Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong, a former surgeon, is ushering the legacy newspaper into a new era. Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Guardian
Patrick Soon-Shiong despises clickbait and says the future belongs to quality journalism. Will his gamble pay off?
Patrick Soon-Shiong has spent decades trying to cure cancer and made a biotech fortune in the process, making him one of California’s most successful, enigmatic billionaires.
Born in South Africa to Chinese parents, he rose from humble origins and ended up in Los Angeles where he has thrived as a surgeon, scientist and entrepreneur. “The richest doctor in the history of the world,” Forbes magazine declared in 2014.
A bright, restless mind, Soon-Shiong is now seeking to remedy a very different source of malignant metastasis: news.
Fake news, superficial news, clickbait news, shrill, shouty, polarising news, he plans to tackle all these ailments in his latest incarnation as a media mogul.
Soon-Shiong has bought the Los Angeles Times and a handful of other California newspapers for $500m, vaulting him into an exclusive club populated by Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos and a handful of other proprietors.
“I’m a news junkie number one, a complete news junkie,” he told the Guardian in an interview at the LA Times’s new home, a still-under construction 10-acre campus in El Segundo, 20miles south of downtown. “It’s got nothing to do with the business analysis. It’s got to do with an analysis of what’s important for humanity.”
A flamboyant claim from a businessman who trails plaudits as well as controversies. He is widely seen as brilliant and at times bombastic, with promises outstripping reality.
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