ged by the company's inflexibility he resigned and moved out west where he even- tually fell into the orbit of Bob Magness, a swashbuckling cable entrepre- neur as unlike anyone at AT&T as Malone was likely to find on the face of the earth. By 1997, Malone was CEO of Tele-Communications, Inc., (TCI) the country's largest cable system operator. TCI had also ac- quired an ownership stake in various programming networks as the price for putting them on its cable systems. And together with other members of the tight-knit cable fraternity, Cox Communications and Comcast Corporation, TCI controlled the country's largest high-speed Internet provider, the AtHome Corporation, and one of the largest competitive local telephone companies, the Teleport Communications Group (TCG). One of Malone's favorite sayings is "never become romantically involved with a business." He is not an investor. He is a trader. The Work Inside Out Toward Your Customers difference is significant. An investor has a long-term horizon and val- ues a company at the net present value of its future earnings stream. A trader's horizon is no longer than his next trade and he believes a company has no intrinsic value at all. It's worth only what someone else is willing to pay for it and the trick is figuring out what makes it valuable to them. Like Vallance, Malone was sure that TCI and AT&T should "do something together," but he not only knew what it was, but knew the order in which it should happen. AT&T had looked at TCG about a year earlier, but had come to the conclusion that the asking price (about $4 billion) was too high. Since then, the values of competitive local exchange companies had soared. Malone suggested that Armstrong send in a new team to discuss a trade of AT&T shares for TCG. If the deal could be structured as a merger, rather than an acquisition, it would be nearly tax-free. That could set the companies up to do a follow-on deal with the AtHome Corporation; this would make AT&T the leader in high-speed Internet access, leapfrogging ove