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Tag: Patrick Soon-Shiong

  • Warren Buffett’s Final Berkshire Bet Brings Him Back to Newspapers

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    Warren Buffett closed his career with a $351 million New York Times investment, backing one of the last thriving newspaper businesses in a digital era. Daniel Suchnik/WireImage

    It’s only fitting that one of Warren Buffett’s final investments before retirement circles back to the business that first taught him how to make money. In the last quarter of 2025, Berkshire Hathaway bought a $351 million stake (more than 5.1 million shares) in The New York Times Company, according to a regulatory filing this week. The bet speaks to longstanding ties between the newspaper industry and Buffett, who worked as a paperboy in the 1940s.

    Today, Berkshire is known for its long-term investments in insurance, energy and tech. But it was once a prominent media investor before Buffett retreated as digital advertising upended the business. But The New York Times has emerged as one of the industry’s rare success stories. The company added 450,000 new digital subscribers during the October-December quarter and lifted quarterly revenue by more than 10 percent year over year to $802 million. Last year, the company made $344 million in profit.

    Buffett, 95, officially stepped down as Berkshire’s CEO at the end of 2025, handing the reins to his successor, Greg Abel. In many ways, the new stake is a nod to Buffett’s roots. As a teenager living in Washington, D.C., he woke before 5 a.m. to deliver copies of papers, including The Washington Post. His route included six senators and a Supreme Court justice. Showing early signs of the dealmaker he would become, Buffett expanded his territory, eventually delivering some 500,000 papers. The hustle was so lucrative that he filed his first federal income tax return at age 14 after earning more than $500 in 1944.

    His affection for newspapers carried into his tenure at Berkshire, where he invested heavily in media companies such as The Washington Post and even established an annual newspaper-tossing contest at Berkshire’s shareholder meeting.

    Man holding newspaper pictured in crowd of peopleMan holding newspaper pictured in crowd of people
    Warren Buffett takes part in a newspaper-throwing contest during the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in 2015. Photo by Hannes Breusted/picture alliance via Getty Images

    But that love affair frayed as the internet eroded newspapers’ advertising dominance. At a 2010 Berkshire conference, Buffett remarked that it “blows your mind” how quickly the business had unraveled.

    He began pulling back soon after,  stepping down from The Washington Post’s board in 2011. Berkshire, which was at one point the paper’s largest investor, swapped its 28 percent stake in Graham Holdings Co., the Post’s then-parent company, for a Miami television station in 2014. The move followed Jeff Bezos’ $250 million acquisition of the paper a year earlier.

    By the end of the 2010s, Berkshire had exited the newspaper business entirely, selling a portfolio of 30 local publications to Lee Enterprises for $140 million in cash. The group included titles such as Buffalo News, the Omaha World-Herald and Tulsa World.

    “The world was changed hugely, and it did it gradually,” Buffett said of the industry’s decline in a 2019 interview with Yahoo Finance. “It went from monopoly to franchise to competitive to… toast.” Even then, he predicted that major publishers such as The New York Times might endure. As for the rest: “They’re going to disappear.”

    The New York Times has indeed thrived, in part thanks to an aggressive expansion into games, recipes and video. Others have struggled. Under Bezos’ ownership, The Washington Post has wrestled with declining advertising revenue and subscriptions. These troubles came to a head earlier this month, when roughly one-third of the newsroom was laid off, with cuts hitting sports, books, international and metro coverage particularly hard. The Los Angeles Times, owned by biotech entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, has faced similar turbulence, including a newsroom reduction of more than 20 percent in 2024.

    Buffett’s vote of confidence has further buoyed The New York Times. Its stock surged to an all-time high this week after Berkshire disclosed its stake, capping a 12-month run in which shares climbed 57 percent.

