Friend of Trump, “America’s richest doctor,” and billionaire biotechie Patrick Soon-Shiong has agreed to shell out $500 million to the LA Times’ Chicago-based parent company Tronc for the LA Times and its sister paper down south, the San Diego Union-Tribune. As part of the deal, Soon-Shiong’s investment firm will also assume pension liabilities to the tune of $90 million.
Why the deal is happening now is not clear, but reports are that Tronc will shift the money to pay down its $368 million debt and boost the papers still under its umbrella, including the Orlando Sentinel and the Chicago Tribune. At least one local, investment banker Lloyd Greif, thinks that the biotech billionaire’s motives are about helping out his city, the LA Times reported.
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That might be the case, but Soon-Shiong’s reputation as a grandstander precedes him. Is his purchase of the two newspapers a grand or a grandiose gesture?
Soon-Shiong’s history suggests a tendency to the latter. His vow to win the war on cancer in a “cancer moonshot” that he proposed at the same time as Joe Biden’s identically named initiative has gained little traction in terms of research output but a lot of traction for his business interests, STAT reports (Soon-Shiong has since changed the name of his elusive program to “Cancer Breakthroughs 2020).
STAT, keeping a close eye on the good doctor, also reported that with one of his charitable giveaways, he managed to boomerang a substantial chunk of the donation back into his businesses. And at least two of those businesses related to his vow to win the war on cancer have seen big losses and tumbling stocks.
In June, he did an interview with MedCity News, where he chalked up reports that his businesses profited from his charitable donations as motivated by politics. Still, he has a long way to go before he can silence critics.
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In addition to being a friend of Trump, Soon-Shiong is also a friend of Biden. With his connections, it doesn’t seem like he needs a finger on the scale measuring his political clout. But he may feel that owning an iconic newspaper in a major US city certainly might shift political balance in his favor if he seeks some kind of editorial control.
That said, according to Fast Company, Soon-Shiong, who was born in South Africa but has been at UCLA since 1980, is a “diehard Angelino.” It’s possible that he wants to do his favorite city a good turn. It’s also possible, given his tendency to collect everything from a piece of Tronc to a piece of the LA Lakers, that he’s just adding another bauble to his collection. Sean Captain, writing at Fast Company, has chronicled Soon-Shiong’s various forays and feints and expresses some skepticism that there will be transparency about the billionaire’s motives in pursuing this new adventure.
Forbes puts the doctor’s net worth at $7.8 billion, which is a lot of fresh blood to infuse into a newspaper that has sustained considerable wounds. Soon-Shiong must think owning newspapers has something to give him, as well: He’s paying twice as much for the pair of outlets as Jeff Bezos paid for The Washington Post. Whether or not part of his motivation is keeping up with the Bezoses is also not clear, but Bezos at least had some experience in publishing—or in going to court with publishers—when he bought his newspaper.
Soon-Shiong owns healthcare startup network NantWorks, which likely involves limited publishing experience, but he is one of Tronc’s largest shareholders. Indeed, he has been wrangling for months over the LA Times with Tronc chairman Michael Ferro. Since last spring, the two have engaged in a public exchange of salvos fired off in letters from their lawyers.
The relationship between Tronc and the LA Times has been similarly fraught since the Chicago-based company’s predecessor acquired the newspaper in 2000. Tensions peaked in the last few weeks when Times staff voted to unionize after enduring a series of cutbacks that reduced their numbers by about 900 from their peak, the The Washington Post reported. Reports that Tronc had set up an ad hoc group of contributors who weren’t part of or sited in the newspaper’s press room only heightened the tensions.
Perhaps because Soon-Shiong calls LA home, news of the pending deal generated some unexpected optimism about a paper that’s seen an endless cycle of editor and publisher turnover, in addition to the tensions between Tronc and staff. Other responses were more practical, the LA Times reported, quoting Gabriel Kahn of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism as saying, “I hope that he can stand the sight of blood because it is going to take a lot of investment to turn the paper around.”