When Brian Roberts (pictured above) closed the 2011 acquisition of NBCUniversal from General Electric, Comcast Corporation was worth roughly ten times what Netflix was worth. Today, Netflix is worth about four times Comcast — a roughly forty-fold reversal of relative valuation since Mr. Roberts took over as Chairman.
NLPC has detailed the reversal in its case for Proposal 4 on Comcast’s 2026 proxy ballot, which would separate the offices of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. The exempt solicitation report has been circulated to investors ahead of the June 10 annual meeting. Comcast shareholders can — and should — vote now at www.proxyvote.com.
The Netflix figure is mind-boggling, but the underlying record produced it. Comcast shareholders have lost about 40 percent of their investment, including dividends, over the past five years. The S&P 500 returned roughly 87 percent over the same period — a gap exceeding 125 percentage points. Comcast is itself a component of the index.
Mr. Roberts has all but acknowledged the problem. In October, he told shareholders that Comcast is “making steady progress as we reposition the company for long-term, sustained growth.” A company that requires repositioning is a company that was, until recently, positioned poorly.
The fiscal-year 2025 results bear out the diagnosis: declines in adjusted earnings per share, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted net income. Peacock has accumulated approximately $11 billion in cumulative losses since launch. Comcast lost more than 1.25 million domestic video subscribers in 2025 and continued losing domestic broadband customers — its principal economic moat — to fixed wireless and fiber competitors.
The strategic record is no kinder. In January 2026, Comcast completed the spinoff of Versant Media Group, the cable network portfolio Mr. Roberts spent more than a decade assembling — and which the market now values at about $5 billion. Comcast paid roughly $30 billion in 2011 and 2013 to acquire NBCUniversal, in significant part for the cable assets it has now sent out the door. Versant’s leadership, installed under Mr. Roberts, stripped MSNBC of NBC’s peacock symbol and renamed the network “MS Now” — an open admission that the brand under Comcast had become unrecoverable.
In pursuit of streaming growth at Peacock, Mr. Roberts and co-Chief Executive Officer Mike Cavanagh committed NBCUniversal in 2024 to an eleven-year, $27 billion National Basketball Association rights package — more per year than the company pays the National Football League, even though NFL telecasts consistently outdraw NBA telecasts by a wide margin. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has since cited the NBA pricing in signaling early renegotiation of league media-rights deals as soon as 2026. The bill is coming due, and Mr. Roberts is the one who jacked the price up.
The Warner Bros. Discovery sale process in late 2025 produced the most concise summary of where Comcast stands. Mr. Cavanagh told investors at a December UBS conference that Comcast’s bid was light on cash relative to those from Netflix and Paramount Skydance, that the company “debated whether to bother or not,” and that Comcast “didn’t expect that we had a high likelihood of prevailing.” Paramount Skydance won. Disney absorbed Hulu, FuboTV, and the Fox entertainment assets in recent years. Netflix moves on. Comcast was not a serious bidder, and its own co-Chief Executive Officer said so on the record.
Against this record, Mr. Roberts’s 2025 compensation rose 4 percent to $35.15 million; Mr. Cavanagh’s rose 154 percent to $71.76 million.
Mr. Roberts holds 33⅓ percent of Comcast’s combined voting power through ownership of all Class B common stock — a percentage the proxy statement describes as “generally non-dilutable” — though his economic interest in the company amounts to about 1 percent of total equity. Proposal 4 would, at long last, place a director who answers to all shareholders — not to Mr. Roberts — at the head of the Board that has presided over the reversal. Sixty percent of S&P 500 companies have already separated the two offices.
This is not a new argument. At Comcast’s 2025 annual meeting, NLPC’s similar independent-chair proposal received approximately 27 percent of total votes cast — and approximately 43 percent of votes cast by shareholders other than Mr. Roberts.
In the same meeting, 24.7 million shares were voted to withhold support for Mr. Roberts’s own re-election to the Board — roughly five times the withhold votes received by the Comcast directors with the broadest shareholder support. The Class B vote is what kept Mr. Roberts in office. The unaffiliated vote did not.
Comcast shareholders deserve the same. Vote FOR Proposal 4 at www.proxyvote.com.
(Post references PX14A6G Notice of exempt solicitation)
