Charter to Buy Cox for $34.5 Billion

The combined company, which will be called Cox Communications but headed by current Charter CEO Chris Winfrey, will span 46 states and reach 70 million homes and businesses, said Cox and Charter executives. Attorneys said they expect regulators to approve the deal, but it isn’t yet clear what sort of conditions President Donald Trump's administration might require for approval. “Together, we'll be better positioned to aggressively compete in an expanding and dynamic marketplace against national and increasingly global competitors,” Winfrey said Friday. He predicted the deal could close by mid-2026.

The Charter/Cox deal is expected to require approval from the FCC, DOJ and probably some state telecom regulatory bodies, attorneys told us. Winfrey said on Friday’s call that the companies are prepared to go through a “fulsome” regulatory process. Charter and Cox don’t have overlapping footprints and face “robust competition” from satellite companies and other ISPs in all their markets, Winfrey said. Charter and Cox don’t own media programming and don’t have foreign ties, which would likely also ease the regulatory approval process, wrote LightShed Partners' Walter Piecyk in an email to subscribers.

If the deal closes, the combined company will offer Charter’s current Spectrum-branded services to current Cox customers, and give them “the choice to pay less for new Spectrum bundled services or to keep their current plans,” said the joint news release. Winfrey said the company’s goal will be for employees and customers nationwide to receive the same experience from the combined company. Along with Winfrey staying as CEO, current Cox CEO Alex Taylor will become chair of the new company’s board. Charter’s proposed purchase of Liberty Broadband -- announced in 2024 -- will be completed at the same time as the Cox deal, Charter said Friday.

Attorneys told us that while Charter and Cox are likely to get regulatory approval eventually, it isn’t clear what concessions or conditions the FCC or DOJ might require.

Several attorneys referenced the Trump administration’s punishment of disfavored law firms and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s threats against companies over diversity programs and editorial content as indications that previous expectations about merger conditions may no longer apply. “It used to be that merger conditions would at least be related to something under the Communications Act,” said Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld in an interview. “With these guys, you never know.” Verizon’s purchase of Frontier was approved Friday shortly after the company yielded to FCC pressure to do away with diversity, equity and inclusion policies. The way regulators handle Charter/Cox could provide more certainty for future transactions, one industry attorney told us. “This could potentially start the domino rolling,” he said.

Public Knowledge Legal Director John Bergmayer said the companies could be pressured to agree to “drop cable channels critical of this administration, or agree to censor online content or sites that the administration disapproves of.” Given Carr’s willingness to threaten companies that have angered Trump, “what could once be dismissed as paranoid speculation becomes frighteningly plausible,” Bergmayer said.

Several attorneys told us Friday that they expect broadcasters to seek conditions related to retransmission consent negotiations from the deal. Cable interests have been vocal in opposing NAB’s petition for a mandatory transition to ATSC 3.0, and broadcasters could also seek 3.0-related conditions, attorneys said. A broadcast industry official said Friday that the Charter/Cox agreement illustrated the need for the FCC to roll back broadcast ownership limits.

The Communications Workers of America said regulators should “require conditions to protect the public interest and workers' rights.” Charter “has a record of anti-union actions that keep wages low and workers disempowered,” CWA said. “Without collective bargaining rights for workers, a deal like this one will further entrench the power of cable giant Charter to squeeze workers harder.”

The transaction could be seen as a reaction to the cable industry’s subscriber woes and the scale of competitors such as Google Fiber, said Phillips Lytle attorney David Bronston in an interview. Wrote Piecyk: “In a stagnant cable market, scale is everything, particularly when it comes to bundling broadband and video services." However, said Bergmayer, more consolidation “won’t fix the cable industry, and introducing new sets of competitive problems is no way to address existing ones.”

MoffetNathanson analyst Craig Moffett said in an email to subscribers that mobile services are the reason for the sale. He expects Charter to bring Cox’s wireless services into Charter’s existing mobile virtual network operator deal with Verizon, which likely has better terms than Cox’s. “Charter's mobile-first convergence strategy looks like it is working, and that strategy can be easily ported to Cox,” he wrote. Moffett also downplayed the effect of the purchase. “One should be careful not to overstate just how transformative a transaction like this will be,” he wrote. Cable is a regional business, and the combined company’s increased scale won’t change the competition it faces in any individual market, he said.