In 2020, Patrick Soon-Shiong wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper he owns, reflecting on the murder of George Floyd and what it said about “centuries of racism in America”.
Announcing the Times’s reckoning with itself, in the form of an overview by the paper’s editorial board of the newspaper’s history in covering and employing people of colour, Soon-Shiong told readers: “We invite you along on our journey”.
Soon-Shiong’s personal journey, from an upbringing in South Africa to a self-made biotech billionaire, is impressive. But at points he has struggled to bring Times staff with him – as made clear by the cascade of resignations this week within his paper’s opinion section, all prompted by his refusal to allow the editorial board to endorse Kamala Harris.
“I think my fear is, if we chose either one, that it would just add to the division,” Soon-Shiong told Spectrum News on Thursday, noting that he was registered as a political independent.
The billionaire owner’s refusal to allow the editorial board to make its customary presidential endorsement prompted the public resignations of multiple editorial writers, including a recent Pulitzer prize winner, Robert Greene, and the section’s widely respected editor, Mariel Garza, who said: “I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent.”
It also prompted the beginnings of a revolt among the paper’s subscribers, with nearly 2,000 of them cancelling their subscriptions for “editorial content” reasons on Tuesday and Wednesday alone. The Star Wars actor Mark Hamill was among those who cancelled his subscription in protest, tweeting that he was also “not okay with them being silent”.
Asked by Spectrum News about the readers who were cancelling their subscriptions because of his decision, Soon-Shiong said: “I hope that they understand by not subscribing, it just adds to the demise, frankly, of democracy and the fourth estate.”
Soon-Shiong, 72, was born in South Africa, where his parents had fled from China during the second world war. After taking a medical degree he earned a master’s in Canada before moving to Los Angeles to train as a surgeon, becoming a specialist in pancreas transplants.
He made his fortune after developing Abraxane – a drug for treating breast, lung and pancreatic cancer – and selling two drug companies, APP Pharmaceuticals and Abraxis BioScience. The Bloomberg billionaires index puts his wealth at $11bn (£8.5bn). His compound in the upscale neighbourhood of Brentwood has an underground basketball court on which the late Kobe Bryant sometimes played, according to a 2021 New Yorker profile of Soon-Shiong. A big basketball fan, he has a minority stake in the LA Lakers team.
The New Yorker profile says Soon-Shiong likes to describe himself as an “accidental billionaire”.
“I would like to be remembered, primarily, as a physician-scientist,” he says in the profile. The article describes Soon-Shiong as “patient and kind, never pushy”, which chimes with some accounts from people who have worked under Soon-Shiong at the LA Times, who portray a well-intentioned owner who nonetheless struggled to grasp what it would take to turn the title into a modern digital news publication.
Norman Pearlstine, the former Time Inc executive he brought in as the LA Times’s executive editor, told the New Yorker: “He made the acquisition with very little due diligence, because he thought that it had to be easier than curing cancer. I’m not sure whether he still believes that.”
Soon-Shiong bought the Los Angeles Times and other local papers for $500m in 2018, and said early this year that he had invested “hundreds of millions of dollars – approaching $1bn” in sustaining the paper, which has won a score of Pulitzer prizes under his ownership.
Other profiles have been more critical. In 2014, Forbes described the billionaire as “undeniably brilliant” but “equally undeniably a blowhard”, noting that his X handle at the time was @Solvehealthcare, and describing him as someone with “a deep streak of P.T. Barnum showmanship”. The New Yorker journalist who profiled Soon-Shoing added: “I wouldn’t call him modest.”
Soon-Shiong and his wife donated heavily to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, although, according to Politico, he then met Donald Trump in an unsuccessful attempt to secure a job in his administration. In those 2017 discussions with Trump and his advisers, Soon-Shiong was seeking an appointment as Trump’s “health care tsar ”, a senior role with broad authority over health in the US, Stat News reported.
While many responses to his decision to block an endorsement have been harshly critical, Soon-Shiong has received praise, including from fellow South African-born billionaire Elon Musk. Musk, who has endorsed Trump, responded to Soon-Shiong on X that his rationale “makes sense”, and responded to another post about Soon-Shiong blocking an endorsement of Harris with “good for Patrick”.
The opinion section departures follow a difficult start to 2024 for the Times. Kevin Merida resigned as the paper’s executive editor in January, shortly before the Times laid off 115 journalists, approximately 20% of its newsroom. The New York Times later reported that Soon-Shiong had tried to dissuade Merida from pursuing a story about a wealthy California doctor who was an acquaintance of Soon-Shiong’s, and the doctor’s dog, and that the interaction had been one factor in Merida’s departure. In a statement to the NYT, the LA Times said Soon-Shiong had asked for “truthful, factual reporting” on the story.
Soon-Shiong said that sweeping layoffs this January “were necessary because the paper could no longer lose $30m to $40m a year without making progress toward building higher readership”, the LA Times reported.
Matt Pearce, a former Times reporter and union organiser, praised Soon-Shiong’s investment in the newspaper, writing in a newsletter this week that “a lot of people don’t understand exactly how much money he has poured into journalism in Los Angeles”.
However, Pearce said Soon-Shiong’s statement on the non-endorsement was “throwing his own employees under the bus”.
By seeking to avoid division, Soon-Shiong has created it within his own newspaper.
The LA Times has been approached for comment.