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Liberty Media buys F1 and Brings it to the Modern Era
At 3:03:32 · chapter starts 2:43:03
The Liberty Media acquisition is announced in September 2016 at $4.4 billion of equity and $8 billion total enterprise value, structured via a tracking stock on the Formula One Group (ticker: FWONK). Liberty's incoming chairman Chase Carey brought a team of Fox Sports and ESPN veterans: Sean Bratches from ESPN and a crew of NFL OGs. They identified four pillars of transformation. First: a cost cap. The $145M cap (later adjusted to $170M) on car development spending — down from $400–500M for top teams — instantly made every team at or near break-even, with the top teams becoming genuinely profitable for the first time. Average team valuations have since risen 89% in just two years to $3.6 billion on average.[1] Second: rebuild race promoter trust. Liberty got promoters together, shared data, and proposed treating each Grand Prix as a 22-race Super Bowl — complete with celebrity bookings, social media coordination, and shared marketing. Third: open the digital world. Lewis Hamilton's Instagram was no longer under cease-and-desist. F1 leaned into esports, the video game partnership with EA, and the concept of making F1 testing into a marquee media event. Fourth: court Hollywood. Liberty terminated Bernie on January 23, 2017, naming him honorary chairman emeritus — the gentlest possible firing — while Chase Carey took operational control. Within a year, they were deep in conversations with Netflix about what would become Drive to Survive.
