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- The Los Angeles Times, owned by SA-born billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, has fired a fifth of its newsroom last week.
- This sparked a one-day strike.
- Soon-Shiong is also facing pressure as his listed biotechnology company is tanking.
- For more financial news, go to the News24 Business front page.
South African-born billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong is facing a revolt at his publication, the Los Angeles Times, after a fifth of its newsroom was fired last week.
At least 115 people lost their jobs, the largest layoff in the paper's 142-year history, reports the BBC. In June last year, dozens of employees were retrenched as the company faced a financial crisis.
In the past two weeks, the newspaper's managing editor, Sara Yasin, as well as the executive editor, Kevin Merida, resigned. On Friday, hundreds of workers at the paper staged a one-day strike in protest of the layoffs, which Soon-Shiong said "did not help" the situation.
Soon-Shiong was born in Gqeberha in the 1950s to Chinese immigrant parents. He studied medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand before later emigrating to the US via Canada.
He founded his own medical research firm in the early 1990s, and made his fortune in pharmaceuticals and healthcare. He sold two of his companies for a combined $7.4 billion in 2008 and 2010. By 2018, Fortune described him as America’s richest doctor and the richest man in Los Angeles. He also owns a stake in the LA Lakers basketball team.
He bought the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest and most widely read publications in the US, for $500 million (R6 billion at the time) in 2018.
When he launched the takeover, Soon-Shiong told Los Angeles Times journalists:
In a recent interview with the LA Times, Soon-Shiong said he invested almost $1 billion in the paper over the past five years, but that it is still making losses of between $30 million and $40 million a year. He said that Merida and other leaders were not taking the publication in the right direction.
The Hollywood Reporter reported that Shoon-Shiong's 30-year-old daughter Nika Soon-Shiong objected to Merida's recent decision to temporarily ban some reporters from being involved in coverage of the Gaza conflict.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, more than three dozen LA Times journalists signed a statement that was critical of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. According to the publication's sources, Merida restricted signers of the petition from participating in coverage of the conflict for 90 days.
The Hollywood Reporter wrote:
The newspaper's union, the LA Times Guild, claimed last week's the layoffs of columnists, reporters and editors were handled in a "brutal and inhumane" way. Those affected were locked out of the company's communications systems before they could even read the layoff notices in their company email, the union said.
"The LA Times laid us off in an HR Zoom webinar with chat disabled, no Q&A, no chance to ask questions," an employee said, according to a report in the Los Angeles Magazine.
The LA Times Guild also accused the company of attempting to "pit young journalists of colour against more senior employees and gut seniority in the process".
The union says it remains grateful for Soon-Shiong's investment in the newspaper, but said that those entrusted to steward his family's largesse have failed him.
Bloomberg estimates that Soon-Shiong's personal wealth has fallen from $13.3 billion in 2021 to $9.5 billion, as shares in his company ImmunityBio crashed 91% during that time.
The company, which develops treatments for cancer and other diseases, is struggling to gain traction, reports Investor's Business Daily.
