For Rocco B. Commisso, family wasn’t a metaphor for how he ran Mediacom—it was the org chart. He worked side by side with his own blood relatives at the company he built from nothing into what’s now the fourth-largest cable provider in the country, and he expected everyone else on the team to be treated with that same loyalty. It’s why his passing in January at age 76 didn’t just ripple through Mediacom—it landed across an entire industry that had come to think of him as one of their own.
“If you take care of me, I will take care of you,” he liked to tell employees—a mantra his son Giuseppe Commisso, now Mediacom’s CEO, calls his own guiding principle as he leads the company.
“I never imagined the success he achieved over the years or the wealth he created, not just for himself, but for everyone who joined the venture at the conception of Mediacom Communications. It was never solely about the wealth—it was about the passion and love for the business,” says Catherine Commisso, who was married to Rocco for 50 years and serves as Mediacom’s Vice Chair & EVP, Corporate Strategy and Administration. “He always said that if you are passionate about what you’re doing, it will never feel like work.”
Rocco was certainly passionate, and no one ever questioned his work ethic. The stories of him arriving in America from Italy at age 12 without speaking English, how he used his accordion skills to secure admission to Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx and how he earned a soccer scholarship to Columbia despite never playing in high school are legendary. Catherine said he worked 40 hours a week just in high school. After college, he joined Pfizer, where he persuaded his boss to finance his MBA at Columbia while working the 4pm-to-midnight shift. In his spare time, he became student body president and helped his brother Nick start a disco in the Bronx.
That was around 1973 when his relationship began with Catherine. Even in love, Rocco, a whiz at numbers, was doing the math. “Our engagement was supposed to last four years, but Rocco wanted to marry in two, and he convinced me I could finish my studies in New York. He was always so quick to plan. In my life with him, I always felt I was catching a train,” she says.
After graduating from business school in 1975, he spent a decade in finance, lending to media and communications companies. That led to him serving as CFO of Cablevision Industries Corporation. After it merged with Time Warner in 1995, Rocco set about creating Mediacom in the basement of his home, acquiring a patchwork of cable systems that were overlooked and underperforming.
His son Giuseppe, then 14, helped him send faxes and set up his computer in those earliest days of the company, giving him a front-row seat to how it was created. “My father’s founding principle was that smaller cities and towns across America deserved the same or better communications services as our nation’s largest metropolitan areas,” says Giuseppe. “He turned that belief into a reality for the 1,500-plus communities served by Mediacom and proved to the broader industry that a smaller market strategy built around advanced technology was both achievable and sustainable.”
Giuseppe wasn’t the only family member Rocco pulled into the venture in its earliest days. Italia Commisso Weinand received a call from her brother in 1996 while she was working at Comcast. She had 19 years in cable under her belt, including stints at Time Inc. and Times Mirror. “Rocco’s idea ‘to serve the underserved markets of America’ resonated with me,” she says. She helped him with some due diligence, and it wasn’t long before she signed on as his third employee, serving as VP, Operations. “It was scary, but how do you say no to your big brother? He was willing to give me free rein because he had that much trust and confidence in what I had already accomplished,” says Commisso Weinand, who was crowned as Comcast’s first-ever GM of the year.
Rocco had bought a system out in California that his sister was visiting every other week. Soon Rocco ran the numbers and convinced her she’d save money by flying on a Saturday. “We always wanted to please Rocco, and I was at the front of the line. His motto was underpromise and overdeliver. Early on, we were a few but mighty, as all the years of experience served us well. In the course of growing, we learned as we performed,” she says. “The secret is that it is difficult to duplicate Rocco’s success because his ethics and morals combined with his genius are difficult to live up to. He was the real thing.”
Today, Mediacom provides internet, video, phone and mobile services to more than 3 million households and businesses across 22 states, mainly in the Midwest and Southeast. It’s been at the forefront of delivering gigabit speeds, with a goal of bringing DOCSIS 4.0 to a million homes by the end of the year.
