Who Owns Comcast?

Comcast has no owner, but the Roberts family controls it. Comcast Corporation is listed on Nasdaq, and Brian Roberts holds a special class of stock carrying a fixed one-third of all votes — an entitlement written into the company’s constitution and unaffected by how many shares anyone else buys. In Britain that matters because Comcast owns Sky. Ownership verified 6 September 2026.

Who owns Comcast today?

Comcast Corporation is a public company registered in Pennsylvania and based in Philadelphia. Ownership sits with its shareholders; the largest are the index managers — Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street.

Control sits elsewhere. Brian L. Roberts, son of the founder Ralph Roberts, holds all of the Class B common stock, which carries a fixed 33⅓% of the combined voting power of the company.

Ultimate parent and corporate structure

There is nothing above Comcast Corporation. Beneath it sit NBCUniversal, Sky and its American cable business.

The Class B arrangement is the most unusual founder-control device covered on this site, and it is worth understanding precisely. Most such structures give the holder a multiple of votes per share — ten at Alphabet, twenty at Roblox — so their share of the vote falls if the company issues more stock.

Comcast’s does not work that way. The Class B holder’s 33⅓% is fixed as a proportion of the whole, not derived from a share count. Comcast can issue as many ordinary shares as it likes and the entitlement does not dilute. It is a constitutional floor rather than an arithmetic outcome.

One third is not a majority, but combined with a board and a shareholder base that has never united against it, it has given the family effective control for decades.

Major shareholders or controlling persons

Brian Roberts is the controlling person in practice. His economic stake is a small percentage of the company — far smaller than his voting entitlement.

Institutional investors hold the overwhelming majority of the economics. Attempts to abolish the Class B structure have been raised at shareholder meetings and have not succeeded.

Official records and evidence

Comcast files with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and the annual proxy statement sets out the Class B entitlement in terms — it is the authoritative source and is free to read.

Companies House is informative here for a different reason. Comcast Corporation is named directly on the UK register, as the person with significant control of Sky New Media Ventures Limited, with company number 27-0000798 and notified 9 October 2024. As this site’s Sky page records, that entry was the end point of a reorganisation that moved four times in nine days without changing who owned anything.

Ownership history and changes

Comcast began in 1963 when Ralph Roberts bought a small cable system in Tupelo, Mississippi. It has never been acquired and has grown almost entirely by purchase.

• 2002 — acquires AT&T Broadband, becoming the largest US cable operator.
• 2011–2013 — buys control of NBCUniversal from General Electric, then the remainder.
• 2018 — wins Sky in a rare Takeover Panel blind auction against Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, at a price reported above £30bn.

Two large attempts failed: a hostile bid for Disney in 2004, and a bid for Time Warner Cable in 2014 abandoned under regulatory pressure. Losing the Fox assets to Disney in 2018 is what redirected Comcast towards Sky.

Related companies and brands

Comcast owns Sky, Sky News, Sky Sports and Now in the UK; NBC, Universal Pictures, Peacock and the Universal theme parks in the US; and Xfinity, its American cable and broadband brand.

It does not own Disney, despite the 2004 approach, and it no longer competes with Fox for Sky — Fox sold its stake to Comcast when the auction was lost. The Murdoch association with Sky ended in 2018 and is the single most persistent error about the company’s ownership in Britain.