    Warren Buffett’s Final Berkshire Bet Brings Him Back to Newspapers

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    Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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  • 1. Patrick Soon-Shiong – Los Angeles Business Journal

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    $20.8 billion

    down 2%

     

    Soon-Shiong’s portfolio saw a slight drop over past 12 months as the value of
    his stake in Culver City immunotherapy firm ImmunityBio shrank. That drop was partially offset by value gains elsewhere, including his stake in the Los Angeles Lakers. Soon-Shiong, 73, a native of South Africa who now lives in Brentwood, came to UCLA in 1983 to pursue a surgical career. He then founded diabetes and cancer biotech firm APP Pharmaceuticals – which sold in 2008 to dialysis firm Fresenius for $4.6 billion – and Abraxis Bioscience, which sold in 2010 to Celgene for over $3 billion in stock and cash. He used the proceeds to set up his Nant family of bioscience companies, which now serves as the backbone of his business empire, including ImmunityBio.

    The value of his stake in ImmunityBio plunged by $1 billion in December as a public offering of stock was priced below the current price at the time. His stake took a smaller hit in May as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration rejected ImmunityBio’s application to expand the use of its Anktiva immunotherapy drug to a larger pool of bladder cancer patients. The agency a few weeks later did approve another expanded use of Anktiva for lymphopenia patients. On the positive side, Soon-Shiong’s 4.5% stake in the Lakers turned out to be more valuable than previously thought. Forbes last October had valued the Lakers franchise at $6.4 billion, making Soon-Shiong’s stake worth about $290 million. But in June, the franchise was sold to a group led by Mark Walters, chief executive of Guggenheim Partners and controlling owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. That transaction valued the Lakers at $10 billion and raised the value of Soon-Shiong’s stake by about $160 million to $450 million.

    In 2018, Soon-Shiong acquired the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Tribune from Tronc (formerly Tribune Co.) for $500 million. After some promising years where he invested heavily in expanding the Times’ newsroom and reach, economic realities of the news business hit hard. He sold off the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2023 to Alden Global Capital. He implemented two rounds of layoffs – one in 2023 and one last year – that totaled roughly 190 newsroom positions. As he announced the second layoff round, he said the paper was losing nearly $40 million a year. He implemented another smaller round of layoffs earlier this year – 14 positions, with another 48 newsroom staff members accepting buyouts.

    In July, Soon-Shiong announced on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” that he plans to take the Los Angeles Times public through a “Reg A” offering with a maximum limit of $75 million. The plan will allow Soon-Shiong to retain majority ownership of the paper once completed sometime next year.He has raised eyebrows for other actions involving the Times. Last fall, weeks before Donald Trump was reelected as President, Soon-Shiong axed an editorial endorsing the Democratic candidate, then-Vice President Kamala Harris. He also announced he was instituting a “bias meter” to alert readers about the ideological tilt of news stories. More than 20,000 readers dropped their subscription in the wake of that news. Education: He has a bachelor’s degree in medicine from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa; a master’s degree from University of British Columbia; and received surgical training at UCLA. Charitable Giving: The Chan-Soon-Shiong Family Foundation has been very active in improving health care delivery in Soon-Shiong’s native South Africa, including a recent $1.6 million grant to fund vaccine research and manufacturing. In 2017, Soon-Shiong and his wife Michelle Chan were invited by the Smithsonian Museum to be part of the museum’s permanent exhibit, “Many Voices, One Nation.”

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  • 1. Patrick Soon-Shiong – Los Angeles Business Journal

    [ad_1]

    $20.8 billion

    down 2%

     

    Soon-Shiong’s portfolio saw a slight drop over past 12 months as the value of
    his stake in Culver City immunotherapy firm ImmunityBio shrank. That drop was partially offset by value gains elsewhere, including his stake in the Los Angeles Lakers. Soon-Shiong, 73, a native of South Africa who now lives in Brentwood, came to UCLA in 1983 to pursue a surgical career. He then founded diabetes and cancer biotech firm APP Pharmaceuticals – which sold in 2008 to dialysis firm Fresenius for $4.6 billion – and Abraxis Bioscience, which sold in 2010 to Celgene for over $3 billion in stock and cash. He used the proceeds to set up his Nant family of bioscience companies, which now serves as the backbone of his business empire, including ImmunityBio.

