investment grade with the, you know, it’s an excellent, it’s a pile of debt, but it’s excellent, okay and it became very clear to all of us that David’s number one function was to drive up cashflow and drive down debt, the ratio as well as the absolute level. And he’s done, I think, a brilliant job of taking leverage them. And I think, you know, I don’t know what they’re telling the public, my guess is, you know, at the rate they’re going, they’ll be under four times at the end of the year.
FABER: Our, this interview will actually air after their earnings. So—
MALONE: Okay, yeah, I believe they’ll be maybe 3.8, okay, with having paid down another 6 billion out of free cash flow, not out of selling things, out of free cash flow. So he’s rapidly getting to the point where they do have, they will have cash flow with the freedom to decide how to allocate it, as opposed to, you know, having to be driven—
FABER: Solely by getting that debt load down.
MALONE: By fixing the balance sheet. And it’s a tough couple of years. And he’s been pretty, pretty draconian with the tightness. But he’s got MAX profitable now. And it was bleeding a couple billion when we got involved. And so I think, I think the team has done a great job. Our our take on doing the deal was we saw what was coming. We saw we tried to launch streaming from Discovery. We have modest success, we were a little better than breakeven, you know, we were never gonna get scale with only Discovery content. And we figured they just run over so naturally, the decline of linear no good answer, too small to be a major player. You know, in all honesty, we’d visit Tim Cook, I tried to sell Discovery to Tim Cook two or three times.
FABER: And he wasn’t interested.
MALONE: Well, you know, what he would say to me privately was John, it’s not exactly all the kind of content that Apple want, you know, “Naked and Afraid,” you know, shows like that. That’s not exactly up to Apple’s brands standard. So we would laugh about it. But no, I mean, you know, he was interested in in some projects with us, but he really was not really a candidate to buy it.
FABER: But back to our, one of our discussions. Does Warner Brothers Discovery, does the streaming service now MAX, which compasses, obviously, HBO and these, is it, can it get to the scale that you think will enable it to really—
MALONE: Well, we’ll see how we do international, we’re just in the process of launching MAX internationally. And keep in mind, a lot of Netflix customers are international and relatively low revenue per sub. So my guess is that, that we’ll be able to grow MAX in sub count, and probably profitability, can we get it to the same level of profitability that we’ve had with the linear? No. So what we’ve got to count on is linear living longer and transitioning into some kind of a hybrid bundle that that sustains some of the margin contribution that we’ve historically had. And the only way we can do that is cooperation with our historic distributors. We’re not going to get their direct consumer. So we’ve got—
FABER: Back to the Disney Charter, back to—
MALONE: Back to work together, you may hate your distributor, you may have nasty fights over price. But at the end of the day, you’re really rowing in the same boat. And you know, you’re rowing and bailing together, and you better figure out how to work together to sustain this ecosystem because your big enemy is big tech. They’re slowly going to going to try and crunch you. And you should be working together as as an old media industry collectively to figure out how to provide the best service and still be economically viable.
FABER: Yeah. Do you think do you think Brian and Comcast still will have interest in Warner Brothers Discovery if they could figure something out? It’s not clear to me but I’m curious—
MALONE: It’s not clear to me either. It’s not clear to me that Brian, I still think Brian loves the distribution business, isn’t so sure about the content business and absolutely loves theme parks.
FABER: Theme parks have been the growth engine.
MALONE: It’s a growth engine and it’s a real estate business and big tech can’t crunch it. He doesn’t have to worry about what big tech is gonna do.
FABER: But when the tax when it rolls into it, you know, the spring when it’s two years it’s gonna I’m sure there’ll be speculation whether it’s worthy or not—
MALONE: I believe that—
FABER: Given where the stock price was—
PART III
FABER: Interest rates being where they are and the cost to capital, the high cost of capital. I’m just curious how you view that, you know, how you, if at all, change your capital allocation strategy amongst some of the businesses or think about things given we’re in a world that we haven’t been in for quite some time.
