John Malone and Co. from the 2018 Liberty Media Investor Day:

Well, we have to take the long view and I’ve always taken the long view of value creation. You’re always worth more dead than alive in a business. The market never will value you. Typically, your trading valuation is always well below what you could liquidate the company for in most cases. There are a few exceptions and a few cycles when that’s not true.

And so when you take the long view, there are periods when the stock market gets excited and will overvalue a business and there are times when for various reasons, in my opinion, businesses get undervalued. We typically would very much like to shrink the equity at the periods when they’re undervalued and utilize the equity and periods when they’re let’s call them fully valued.

And if you look at us over a very long timeframe, the periods when we regard ourselves as fully valued or even overvalued are relatively short periods relative to the periods when we think we’re undervalued. As a result, net over many years, I’ve been in this game for almost 50 years now, we have been massively shrinking equities over time.

But if we have the skill set and the patience, those opportunities present themselves if you assimilate that tenacity or dry powder. And so these things are very periodic. We went for quite a while with quite a bit of cash in our balance sheet until Sirius came along. The reason we were able to do Sirius was we had money, Lehmann was going out of business. Nobody else had money and we believed in the business.

And our belief in the business proved true. I can’t say we’re always present and we always get it right, but if you take a company and I’ll talk about something outside of this, so at Liberty Global, right? We have people wanting to buy individual businesses in – on a run-rate basis, kind of 11, 12 times EBITDA and we’re structured in such a way that we’re very tax-efficient. We’re set up so that we can trade assets in and out in a tax-efficient way. Thank you, European tax laws.

And so, there are going to be periods when the market loves the business and there are periods when the market hates the business. I’m talking about trying to maximize long-term wealth of long-term shareholders, me, right? And because in most cases, I have substantial voting power, if not control, I can afford to encourage my management teams to be patient.