Ted Hearn: An Appreciation of Rocco Commisso
Rocco's personal history was compelling and heroic for its rags-to-riches, only-in-America quality and charm
WASHINGTON, Jan. 20, 2026 – The world knows famous mononyms like Madonna, Beyoncé, Oprah, Sting, Tiger and AOC. Too bad the masses didn’t know Rocco – as in Rocco Commisso – as so many did in the cable industry for decades. Rocco, an Italian immigrant who worshiped America, died last week at age 76 after battling some hellish affliction, a ball the old Columbia striker couldn’t run down. His funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan is set for tomorrow morning. Expect the cable establishment to turn out in full to say its last farewell.
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Rocco was a man who did not have much of a filter. If you asked his opinion, you got it and with the bark removed. Two decades ago, I got a phone call out of the blue from Rocco and he was hot. I had Rocco on the line for a half hour and it was all Rocco for at least 29 minutes of it after I picked up and said, “Hello.”
He was furious at the FCC chairman at the time, a whey-faced technocrat who was torturing cable operators with pointless regulatory burdens. When he eventually calmed down, Rocco had made a few things perfectly clear: He loved cable TV, with its stellar broadband run ahead of it, and would battle any Washington, D.C., villain to the death to ensure the long-term success of his biggest business gamble, Mediacom Communications, today a major U.S. cable TV and broadband Internet service provider.
Rocco’s personal history was compelling and substantively heroic for its rags-to-riches, only-in-America quality and charm, as 60 Minutes captured in a 2023 profile of Rocco’s life and business career in the U.S. communications sector and professional soccer in the U.S. and Italy.
Rocco arrived here from Italy as a boy of 12, graduated from Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx in 1967, and attended Columbia University on a full undergraduate scholarship. He earned a BS degree in industrial engineering and an MBA from the Graduate Business School in 1975. Rocco was also a fearless star forward on the Lions’ soccer team.
Rocco founded Mediacom in 1995 and today is 100% owned by the Commisso family. Rocco eventually was all about closing the broadband digital divide with private dollars in rural towns beside cornfields in Iowa and nearly two dozen other states. That was before Washington, D.C., decided it knew better and flooded the zone with promises like the $42.45 billion BEAD program that remain unfulfilled after more than four years as federal law.
Rocco’s dealmaking and management skills generated big returns and made him a billionaire several times over. From 2001, when he closed his last major acquisition, to 2022, Mediacom’s revenue soared from $855 million to over $2.22 billion and its annual adjusted OIBDA from $335 million to more than $1 billion.
“Our consistent financial performance over the past 27 years has been a shining example of American entrepreneurship,” Rocco said in his 2022 Chairman’s Letter.
Rocco could see around corners. More so than anyone else at his level, Rocco predicted that surging programming costs would break the cable TV business and trigger the massive subscriber exodus to streaming services like Netflix and YouTube TV.
“Luckily, we prepared ourselves for the seismic change in the video marketplace. Our early and substantial investments in broadband technology gave us the opportunity to shift our primary business from providing television services to delivering high-speed Internet access,” Rocco said in the 2022 letter.
Rocco was not exaggerating. He built a rural broadband powerhouse with a fortress balance sheet.
Rocco’s company narrative ended just as fiber and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) were ramping up. But Rocco always had a plan, including the July 2024 launch of Mediacom Mobile, the company’s new wireless phone service meant as Rocco’s answer to the convergence trend.
Now, it is up to the next Commisso generation to keep Rocco’s vision alive. For me, there won’t be any more calls from Rocco, but I hope anyone close to Rocco will keep my number handy.
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