John Malone says there’s a misguided ‘land rush’ in stocks right now akin to late ’90s bubble

Liberty Media Chairman John Malone said the sizzling IPO market and soaring equity valuations remind him of the dotcom bubble in the late 1990s.

“There’s no question that the equity markets right now are so interested in growth above all other criteria and this is, like, the bubble in the late ’90s … through 2000,” Malone said in an interview with CNBC’s David Faber. “It’s all about growth. This is a land rush right now. Profitability to be determined later.”

It’s been a blockbuster year for U.S. public-market listings, which just surpassed an unprecedented $1 trillion marker, a record that more than doubles 2020 levels. Amid the IPO boom, many money-losing startups are able to score sky-high market capitalizations that some believe are detached from their fundamentals. The fixation on future growth and profitability sparked worries among investors and strategists on Wall Street about the level of froth in the market right now. The S&P 500 is up 25% this year.

“If you have a lot of cheap money creating too much competition particularly in capital-intensive businesses, it can wreck the profitability of any business,” Malone said. “There’s a car company [Rivian] that I guess is just going public that has a $130 billion market cap and hasn’t built a car yet.”

Rivian notched the second-highest valuation for a listing this year after its offering increased its total by about $67 billion. Shares of the electric-vehicle maker at one point doubled in value, trading around $150 billion at its high. Yet, Rivian is still losing money and barely generating revenue.

The 80-year-old mogul said he’s spent his career building businesses with long-term horizons and solid fundamentals.

“I’ve always been a long-term investor and so I’m much more interested in building this business brick by brick, making it solid and sticky,” Malone said. “‘How can you grow it,’ and, ‘how can you grow pricing power,’ and, ‘how can you defend the franchises that you’re building?'”

Malone built cable empire TCI in the 1970s before selling it to AT&T in 1999 for roughly $50 billion. Malone is now chairman and largest voting shareholder of Liberty Media.