Richard Parsons, who presided over Time Warner as CEO from 2002-2007 as the media conglomerate was recovering from the epic fail of the AOL merger and who later became interim chairman of CBS to right its ship following the resignation of Leslie Moonves, died Thursday in Manhattan after a long illness. He was 76.
Parsons’ longtime friend Ronald S. Lauder, a member with Parsons of the Estée Lauder board, told the New York Times today that Parsons died of bone cancer.
One of nation’s most powerful Black executives, Parsons was an astute, soft spoken and genial presence. He was born in 1948 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and grew up in Ozone Park, Queens, the son of an electrical technician and a homemaker and one of five children. He attended the University of Hawaii and went on to a law degree at Union University Albany.
Parsons served in both state and federal politics under New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, and presidents Gerald R. Ford, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In 2008, he was a member of the then president-elect Obama’s Economic Transition Team and later served as a member of Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
He took the helm of the company then called AOL Time Warner in 2002, replacing the late Gerald Levin as CEO. Faced with economic and culture-clash fallout from what is widely considered one of the worst mergers in corporate history, he removed ‘AOL’ from the company’s name and, dramatically, from atop its former Columbus Circle headquarters the Time Warner Center in 2003.
He had joined Time Warner as president in 1995 and voted for the merger, which was inked by Levin just as the dotcom boom crested and broadband was set to displace dial-up services like AOL. He faced massive losses, furious investors and challenges of getting the business back on track even as he fended off corporate raider Carl Icahn, who was pushing for the company to split up. Parsons reached an agreement with the activist investor, known for his recent unsuccessful shots to scale the board of Disney. In 2009, Time Warner spun out AOL as a separately stand-alone company.
Parsons handed the Time Warner reins to then-COO Jeff Bewkes, who led the pared down company, which also sold its stories music and magazine divisions, through to its subsequent sale to AT&T.
Discovery Communications acquired the company in 2022. “All of us at Warner Bros. Discovery suffered a terrible loss today,” said David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery.
“I met Dick Parsons about 30 years ago when I started at NBC. He was a great mentor and friend. I knew him as tough and brilliant negotiator, always looking to create something where both sides win. All who got a chance to work with him and know him saw that unusual combination of great leadership with integrity and kindness. Dick played both an enormous role in building Time Warner but was also one of the great problem solvers this industry has ever seen. It’s why so of us many looked up to him and sought his wise advice.”
Parsons was named chairman of Citigroup in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, helping to steady the banking giant, much as he did decades earlier in his trailblazing first corporate turnaround with the company that became Dime Bancorp. In a New York Times interview in 1998 when he took the top job at Dime, he was asked about being a black executive who was the first to run a savings and loan of that size. “The fact is, in this society, you are going to be held to a higher level of accountability,” he said.
He was named interim CEO of the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014 amid the scandal around then-owner Donald Sterling and forced Sterling to resign and sell the team.
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In September 2018, Parsons, who had been serving as an advisor to CBS controlling shareholder Shari Redstone’s National Amusements amid a battle with Moonves for control of CBS Corp, was appointed interim CBS chairman after Moonves was forced resignation amid allegations of sexual misconduct from several women.
That tenure lasted just a month, however, resigning in October of that year. Parsons cited health reasons related to his ongoing fight with multiple myeloma as the reason for his sudden exit.
In all ventures, his extreme likability served him well. A statement today by Lazard, where he served as a board member, recalled a longtime friend who said Parsons had “the ability to make friends … in an empty elevator.”
He co-founded VC investment firm Imagination Capital in 2017. He has served on the boards of Citigroup, Estee Lauder, among others, and been a longtime senior advisor to giant Providence Equity Partners. He served as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation.
A wine afficionado, Parsons acquired Il Palazzone winery in Montalcino, Tuscany, a premium producer of Brunello, in 2002. He sold it in 2021.
He was a significant contributor to arts and culture, serving as chairman of the Apollo Theater and the Jazz Foundation of America, and sitting on the boards of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Parsons also served as chairman of the Equity Alliance, founded in 2021 to invest in venture capital fund managers and founders who are people of color and/or women.
In recent years, said Lazard, “Dick turned his attention to what he saw as one of American business’s most pressing challenges — the need to democratize access to capital. Through his leadership of Equity Alliance, he understood deeply that success in life was, as he often quoted, ‘10% what you know, 10% who you know and 80% luck’ — and he was a trailblazer in helping others access all three.”
