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Back at the end of the last century, Patrick Drahi was a fledgling French media entrepreneur, a one-time protege of U.S. cable king John Malone.
He was intent on building an empire to rival that of his mentor, who borrowed heavily to build two media conglomerates and today controls Sirius XM and Charter Communications. Within little more than a decade, Drahi, a graduate of the Polytechnique, France’s MIT, had an empire stretching from Israel, across Europe into the U.S.
, and down to the Dominican Republic — owning France’s oldest phone company and its 24-hour news channel, a chunk of British Telecom, Portuguese mobile phone and cable operators, and mobile phone and TV news networks in Israel. In 2015, he moved into the U.S.
, buying Suddenlink, a southwestern cable company, for $9 billion. He bought New York-area cable and internet provider Cablevision for $17.7 billion from the Dolan family, and paid $200 million for Cheddar, a youth-oriented cable business channel.
For fun, Drahi, who has a 750 million-euro collection of modern art, bought auction house Sotheby’s in 2019 for $3.7 billion. Drahi built his empire buying undervalued and underperforming cable and telecom companies, and applying what he and his aides claimed was telecom engineering — lowering costs with better technology, and using.
