Jeff Bezos, Laurene Powell Jobs, now Marc Benioff: Why billionaires are buying media companies

FAN Editor

Another tech billionaire is jumping into the media business: Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne Benioff announced Sunday they would buy Time Magazine for $190 million from Meredith Corporation.

Benioff is worth $6.6 billion according to Forbes, and is the CEO of the $118 billion cloud software company Salesforce.

“The Benioffs are purchasing TIME personally and the transaction is unrelated to Salesforce.com,” according to a press release about the deal. Although the couple won’t be involved in “the day-to-day operations or journalistic decisions,” according to the release, Benioff tweeted that they have “deep respect for [the Time] organization” and are “honored to be stewards of this iconic brand.”

Benioff is just the most recent tech billionaire to buy a media company.

In July 2017, The Emerson Collective, a non-profit run by the philanthropist and billionaire widow of Apple’s Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell Jobs, bought a major stake in The Atlantic magazine.

The 160-year-old publication is “one of the country’s most important and enduring journalistic institutions,” Jobs said in a July statement, and Emerson Collective planned to “ensure that The Atlantic continues to fulfill its critical mission at this critical time.”

Billionaire Jeff Bezos says he bought the Washington Post for similar reasons, even though the newspaper had been losing revenue for several years before he came on board.

“I said to myself, ‘If this were a financially upside down salty snack food company, the answer would be no,'” Bezos told an audience at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. on September 13 about agreeing to buy the company. “But as soon as I started thinking about it that way, it was like, ‘This is an important institution.’ It is the newspaper in the capital city in the most important country in the world. The Washington Post has an incredibly important role to play in this democracy, there’s just no doubt in my mind about that.”

Bezos purchased the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million through his company Nash Holdings LLC.

In June, former surgeon and biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune and several community newspapers for $500 million. He told CNBC earlier this month that he doesn’t view other newspapers as “rivals” but as “industry compatriots.”

“I think we need to defend the whole area of democracy in which these newspapers are really another Fourth Estate,” Soon-Shiong says.

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Don’t miss: How Amazon founder Jeff Bezos went from the son of a teen mom to the world’s richest person

This article is an updated version of a previously published story.

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