 other cable companies. And it would in- herit TCI's controlling interest in AtHome. AT&T Consumer Services would have earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of about $7.5 billion, growing more than 20 percent a year even without considering syner- gies. These were growth businesses with real customers and real reve- nue. The rest of AT&T, the parent, would consist of its business segments and its network infrastructure. In fact, one of its biggest customers would be AT&T Consumer Services, which would own no long-distance networks of its own. It would have about $36 billion in revenue, growing about 9 percent a year and generating net income of $4 to $5 billion in its first year. There were, however, a few complications. Malone didn't want to give up TCI's programming interests, SO they would be merged into Liberty Media, which he controlled, and it too would become a track- ing stock of AT&T. AT&T would benefit from Liberty Media's tax losses but would write a check every year to reimburse Liberty for the privilege of using them, in effect allowing Malone to turn tax losses into cash. The deal document was peppered with this sort of thing, in which Malone reveled. The board approved the deal in the late afternoon of June 23, 1998, and we prepared to announce it before the markets opened the next day. AT&T ended up paying the going rate for cable companies in the spring of that year, somewhere between the $2,600 that Paul Allen had paid for Marcus Cable in April and the $3,500 per subscriber that Cox Communications had paid for Community Cable in May. How much the company paid (or, depending on your point of view, over- paid) would become a hot issue in the weeks to come, along with wild estimates of the cost of upgrading TCI's cable systems. But at a little past midnight on the morning of June 24, my biggest concern was nailing down exactly how many shares of TCI John Ma- lone owned SO that we could finalize the news release. His dealings with the company were SO convoluted, wi