MALONE: No, absolutely, we’re in a higher for longer interest rate environment or cost to capital environment I think, somewhat of a return to normal, normality. Sure, I mean, I’m arguing right now on a personal investment, they want to buy an apartment building and I don’t want to buy an apartment building because I think the leverage is too expensive and too uncertain. And I don’t think the market value or the cost of the purchase is justified or it reflects the current cost of capital environment. So I’ve killed a number of deals, personal deals, that were based upon, you know, that changing landscape. And you know, this is all about the present value of future cash flows and in the terms under which you can have access to the capital. So you know, for a while there I was borrowing money at 1%, euros at 1% or less, on a long term fixed basis, and that made buying almost anything on a levered basis shooting fish in a barrel. Now, it’s a much more difficult thing. From an industry point of view, I think there’s way too much competition came into a lot of businesses because of cheap capital. And a lot of that particularly overbuilding in the cable or broadband business, I think is starting to dry up because the returns just aren’t there. If you’re paying 7 or 8% for your money.
FABER: You continue to have to borrow.
MALONE: Yeah.
FABER: Right so.
MALONE: And also how much of the capital structure can be borrowed with the debt service being a lot higher so it takes a lot more equity and returns are much skinnier on, after a financing basis so it is changing the landscape in our industries. You know, everybody who has a levered balance sheet, whether they’re content or distributor in our industry, they’re all looking at the same thing. How long have I got, when’s my next refinance? And how much is it gonna cost? People who have issued debt, very long debt very favorably. Like your own company for instance, is sitting there looking at very long debt that’s trading at under 50 cents on the dollar, not on a credit basis, just on a—
FABER: Just on the fact—
MALONE: Cost of money basis. Well, you can de-lever pretty fast if you can buy your debt back at 50 cents on the dollar. And it also gives you a pretty nice boost to earnings. So people are starting to focus a little bit on opportunistically managing their balance sheet while keeping the other eye on maturities.
FABER: But for these businesses that still need to grow or still need to build and obviously expend a lot of capital to do that. It’s a different world now isn’t it?
MALONE: Slows way down. Makes it much more difficult to raise either equity or debt because the business strategy has to change to reflect the cost of capital. And so yeah, I mean, it’s been a pretty dramatic shift here in the last couple of years. And I don’t think it’s going to change as fast as perhaps the equity markets think it might.
FABER: Why not?
MALONE: I just think it’s once inflation gets embedded, okay, and you have a federal government running pretty massive deficits so the federal government to finance itself with the Federal Reserve saying we’re not going to print and actually trying to shrink their balance sheet and the federal government running who knows two, two and a half trillion dollar deficit that has to be financed. You’re going to have central governments crowding out other other private needs for capital, and you’re gonna see a sustained, unusually high interest rate environment up until they essentially address the deficit with taxes or some kind of a federal reform. And this is true of most of the western nations. So it’s not just the U.S. that’s in this situation.
FABER: No. Everybody seems to be running deficits. There are those who believe the Fed is going to be forced to potentially to lower rates in part because interest costs otherwise will overwhelm the U.S. budget given we got 50% I think coming off in the next three years that’s going to be refinanced.
MALONE: But that’s surrendered to inflation and then you run the risk of looking like Argentina. Right? And you can’t conduct a rational capitalist society if you have runaway inflation, if you can’t trust the capital. The other problem America has is if faith in the dollar as a reserve currency gets undermined because it looks like, you know, we’re going to inflate or devalue our obligations by inflating our currency, other nations will stop using it as a reserve currency, which would be a disaster for U.S. dollar and our debt. If you think you’ve seen high interest rates? Wait till that happens.
FABER: Well, let’s hope it doesn’t. You don’t think it will do you?
MALONE: I don’t know. I mean, geopol – this is the most scared I’ve ever been in my adult life of geopolitics. I mean, we’ve got, we’ve got an association forming between Russia, Iran, and China. Maybe the Saudis, so you could have a new OPEC forming and you have also a couple of wars going on and you might have another one. So you know, I’m very concerned about the geopolitical thing. We look weak. Financially, we look weak now. We don’t, we look very divided as a country. And we’ll see whether the new leadership in the House can create some level of unity or direction. But but this is, this is a dangerous period with what’s going on in the Middle East with what’s going on in Ukraine, with the increasing alliances being formed between Russia and China. You know, the two biggest nuclear powers of this – I mean this is scary stuff.
FABER: John, I want to wrap up with a couple of questions, one of which I’ve asked you before, you don’t like the question, but I have to ask it. Zaslav’s comp, which comes up a lot. You paid him I think 825 million bucks, most of it in stock over the last I don’t know how many years it’s been.
