Billionaire biotech investor Patrick Soon-Shiong is exploring the sale of the Los Angeles Times less than three years after buying it for $ 500 million, people familiar with the matter said.
The move marks an abrupt turnaround for Soon-Shiong, who had promised to restore stability to the West Coast news institution and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the newspaper in an effort to reverse it.
When Mr. Soon-Shiong acquired the Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune and a handful of weekly newspapers from the Tribune Publishing Co., then called Tronc Inc. in 2018, he was greeted with great fanfare by the team and media observers after years of turbulence and reduced size of publications. At the time, he said that the sale represented the beginning of a new era and that he intended to do whatever was necessary to make the business feasible for the next 100 years.
Since then, he has been unhappy with the slow expansion of his digital audience’s news organization and its substantial losses, people said. He also came to believe more and more that the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune – together known as the California Times company – would be better served if they were part of a larger media group, they said.
Mr. Soon-Shiong has focused heavily on his immunotherapy company’s efforts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine and has had little time to dedicate to the Times, people familiar with the matter said. “Covid really brought him back to the lab,” said one of the people.