Following additional clinical trials, the F. These developments suggest that Soon-Shiong had helped invent a better drug. In , the insurer Anthem started a program that identified effective cancer treatments, then paid doctors an additional fee to prescribe them.
When treatments were equally effective, Anthem chose the one that cost less. Abraxane made the cut only for pancreatic cancer; for breast and lung cancers, Anthem deemed paclitaxel a less expensive and equally effective drug. Anthem still reimburses costs for Abraxane when used for any of the three cancers.
In a transaction known as a reverse merger, publicly traded American Pharmaceutical issued millions of new shares to acquire privately held American BioScience—its own largest shareholder. Less than fifteen months after the merger, Soon-Shiong announced that he was splitting the companies up again. In , Abraxis BioScience was sold to the biotech firm Celgene for nearly three billion dollars. Having started from nothing fourteen years earlier, and operating outside his medical specialty, Soon-Shiong was now worth more than seven billion dollars.
Soon-Shiong was not name-dropping; these men really are his close friends. And such a good friend. The next day, Oliver was better. Everyone brought up the basketball court. And bowling alleys. Just like a big N. Soon-Shiong and Kobe Bryant were close. When Bryant ruptured his Achilles tendon, in , during a Lakers game, Soon-Shiong rushed to the locker room to meet him. An Achilles rupture can cause heavy swelling around the ankle, and the standard medical procedure is to wait until the swelling subsides before surgically reattaching the tendon.
But Soon-Shiong had ruptured his own Achilles playing basketball a few years earlier, and claimed to have devised a novel approach to treating the injury. He advised Bryant to have the operation immediately. Soon-Shiong, who had not performed surgery in years and had no background in orthopedics, was in the operating room.
Bryant returned to the court the following season, but never won another championship. I definitely listen. Soon-Shiong purchased his share in the Lakers in , from Magic Johnson. By this time, he had returned to U. In , he was part of an unsuccessful bid to buy the Dodgers.
In , he invested in the startup Zoom, which was valued at fifty million dollars. The company is now worth seventy billion dollars. Soon-Shiong invested in clean-tech ventures and marketed his own I. His wife, Michele, opened a movie studio, and he invested in an e-sports platform. Michele, a practicing Catholic, persuaded him to donate to several Christian charities. Soon-Shiong grew up in the Anglican Church, and still occasionally attends services.
He acquired a controlling stake in the parent company of Verity Health Systems, which ran six hospitals in California. Verity Health filed for bankruptcy in ; critics noted that the hospital chain had spent more than twenty million dollars upgrading its I. After Verity failed, Soon-Shiong acquired control of St. Vincent Medical Center in downtown L. By , Soon-Shiong had emerged as the sole owner of the paper.
In our initial conversation, he recalled his first real job, as a teen-ager, delivering copies of the Evening Post off the back of a truck in Port Elizabeth.
The L. In the nineteen-sixties, along with the rest of California, the paper tacked left. An era of liberal respectability followed: the paper won numerous Pulitzers and carried a thick classified-advertising section. By the time Soon-Shiong acquired control, the paper was much reduced. The modern news business relies more on paid digital subscriptions than on display advertising. That model is well suited for large platforms like the New York Times , which tripled its subscriber base while Trump was in office.
Such growth can come at the expense of local papers; the Times now has more subscribers in Dallas than the Dallas Morning News does. The middle ground is vanishing, and, to survive, the L. Times needs a national audience. After the murder of George Floyd , in , when Pearlstine was the editor, the L.
Erin B. Logan was impressed. In December, , Pearlstine left the Times. Still, he remains fond of Soon-Shiong, who, he said, had never interfered in editorial coverage. Merida, who is Black, previously ran the multimedia platform the Undefeated, at ESPN, which focussed on the cultural intersection of race and sports.
He told me that he thought the Times could reach a million subscribers. Soon-Shiong seems less interested in the news business in general than in the L. Times specifically. To buy the paper, he had to take a substantial minority stake in Tribune Publishing, the parent company of the Baltimore Sun , the New York Daily News , the Chicago Tribune , and several other regional newspapers.
Before my first conversation with Soon-Shiong, his representative sent me a one-page fact sheet listing areas in which he is currently active. Of the twenty-five business lines, the L. In satellite photographs, the town of El Segundo looks like an abandoned game of SimCity. Some sixteen thousand people live there, in a small rectangle of tract housing, penned in by LAX, an oil refinery, an industrial park, and a sewage-treatment plant.
Inside the NantWorks galaxy, there is NantHealth, which builds diagnostic medical software; NantCloud, which offers cloud-computing services; ImmunityBio, which develops immunotherapy treatments for cancer; and NantStudios, a movie soundstage and visual-effects studio. In , Soon-Shiong relocated the Times to a nondescript office building in this industrial suburb, facing the highway, steps from the airport. The facility looked a bit like a brewery. Soon-Shiong manages activity at NantWorks virtually.
Our first conversation took place in June, , after L. County had loosened its mask requirements. Soon-Shiong thought that this was foolish. When we spoke a month later, amid a spiking caseload, the mask mandate had been reinstated.
Soon-Shiong also predicted that the vaccines would be less effective against the Delta variant; this proved true as well. This is actually the factory, where the virus reproduces itself. Soon-Shiong continued diagramming various biological structures. Episodes Love and Fortune. Season 1. Release year: Episode 1 24m. Episode 2 24m.
Episode 3 24m. Episode 4 24m. Episode 5 24m. Episode 6 24m. Episode 7 24m. Episode 8 24m. Episode 9 24m. Episode 10 24m. Episode 11 24m. Episode 12 24m. More Details. Still, they decided not to purchase it for their collection, so Mary took the pendant to Sotheby's. The experts at the auction house felt the piece was much more valuable, because it was believed to be one of only three similar items known to exist.
But as the saying goes, "Never count your millions until the auctioneer bangs his gavel. Sotheby's put the pendant up for auction on July 9, , making it the highlight of a large lot of antique sculptures. Clearly the expectations were high. Mental Floss: 6 articles of clothing that caused riots. In , Teri Horton, a retired truck driver, went to her local thrift store to buy a depressed friend a gag gift. She found a rather large painting -- 66 inches by 47 inches -- that she thought was pretty amusing because it was, in her opinion, so ugly.
In the end, her friend didn't want it she, too, thought it was ugly, plus it wouldn't fit through the door of her trailer , so Teri took it home and tried to unload it at her garage sale. A local art teacher saw the painting and suggested it could very well be a Jackson Pollock. However, due to the painting's lack of verifiable history of ownership called "provenance" , the piece is disputed by many fine arts experts as simply another artist's work inspired by Pollock.
To find proof of Pollock, Teri had the work examined by a forensic specialist who claims to have found a fingerprint that matches one in Pollock's studio. But even the fingerprint evidence has been disputed by the art world, leaving the painting, as yet, unsold.
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