MALONE: Well, it was not actually in stock. It was in stock options.
FABER: Stock options.
FABER: So was it worth it?
MALONE: How much of it is—
FABER: How was it, when you talk to these, you know—
MALONE: Well, it would have been worth it. I mean, if he had actually got that much in value, it would have been it would have represented an enormous increase in the value of the company. So the way I look at it is, you know, you could say the same thing about Greg, I mean, I, I’m very generous—
FABER: You pay your people extremely well. Don’t you?
MALONE: Only on the upside, very little of it is is fixed. If the performance isn’t there, they never actually make the money.
FABER: So Zas hasn’t made that? I mean—
MALONE: He has not made a lot of money. He’s made pretty good money. But he has not made anything like what the Black-Scholes model says that those options should have been worth because the companies haven’t performed, their equities haven’t performed. These are all equity performance-based theories of compensation. So you have give a guy a seven year option on 1% of a $10 billion company, right, and the Black-Scholes model says, oh my god, you’ve given them this huge amount of value. But if the company, if the stock doesn’t move, right—
FABER: Well, in this case, this stock hasn’t. Yeah. I mean, there was that brief period. Archegos. Should’ve sold everything you had.
MALONE: So those options effectively turn out to be worthless and I think—
FABER: He’s still made hundreds of millions of dollars. Zaslav.
MALONE: I’m not sure. I haven’t looked back at how much. He had some restricted stock grants. Okay, so he gets the stock, he has to hold it for a certain number of years. But if the stock goes down, okay, I mean, we’re talking about a company in Discovery that was trading at 30 to 40 bucks a share, and it’s now just barely got inched above 10, those same shares. So you know, three quarters of anything that he got in stock got wiped out in this in this transaction with a AT&T and David had not sold any shares, like I never sold any shares. So all through this period when we had that crazy run up of Discovery shares—
FABER: Yeah, the Archegos.
MALONE: Yeah. I couldn’t sell because we were in talks with AT&T and so neither could David. And so we didn’t sell any of our shares. Now, a lot of people who weren’t involved in those talks, you know, bailed and made a lot of money. But we didnt, so, you know, do I overpay guys? I’m willing. See, here’s how I look at business. Okay. I have a hotel business in Ireland. My two partners are I call them a sweat equity partners. They know the business. They were broke when I went into it, but they knew the business. So I just say I’ll put up the money, you put up the expertise, you guys will own 20 and I’ll own 80, right. I make them my partners.
FABER: And that’s how you feel like you do—
MALONE: That business is profit—
FABER: With Fries or Maffei or Zaslav.
MALONE: So that business here, despite Covid is probably worth close to a billion dollars. So those guys are worth 200 million, right? Did I overpay them? Could I have done it? Could I have built that business? I do that with all my personal businesses. I have partners everywhere. And, and the partners benefit from the success of the business. I put money into all kinds of young guys, venture capital ideas, right? My typical deal is 60/40, I get 60% of the upside, they get 40% of the upside, I get a 5% preference return, okay. We use as much leverage as is prudent. And they go start, they go buy a business, or they start a business or whatever. And some of them, Bob Johnson.
FABER: Right. Worked out pretty well.
MALONE: Worked out well for Bob. So, you know, do you regard that as compensation to Bob, or the benefits of ownership and the appreciation of an asset that he helped create. I mean, I, Barry Diller for God’s sakes. You know, Barry didn’t have any assets to speak of when he got bumped out of QVC by Comcast by Ralph. And he was on the beach. And he was a friend. And I said, how about how about taking over and running HSN. I just got control of it Barry, but I don’t, you know, you just got exposed. He said, look, I’ve built three businesses for three companies, and I own nothing. And I said, okay, well, here’s our deal. You know, you run it, I have nothing to do with it. I won’t interfere. You get a proxy—
FABER: On your shares if I remember that right.
MALONE: On my shares and, and you’ll end up owning something at the end.
FABER: He made a lot of guys very, very wealthy.
MALONE: Very, very wealthy. Well, that’s my approach to life because I can’t possibly know enough to manage the breadth of businesses that I’ve been in. And so, you have to make these guys your partners.
