Malone “missed out big-time on Germany,” said Alex DeGroote, a media analyst at Panmure Gordon in London. “It’s the biggest market in Europe, and having critical mass there is important for anyone.”

Vodafone, which in October completed a 7.7 billion-euro takeover of the German operator, has become a formidable new rival since selling its stake in Verizon Wireless for $130 billion. On Oct. 10, Malone said the U.K. company could be “a good partner.”

Malone’s latest effort is in the Netherlands, where Liberty Global is seeking full control of cable company Ziggo NV. On Oct. 16 Ziggo said it had rejected a bid from Liberty for the 71.5 percent of the Dutch company it doesn’t already own.

With a net worth of $6.9 billion, Malone chairs three publicly traded companies: Liberty Global (which owns cable operations in 12 European countries plus Puerto Rico and Chile), Liberty Media Corp., and Liberty Interactive Corp. Liberty Media holds shares in various media outlets and Interactive owns the QVC home-shopping network and stakes in TripAdvisor Inc., Time Warner Cable Inc. and Expedia Inc.

Born in Milford, Connecticut, to a schoolteacher mother and a father who was an engineer at General Electric Co., Malone tapped his penchant for technology and business as a teen by buying broken radios and fixing them for resale to friends.

He graduated from Yale University in 1963 with degrees in economics and electrical engineering, married his high school sweetheart, Leslie, and headed off to the legendary Bell Laboratories Inc. in New Jersey. There, he worked on the videophone, a product so famously ahead of its time that it never got off the ground.

Bill Gates

In 1972, he moved on to Tele-Communications Inc., where he helped former cottonseed salesman Bob Magness turn the Colorado company into the second-largest U.S. cable operator, behind Time Warner. During the early years at TCI, Malone recalled, Bill Gates would stop by, “with a pizza and a six-pack of beer” to work on “Express,” a kind of precursor to the Internet that ran on cable pipelines.

“We tried to invent something before the Internet came into being,” Malone said. “The technologies weren’t quite ready.”

In 1999, Malone sold TCI to AT&T Inc. for $59 billion, leaving him with control of its Liberty Media subsidiary. He has since turned that company into a giant that owns Sirius XM satellite radio and holds interests in Time Warner, Viacom Inc., concert-promoter Live Nation Entertainment Inc., and bookseller Barnes & Noble Inc.