I had to pull over from the highway, while I listened to this month's Burgundy Asset Management Ltd. Book club choice: "Born to Be Wired” the memoir by John Malone.

If you have enjoyed Discovery Channel, BET, bought tickets on Ticketmaster, watched a show on HBO, seen a Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team race, or an Atlanta Braves game, you have been part of Malone’s businesses. He is the quiet engineer who looked at the chaos of cable, broadband and content and saw a system where everyone else saw noise. He funded Ted Turner as CNN was being born, helped wire America for the internet, and put together more mergers than most of us could name. For anyone who loves a good M&A story, and I do, the book is a fire hose.

I thought the Burgundy Analysts in our book club would find the early years of TCI dull as dusty, small-town cable telecommunications businesses merged, but they enjoyed Malone’s analysis of the people and CEOs, how to listen well and why to trust. The Analysts also reminded me, when I enthused about Malone’s talent, that he had another side, and was proud to be called Darth Vader by Al Gore.

What made me pull over was not all the deals. It was the last chapter where Malone stops being a dealmaker and becomes a father. He is blunt about his peers who pushed their children into the family business. Malone says roughly a third of public companies are family dynasties, and he has watched plenty of them fumble the handoff. His peer and rival Sumner Redstone is a cautionary tale. Redstone built a media empire around Viacom and Paramount and could not let go of it. He held control into his nineties. The succession with his children turned public and litigious, including a painful public fight with his own daughter, Shari. By the time the family finally sold control of Paramount, an empire once worth $80b changed hands for less than $8B. Shari was a capable and respected leader. She inherited a company already wounded by a father who would not put his affairs in order.

"There is a time to let go. Not everyone can do it," says Malone.

Malone’s own choice was full of a lifetime's reflection. He offered his children a place in Liberty, the business he built. They passed and he respected that. He and his wife, Leslie, had seen what his life’s work cost Malone, the stress and grip it held on him, and they were adamant their children were entitled to their own lives. “Forcing my kids to take over,” Malone says, “Would be repugnant. My father never expected me to run the family farm. He gave me something better: an education, and a curiosity about the world.”

“Wealth never drove me. You do not gain immortality from a statue. You gain it from the people you have impacted. The highest emotion available to any of us, is gratitude.”

Here is what I see in my work with business families. The founders who struggle most with sudden wealth are the ones who cannot separate their identity from the thing they built. The ones who do it well ask a harder question. "How do I set the next generation free to choose?