Ep. 88: Ownership, with Liberty Media’s Greg Maffei

“We developed a green team and a red team. The red team's job was to play defense, and first think mostly about liquidity and our downside. And the green team was supposed to think about where could we take advantage of this?”

With COVID striking at the heart of Liberty Media’s sports portfolio (Formula 1 and the Atlanta Braves), it’s understandable that President and CEO Greg Maffei injected competitive stakes into how his managers look at their respective businesses. Some of Liberty’s other holdings such as Sirius XM are more pandemic proof, while their digital commerce subsidiaries QVC, HSN, and Zulily have adapted more readily to the times.

“We moved much of the inventory and on-air time that was spent on things like apparel and beauty over to gardening, home supply,” he tells Mike. “In the case of Zulily we sold something like one million face masks. So, we were really able to shift what our focus was to take advantage of the trends, and business has been very strong.”