    The value of his stake in ImmunityBio plunged by $1 billion in December as a public offering of stock was priced below the current price at the time. His stake took a smaller hit in May as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration rejected ImmunityBio’s application to expand the use of its Anktiva immunotherapy drug to a larger pool of bladder cancer patients. The agency a few weeks later did approve another expanded use of Anktiva for lymphopenia patients. On the positive side, Soon-Shiong’s 4.5% stake in the Lakers turned out to be more valuable than previously thought. Forbes last October had valued the Lakers franchise at $6.4 billion, making Soon-Shiong’s stake worth about $290 million. But in June, the franchise was sold to a group led by Mark Walters, chief executive of Guggenheim Partners and controlling owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. That transaction valued the Lakers at $10 billion and raised the value of Soon-Shiong’s stake by about $160 million to $450 million.

    In 2018, Soon-Shiong acquired the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Tribune from Tronc (formerly Tribune Co.) for $500 million. After some promising years where he invested heavily in expanding the Times’ newsroom and reach, economic realities of the news business hit hard. He sold off the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2023 to Alden Global Capital. He implemented two rounds of layoffs – one in 2023 and one last year – that totaled roughly 190 newsroom positions. As he announced the second layoff round, he said the paper was losing nearly $40 million a year. He implemented another smaller round of layoffs earlier this year – 14 positions, with another 48 newsroom staff members accepting buyouts.

    In July, Soon-Shiong announced on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” that he plans to take the Los Angeles Times public through a “Reg A” offering with a maximum limit of $75 million. The plan will allow Soon-Shiong to retain majority ownership of the paper once completed sometime next year.He has raised eyebrows for other actions involving the Times. Last fall, weeks before Donald Trump was reelected as President, Soon-Shiong axed an editorial endorsing the Democratic candidate, then-Vice President Kamala Harris. He also announced he was instituting a “bias meter” to alert readers about the ideological tilt of news stories. More than 20,000 readers dropped their subscription in the wake of that news. Education: He has a bachelor’s degree in medicine from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa; a master’s degree from University of British Columbia; and received surgical training at UCLA. Charitable Giving: The Chan-Soon-Shiong Family Foundation has been very active in improving health care delivery in Soon-Shiong’s native South Africa, including a recent $1.6 million grant to fund vaccine research and manufacturing. In 2017, Soon-Shiong and his wife Michelle Chan were invited by the Smithsonian Museum to be part of the museum’s permanent exhibit, “Many Voices, One Nation.”

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  • ImmunityBio Wins U.K. Approval – Los Angeles Business Journal

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    Culver City-based ImmunityBio Inc. has started to take its Anktiva immunotherapy drug global.

    Last month, the United Kingdom Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency approved Anktiva for treatment alongside a bacterial therapy for certain bladder cancer patients. This is the first approval for Anktiva outside the United States, where it received approval in April of last year.

    Anktiva works by stimulating the production of “natural killer” and T-cells – immune cells that kill cancer cells. ImmunityBio has paired Anktiva with a bacterial agent called Bacillus Calmette-Guérin, or BCG. That benign bacterium induces an immune response in the bladder in proximity to the cancer cells, leading to clearance of the cancer in many patients.

    But in roughly one-third of patients, BCG fails to clear the cancer, and in about half the remaining cases, the cancer returns in a relatively short time. In these instances, according to ImmunityBio, adding in Anktiva to the BCG treatment significantly boosts the chances of clearing the cancer.

    ImmunityBio first submitted Anktiva for approval in the United States with the FDA in late 2023. Initially, the FDA rejected the drug, citing concerns about the quality of the third-party manufacturing process. ImmunityBio addressed those concerns and later resubmitted the drug; this time, the FDA approved it. 

    ImmunityBio announced last week that the Michael DeBakey Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Houston recently became one of the first VA hospitals in the nation to provide Anktiva treatments.

    ImmunityBio has also begun applying for broader use of Anktiva, both to treat other conditions and diseases in the U.S. and to other countries. The U.K.’s Medicines Agency is the first of what the company hopes will be many approvals in the international arena.

    “With the MHRA’s authorization of ANKTIVA plus BCG, we can now offer our immunotherapy outside the U.S. to help patients with a disease that, if not effectively treated, can lead to bladder removal,” Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder, executive chairman and global chief scientific and medical officer of ImmunityBio, said in the company’s announcement.

