CHARTER COMMUNICATIONS, INC. /MO/ (CHTR) stock intrinsic value fair value estimate & owner earnings analysis

Charter operates the Spectrum-branded cable network, providing residential and business internet, video, phone and mobile service across a large multi-state U.S. footprint. On August 20, 2026, Charter closed two long-pending transactions: it acquired Liberty Broadband in an all-stock merger, and it combined with Cox Communications' residential and commercial cable business, with Cox Enterprises taking roughly a quarter of the combined company's economic interest and Charter assuming close to $13 billion of Cox and Liberty debt. Within a year the parent company plans to take the Cox Communications name, with day-to-day operations continuing under the Spectrum brand. Because this closed only weeks before this analysis and Charter has not yet reported a full quarter of results under the new share count and debt load, the figures below combine Charter's own audited results with the best currently available, still-preliminary combined disclosures, and should be revisited once real combined financial statements are reported. How we valued it. We start from the cash Charter's existing business actually generates, remove the swings caused by working-capital timing and non-cash stock compensation, and then subtract only the capital spending needed to maintain the existing network rather than the extra spending that goes into extending service to new areas or upgrading capacity, which we treat as growth investment. On that basis, Charter's owner earnings per share have ranged from about $21 to $45 over 2019-2025, with a midpoint (median) of just under $32; we used that midpoint, not the most recent year, as the representative starting point for the standalone business, since owner earnings swing a great deal year to year with how much of the capital budget goes into network upgrades versus how many shares Charter has bought back. We then adjusted that starting point down modestly for the newly closed Cox and Liberty transactions: Charter issued roughly 41 million net new shares to complete them and took on nearly $13 billion of additional debt, including new borrowing used simply to fund a cash payment to Cox's prior owner. Charter's own preliminary combined disclosure shows revenue up sharply on a combined basis but net income attributable to Charter shareholders roughly flat to slightly lower for the first half of 2026 versus Charter alone, telling us that Cox's own cash generation, once the extra debt service and revised ownership split are accounted for, is only offsetting the new dilution and financing cost rather than clearly adding to per-share value at this early stage. We used that as our working estimate of today's per-share owner earnings, with a wide band of uncertainty, since Charter itself states it has not yet finished the valuation studies needed to finalize the accounting for the deal. What's changed in the business itself. Residential broadband losses, which ran at about 400,000 for all of 2025, have already been running close to that pace in just the first half of 2026 alone, as fiber overbuilders and wireless carriers' home-internet plans continue to take share; management has acknowledged that an aggressive round of retention discounting in early 2026 did not work as intended and has since pulled it back, which helped video (losses improved sharply, to about 21,000 in the second quarter from 80,000 a year earlier, thanks to better-bundled streaming apps) but created near-term pressure on broadband pricing. Mobile phone service remains the clear bright spot, adding more than 400,000 lines in a single recent quarter, still well under half the penetration of Charter's broadband base, so there is real room for it to keep contributing profit for years. Share buybacks, which drove much of the per-share growth in Charter's owner earnings over the past decade, have been suspended through the third quarter of 2026 to preserve balance-sheet capacity for the Cox transaction, and Charter has set a new target of reducing debt to 3.5 times cash operating profit within three years of closing, down from its prior 4-4.5 times range - both of which materially slow the near-term per-share growth story that supported the previous version of this analysis. The three cases. The base case assumes broadband losses moderate gradually from their current elevated pace as the pricing correction takes hold and Charter's already-underway, subsidized rural network build (roughly 1.3 million new homes reached since 2022) keeps adding addressable customers, while mobile keeps growing for several more years and buybacks resume only modestly once leverage nears its new target; owner earnings per share grow only slightly over the next two to three years before settling into modest mid-single-digit growth, then flattening out again as mobile penetration matures - we see no specific, evidenced reason for growth to continue indefinitely once that point is reached, so we hold value flat in real terms after that. The bear case assumes broadband losses continue at or above their current, already-worse-than-2025 pace, deleveraging takes longer than planned so buybacks stay suspended for years rather than quarters, and refinancing Charter's substantial debt load at today's higher interest rates weighs on cash flow throughout. The bull case assumes the pricing correction and rural build succeed as already evidenced in early results, broadband losses moderate faster, mobile keeps growing at its demonstrated pace, and deleveraging reaches its three-year target on schedule, allowing meaningful buybacks to resume in the back half of the decade. None of the cases assume any benefit we could not point to something Charter has already shown, disclosed or contracted for. A word on the debt. Owner earnings here are calculated after Charter's own interest payments, so we have not separately subtracted its roughly $95 billion of pre-merger debt (now closer to $106-107 billion including the newly assumed Cox and Liberty obligations) - doing so would double count it. Instead, that leverage is the main reason the bear case is meaningfully weaker than the base case, and why per-share value could be quite sensitive to how quickly Charter delivers on its new deleveraging target. What we could not fully reconcile. Because the Cox and Liberty transactions closed only weeks ago, Charter has not yet reported a full quarter of actual combined financial statements - only preliminary, unaudited estimates that the company itself says are subject to change once formal valuation work is complete. We treated those preliminary figures as directional evidence of scale, not as a precise input, which is a meaningful source of uncertainty in this estimate that a normal, already-integrated company would not carry. Bottom line. On the combined business as it stands today, we estimate intrinsic value at roughly $603 per share in the base case, with a range of about $390 in the bear case to $743 in the bull case - all somewhat lower than our prior estimate, reflecting the dilution and added debt from the now-closed Cox and Liberty transactions, the suspension of share buybacks, and broadband losses that have run worse in 2026 than in 2025. Given the size of that range and the genuine uncertainty around a transaction that has not yet produced a full quarter of reported results, the margin-of-safety price carries a considerably larger discount from our base estimate than we would apply to a stable, already-settled business - around $265 per share - and confidence would rise once Charter reports actual (not preliminary) combined results and shows broadband losses stabilizing and leverage trending toward its new target.