Rocco’s belief in what smaller markets deserved was matched by an equal belief in the people he did business with. Patriot Media Chairman Steve Simmons felt that loyalty firsthand, and from both sides of the negotiating table. He first met Rocco 50 years ago, when Rocco was a young banker at Royal Bank of Canada. He financed Simmons’ purchase of the jointly owned Long Beach cable system from Times Mirror and Knight-Ridder in 1984. “The transaction was viewed as very risky, but I sensed rightly that Steve would make me look good,” Rocco said in a video for Simmons’ 2015 Cable Hall of Fame induction.
The tables turned when Rocco bought a number of systems for Mediacom, some of them belonging to Simmons. “I forever felt happy for Rocco and sad for me because he always would tell me that some of my systems were the best in his company. I thought, ‘why did I sell?’” recalls Simmons.
The two continued a lifelong friendship, with Simmons co-founding the Entrepreneurs Club, a group of former and present Chairs and CEOs of cable operators that Rocco proudly belonged to—and where he’d happily speak his mind on retransmission consent, carriage fees and other pressing issues. “He’d ask great questions and cause us to have wonderful debate,” says Simmons. “He was just an all-out titan of the industry, and one who fought fiercely for his company and for cable operators.”
Rocco also was a leader in cable in upgrading his systems. Even the more rural areas had money put into them to make sure they got higher internet speeds and new technology.
“He was just an entrepreneur through and through, top to bottom. He did a spectacular job of winding up with almost 100% of Mediacom, and we would talk a lot about how he had no debt,” says Simmons. “That part of it allowed him to become probably the wealthiest of all of us cable industry entrepreneurs, except for [John] Malone, because he had this equity with no debt on the company. It also allowed him to use his cash flow to upgrade those systems and do things to improve the service for customers.”
It was a move Giuseppe didn’t fully appreciate at the time, but values today. “After my father took Mediacom private in 2011, he would often joke that he was the most indebted man in America! While many business leaders in our industry spent the past decade focused on M&A strategies, my father was instead keenly focused on paying down our corporate debt,” he recalls. “As I step into my new role as Mediacom’s Chairman and CEO in a highly competitive broadband market, I feel incredibly fortunate for his emphasis on delivering a clean balance sheet. It is a luxury that very few companies in our business enjoy and I strongly believe it will be a competitive advantage for us moving forward.”
Mediacom’s success let Rocco pursue another one of his passions: soccer. He purchased a majority stake in the New York Cosmos in 2017 and Italian soccer club Fiorentina in 2019. And Columbia University was always in his life. Catherine says he co-founded the alumni advisory group Friends of Columbia Soccer in the mid-1970s and he gave to both the men’s and women’s teams. “He never forgot where he came from; it stayed deep in his mind. The love for soccer gave him a clear path to invest, and he did so profoundly,” she says. “He created the most beautiful soccer training center in all of Europe, Rocco B. Commisso Viola Park. It is the largest training center in Italy, housing the kids’, women’s and men’s soccer teams. He gave Fiorentina what no other owner ever did: a home.”
That willingness to open doors for people extended well past the soccer pitch. Giuseppe said his father would be the first to tell you he was the beneficiary of generosity. “He knew that the scholarship he received to Columbia University changed his life’s trajectory. It is the reason why he gave away nearly 4,000 scholarships to young people during his lifetime,” he says. “He wanted to provide support to young people at a pivotal point in their lives because he knew how important those gestures could be in helping them realize their dreams.”
In 2023, Rocco and Catherine made one of Columbia’s largest-ever gifts for undergraduate scholarships, establishing the Rocco and Catherine Commisso Scholarship at the university’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. The award supports up to 20 students annually, in perpetuity, with eligibility built around Rocco’s life story: students must have lived or studied in Italy, speak Italian, be involved in Italian cultural life, play on Columbia’s soccer teams or hail from the Bronx, with preference given to fellow alumni of Mount Saint Michael Academy. He carried the same instinct into Mediacom itself, where the company’s World Class Scholarship Program has spent years helping the children of Mediacom customers cover the cost of college.
In the streets of Italy, soccer fans would call out “Il Presidente” when they’d see the Fiorentina president. Forbes dubbed him one of America’s wealthiest citizens, with an estimated net worth of $5.6 billion. But such honorifics didn’t matter much to Rocco.
“In the cable industry, he was simply known as Rocco, and so was he in soccer,” says Catherine. “He asked people to call him simply Rocco—titles were not of interest to him; his character was.”