    Next up abroad for ImmunityBio is the European Medicines Agency, which oversees drug applications for the 27 European Union member states, as well as Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein. Immunity submitted its application to the EMA in January.

    Also last week, ImmunityBio reported favorable early-stage clinical trial results for a new cell therapy drug it is developing to treat a type of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. The news sent ImmunityBio shares up 14% on Aug. 13 to close at $2.82.

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    Howard Fine

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  • Two more LA Times editorial board members resign after the paper withholds a Harris endorsement

    Two more LA Times editorial board members resign after the paper withholds a Harris endorsement

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    LOS ANGELES (AP) — Two more members of the Los Angeles Times editorial board have resigned after the newspaper’s owner blocked the board’s plan to endorse Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

    Veteran journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein announced their resignations Thursday, a day after the editorial page editor Mariel Garza left in protest over LA Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong’s decision not to endorse a candidate.

    Greene, a Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial writing, said in a statement shared with the Columbia Journalism Review that he was “deeply disappointed” in the decision not to endorse Harris.

    “I recognize that it is the owner’s decision to make,” he wrote. “But it hurt particularly because one of the candidates, Donald Trump, has demonstrated such hostility to principles that are central to journalism — respect for the truth and reverence for democracy.”

    Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review that she resigned because the Times was remaining silent on the presidential race in “dangerous times.”

    “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza said. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

    Garza said the board had intended to endorse Harris and that she had drafted the outline of a proposed editorial but that was blocked by Soon-Shiong.

    An LA Times spokesperson did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

    An editorial board operates separately from the newsroom, and its writers’ job is to present an issue and then take a side and lay out arguments to defend it.

    Editorial writer Tony Barboza, who remains on the editorial board, said in a post Friday on an internal Los Angeles Times message board that the board had planned a series of editorials that would have culminated on Sunday with a Harris endorsement.

    “All of it was killed,” he wrote. “I am deeply disturbed to see these facts mischaracterized, and the owner’s decision not to endorse in this consequential race blamed on his employees.”

    Soon-Shiong said in a post on the social media platform X that the board was asked to do a factual analysis of the policies of Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump during their time at the White House.

    Soon-Shiong, who bought the paper in 2018 and is a member of the editorial board, said the board “chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”

    Greene, who wrote about water, drought, and Los Angeles County government, among other topics, said he was also concerned with Soon-Shiong’s assertion that the editorial board had chosen to stay silent.

    Greene wrote that a policy analysis would have to be done by the paper’s news side and that the purpose of an editorial board is “to take a stand and defend it persuasively.”

    “I left in response to the refusal to take a stand, and to the incorrect assertion that the editorial board had made a choice,” Greene wrote.

    Klein said in a statement posted on Facebook that her decision to resign also came after seeing Soon-Shiong’s post on X.

    “The decision to resign was made simple and easy when he posted on X yesterday about his suggestion that the board create an analysis of the positives and negatives of each candidate and let the voters make their own decisions,” she wrote.

    “News side does an excellent job of neutral analysis. That’s not an editorial,” she added.

    In an interview with Spectrum News on Thursday, Soon-Shiong pushed back against criticism that he censored the editorial board.

    “As an owner, I’m on the editorial board and I shared with our editors that maybe this year we have a column, a page, two pages, if we want, of all the pros and all the cons and let the readers decide,” Soon-Shiong said.

    He said he feared endorsing a candidate would add to the country’s division.

    “I want us desperately to air all the voices on the opinion side, on the op-ed side,” Soon-Shiong said. “I don’t know how (readers) look upon me or our family as ‘ultra progressive’ or not, but I’m an independent.”

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  • Washington Post becomes second major US newspaper this week to not endorse a presidential candidate

    Washington Post becomes second major US newspaper this week to not endorse a presidential candidate

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    Less than two weeks before Election Day, The Washington Post said Friday it would not endorse a candidate for president in this year’s tightly contested race and would avoid doing so in the future — a decision immediately condemned by a former executive editor but one that the current publisher insisted was “consistent with the values the Post has always stood for.”

