My father started a publishing empire – you’ve read my magazines and now I’m worth $16.3 billion
AS the sole heir to his family fortune, Donald Newhouse is behind titles like Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.
His lifelong role at Advance Publications has given the 94-year-old company president a whopping $16.3 billion net worth.
The Newhouse family’s wealth goes back to 1922, when Donald’s father Sam Newhouse Sr. created Advance Publications.
Over the decades, the company has acquired titles under the Conde Naste group including GQ, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.
Advance Publications also owns a majority stake in Reddit.
But the beginnings of the Newhouse empire go back to a tenement on the Lower East Side of New York City.
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That’s where Sam Newhouse Sr. was born in 1895 – the eldest of eight children to Jewish immigrant parents.
After dropping out of school, Sam decided he would make his way in this world by acquiring a bookkeeping qualification, which allowed him to serve as an office assistant in his first job.
Sam would first get the chance to prove his media savvy when he was brought on by Hyman Lazarus, a lawyer, police court judge, and politician.
After he was impressed by Sam’s work ethic as an office boy, Hyman gave him management of the money-losing paper Bayonne Times.
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Sam was promised he could keep a share of the profits if he made the newspaper a success.
This he did, and Sam had discovered a new business model which he would repeat over the decades.
The up-and-coming tycoon built up a fortune by purchasing struggling newspapers in small communities at a bargain price.
ESTABLISHING AN EMPIRE
He then made them profitable by working with advertisers to increase the papers’ revenues, and by buying out local competitors.
His success within the industry led him to purchase Conde Nast in 1959 for $5million.
Sam said of the acquisition: “My wife asked for a fashion magazine and I went out and got her Vogue.”
SUCCESSION
While married to his wife, Mitzi Epstein, Sam had two children to whom he would pass down his flourishing empire – Donald and Sam Jr., often known as Si.
Donald would go on to serve as president of Advance Publications, while Si became chairman.
Their father had a somewhat fraught personal relationship with his two sons, as he revealed in a private memoir A Memo To My Children.
Nevertheless, they continued the work he had begun in building a media empire after Sam passed away in 1979.
Advance Publications founded Bright House Networks in 2003, later selling the cable company to Charter Communication for $10.4billion in 2016.
To this day, the family business owns 8.16 percent of Warner Bros. Discovery, and is the largest shareholder in Reddit.
STILL THE BOSS
Si passed away in 2017, while Donald is still active as company president aged 94.
He is worth around $16.3 billion, according to Business Insider
But the Newhouses aren’t the only family who are keeping their great fortune to themselves.
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Another media empire, Cox Enterprises, is run by the great-grandson of the founder, making the Cox family worth $34.5 billion.
And Fidelity, which has $4.2 trillion in assets under management, is run by the founder’s granddaughter to this day.