FABER: John, on that, I’d love to end on sort of your personal fortune, how you’re viewing things these days. Are you still the largest landowner in the United States?
MALONE: Yeah I think I am. Although, Stan Kroenke is, he’s catching up.
FABER: He’s catching up.
MALONE: Yeah, he is, he loves land too. He’s a good guy.
FABER: How are you thinking any differently? We’ve talked about this, though, not in a few years. Are you thinking any differently about—
MALONE: My land investments are I would call a preservationist. Right. Okay. So my goal is the vast majority of our lands hopefully stays open and preserved and used appropriately for, for quality of life. Forestry, for forestry and for outdoor activities, and so on. So that’s my goal, and, you know, in the West for energy production, and so on, but it’s gets basically it’s a philanthropical for the land for the bulk of the land. You know, we own a ton of suburban Denver, and it’s appreciated a lot.
FABER: Appreciated a lot. Right, you’ve developed a lot of—
MALONE: Well, I haven’t developed anything. I have 100,000 acres here in the suburbs. And you know, it’s probably pretty valuable,
FABER: I would think it is.
MALONE: Yeah, hopefully it will be a park, you know, it will be open. That’s the goal.
FABER: You’re all good on your estate planning. I assume? I can’t imagine. You would be number one I would think you’ll never pay taxes I’m sure.
MALONE: You’re absolutely right. Estate planning is just driving me nuts these days.
FABER: Estate planning is just driving me nuts these days. And, you know, I’ve always assumed that I would die first. Leslie and I’ve been together for 65 years now. And, you know, guys usually don’t live as long as their wives. You know, I hope that’s the case. But so, you know, everything, everything in terms of the corporate stuff has very low tax bases and under thank you, Ronald Reagan. And if anything happens to me, it goes to her gets stepped up in trust, and then it goes into our philanthropy so when she goes. The kids are all taken care of. I did GRATs for the kids and I’ve done GRATs for the grandkids and, and most of the relatives are okay. A disappointment to me that my son never really wanted to get involved in these business. He has his own business, but he never wanted to get involved in these businesses. But he does sit on the boards, some of the boards at my request and I have a nephew that sits on some of the boards. My goal, as with Diller is to transfer my control positions to the guys who made it happen. Okay, so I would love to see because I do believe there’s a benefit to all the shareholders in having a benevolent control shareholder.
FABER: You do.
MALONE: I do. And—
FABER: Yeah. And it’s just Fries and Zaslav? It’s not Maffei correct? It’s just Fries and Zaslav.
MALONE: Well I’ve already transferred control of a couple of things to Greg.
FABER: Oh you have?
MALONE: Yeah, TripAdvisor. Right. And he moved to Chair, I stepped back from Chair of a couple of businesses that we sort of have control of, and he’s taken the lead. So, so no, I think Greg is very much in line to be one of the ending control shareholders because I believe in that, you know, these are the guys who I didn’t build these things, they did it. So they should end up with continuity to the degree that makes sense, okay. Sometimes you can’t make that happen, but, but if you can, that would be desirable. And so you have continuity and stability. And, you know, I understand that my complexity, tracking stocks, multiple shares, all kinds of things, you know, it’s, it’s an optimization structure, right? But it’s transitional, it’s always transitional, you know, you hold this thing in this situation until it’s mature or until you get a step up or until you get this, that, or. And then it goes off. So we spun off the Braves earlier this year, stock went up about 40%, once we got it out of the complexity, it’s still maybe a little undervalued, but you know, it’s a nice little real estate and, and sport play. And the same, you know, ultimately is going to happen with things like Sirius. Okay. You know, we’ve got, we have this position in Live Nation, Rapino is great. That company is on fire. And, and we got to figure out how ultimately our shareholders benefit from, from our ownership of 35% of that. So it’s, it’s all of this sort of fine tuning. But the general generally of our estate plan is primarily philanthropy. Okay.
FABER: Understood.
MALONE: And with certain assets directed in certain directions, and others, where control gets shifted to successors. Okay. But there’s no particular urgency to liquidate the underlying asset. But with the transition of life comes to step up, comes to flexibility to redeploy concentrated assets more broadly. So diversification, you know, is prudent, you know, we use two wealth management advisors that, that help us, and one on the personal side, and one on the foundation side. And, and they always push for diversification.