    In an article posted on the front of its website, the Post — reporting on its own inner workings — also quoted unidentified sources within the publication as saying that an endorsement of Kamala Harris over Donald Trump had been written but not published. Those sources told the Post reporters that the company’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, made the decision.

    The Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, wrote in a column that the decision was actually a return to a tradition the paper had years ago of not endorsing candidates. He said it reflected the paper’s faith in “our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”

    “We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable,” Lewis wrote. “We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values the Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”

    There was no immediate reaction from either campaign.

    The Post isn’t the only one going this route

    Lewis cited the Post’s history in writing about the decision. According to him, the Post only started regularly endorsing candidates for president when it backed Jimmy Carter in 1976.

    The Post said the decision had “roiled” many on the opinion staff, which operates independently from the Post’s newsroom staff — what is known commonly in the industry as a “church-state separation” between those who report the news and those who write opinion.

    The Post’s move comes the same week that the Los Angeles Times announced a similar decision, which triggered the resignations of its editorial page editor and two other members of the editorial board. In that instance, the Times’ owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, insisted he had not censored the editorial board, which had planned to endorse Harris.

    “As an owner, I’m on the editorial board and I shared with our editors that maybe this year we have a column, a page, two pages, if we want, of all the pros and all the cons and let the readers decide,” Soon-Shiong said in an interview Thursday with Spectrum News. He said he feared endorsing a candidate would add to the country’s division.

    In August, the newly rebranded Minnesota Star Tribune also announced it would no longer endorse candidates. The paper is owned by billionaire Glen Taylor, who also owns the Minnesota Timberwolves. Its publisher is Steve Grove, who was economic development commissioner in the administration of Gov. Tim Walz — Harris’ running mate.

    Many American newspapers have been dropping editorial endorsements in recent years. That is in large part because at a time readership has been dwindling, they don’t want to give remaining subscribers and news consumers a reason to get mad and cancel their subscriptions.

    Martin Baron, the Post’s executive editor from 2012 to 2021, was in charge of its newsroom in 2013 when Bezos bought the paper. Baron immediately condemned the decision on X Friday, saying it empowers Trump to further intimidate Bezos and others. “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” he wrote. “Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

    What to know about the 2024 Election

    It comes at a time when newspapers are struggling

    The decisions come at a fraught time for American media, newspapers in particular. Local news is drying up in many places. And after being upended by the economics of the internet and drastically evolving reader habits, the top “legacy media” — including the Post, The New York Times and others — have been struggling to keep up with a changing landscape.

    Nowhere is this more true, perhaps, than in the political arena. The candidates this year have been rejecting some mainstream interviews in favor of podcasts and other niche programming, and many news organizations are vigorously ramping up to combat misinformation in near-real time on Election Day, Nov. 5.

    Trump, who for years called the media covering him “the enemy of the people,” has returned to such rhetoric in recent days. His vitriol in particular is aimed at CBS, whose broadcast license he has threatened to revoke.

    On Thursday, at a rally in Arizona, he returned to the language explicitly once more.

    “They’re the enemy of the people. They are,” Trump said to a jeering crowd. “I’ve been asked not to say that. I don’t want to say it. And some day they’re not going to be the enemy of the people, I hope.”

    The Post endorsed Trump’s Democratic rivals in 2016 and 2020, and Trump has often denounced critical coverage by the paper. On Friday, after Trump spoke in Austin, he greeted executives from Blue Origin, Bezos’ space exploration company. Trump spoke briefly with Blue Origin’s CEO and vice president of government relations. Some critics have publicly speculated that Bezos wants to avoid antagonizing Trump.

    For the Post, the decision is certain to generate debate beyond the news cycle. It seemed to acknowledge this with a note from the paper’s letters and community editor at the top of the comments section on the publisher’s column: “I know many of you will have strong feelings about this note from Mr. Lewis.”

    Indeed, by midafternoon, the column had elicited more than 7,000 comments, many critical. Said one, riffing off the Post’s slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness”: “Time to change your slogan to `Democracy dies in broad daylight.’”

    ___

    Steve Karnowski in Minnesota and Jonathan J. Cooper in Arizona contributed to this report. Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation at the AP, can be followed at http://x.com/anthonyted

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