The Top 10 Billionaire Backers of Music Companies

Media-shy Phil Anschutz doesn’t get the attention of other sports and media titans, but it’s not for lack of market power. The privately held Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), a subsidiary of The Anschutz Corporation, is a powerhouse and ranks second in concert promotion behind Live Nation. AEG owns and operates Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, among other venues, has a 50% stake in one of its tenants, the Los Angeles Kings professional hockey team, and owns a minority piece in another, the Los Angeles Lakers professional basketball team. AEG Presents was built through acquisitions such as Concerts West and Goldenvoice to help keep Anschutz’s venues filled with entertainment options. Its portfolio includes more than 25 festivals, including trend-setting Coachella, and more than 100 venues. Currently, Forbes puts Anschutz’s net worth at $16.9 billion, making him the 45^th richest person in the world. In 2012, when AEG was taking bidders, the company was reported to be worth $8 billion to $10 billion. Given the acceleration in values of professional sports teams and live music companies over the last dozen years, it’s safe to say AEG has appreciated nicely. 

Bolloré, one of the world’s 500 largest companies, is the largest shareholder in the world’s biggest music company, Universal Music Group (UMG). Through his family-controlled company, Bolloré, Frenchman Vincent Bolloré has a long history of investments in media and telecommunications —Telecom Italia, advertising giant Havas, video game company Ubisoft and UMG — in addition to energy, transportation and logistics. After Vivendi spun off UMG in 2021, Bolloré held 18.01% of the company. The Bolloré company is also the largest shareholder in French conglomerate Vivendi, which owns a 9.98% stake in UMG. Those two ownership interests give Bolloré direct and indirect control over more than a third of UMG, and a UMG board seat held by son Cyrille Bolloré ensures the family company maintains influence over the company’s strategy and fortunes. As of Wednesday (Dec. 11), Bollore’s combined stake in UMG alone was worth $9.1 billion.   

If you’ve lived in the New York area, you’ve probably been to a venue, watched a sports network or paid for tickets to a sports team owned by companies controlled by the Dolan family. Charles Dolan got his start by founding Sterling Manhattan Cable, a cable television provider, in 1962 and Home Box Office (HBO) in 1972. He sold both companies to Time Life Inc. and started Cablevision, a cable television operator serving New York and surrounding areas, which was acquired by Altice in 2016 for $17.7 billion. Thanks to its purchase of the Madison Square Garden Company, the Dolan family became owners of New York sports teams and venues, among other assets. Today, their media and live events businesses are held in MSG Entertainment and Sphere Entertainment Co., owner of Sphere in Las Vegas and MSG Networks. Charles’ son James Dolan is executive chairman/CEO of both companies as well as MSG Sports, the owner of professional sports teams the New York Knicks and New York Rangers. Forbes currently puts Charles Dolan and his family’s net worth at $5.4 billion.  

First on the list of Reservoir Media’s largest shareholders is Wesbild, Inc. & Affiliates with a 44% stake in the multi-faceted music company that trades on the Nasdaq exchange. Reservoir Media was founded in 2007 by Vancouver-based Persis Holdings, a Canadian conglomerate built by Hassan Khosrowshahi, a business executive who emigrated from Iran in 1981 and father of Reservoir Media CEO Golnar Khosrowshahi. The family company’s holdings also include DRI Capital, an investor in healthcare royalty investments, and Wesbild, a developer of master-planned residential and resort communications and investor in commercial and industrial projects in Western Canada. In 1982, Khosrowshahi founded Future Shop, a Canadian consumer elections retailer that grew to 88 locations before being acquired by Best Buy in 2001 for $377 million. In 2018, three years before Reservoir listed on the Nasdaq, his net worth was estimated to be $1.2 billion CAD (approximately $850 million) by Canadian Business magazine. As of Wednesday (Dec. 11), Wesbild’s 44% stake in Reservoir Media was worth $269 million.  

Burkle, a self-made grocery store magnate, has a long history of investing in the music business. Most recently,his Yucaipa Companies invested in Day After Day Productions and formed a joint venture with London-based K2 Agency. Going further back, Yucaipa bought wholesale music and video distributor Alliance Entertainment in 1999 and merged it with Source Interlink in 2005. Burkle, whose net worth Fortune puts at $3.2 billion, later went big game hunting, attempting to acquire Warner Music Group (bought by Access Industires in 2011) and EMI Music (purchased by Universal Music Group in 2012). In 2013, he backed IBZ Entertainment, an Ibiza-based programmer and booker of EDM artists when Tom Sillerman was rolling up EDM companies into SFX Entertainment. In 2012, Burkle’s Y Entertainment Group invested in Hollywood studio Relativity Media and acquired Artist Group International, which merged with APA in 2023—two years after Burkle provided APA a financial lifeline during the pandemic. Burkle’s investments extend well beyond music. In 2010, along with Guy Oseary and Ashton Kutcher, he founded A-Grade Investments, which has funded such tech startups as Spotify, Uber and Airbnb.   

It is often said that the music industry is a small world — a maxim that can be extended to the billionaires investing in it. This summer, Steve Cohen, the billionaire Wall Street investor and owner of the New York Mets, acquired a 5.5% stake in Sphere Entertainment Co, the state-of-the-art venue and entertainment company created and led by James Dolan, another billionaire investor on this list. Cohen’s hedge fund Point72 Asset Management disclosed it purchased 1.56 million shares of Sphere in June after having previously owned and sold a smaller stake in Sphere in 2023. Cohen, who is not known to take an active role in the companies his fund invests in, previously ran SAC Capital, one of the most successful hedge funds in history. He was forced to shut it down in 2013 after the firm pleaded guilty to charges of insider trading and paid a $1.2 billion penalty. 

A Ukrainian-born billionaire, Leonard Blavatnik, 67, began his fortune buying industrial assets after the fall of the Soviet empire. Now estimated by Forbes to be the world’s 52^nd richest man worth around $29.4 billion, the dual U.S.-U.K. citizen controls, directly or through his company Access Industries, approximately 98% of Warner Music Group’s voting rights and roughly 72% of the economic interest. Access bought the major in 2011 for $3.3 billion cash and took the company public in 2020 at roughly four times that value. Founded in 1986 by Blavatnik, Access has more than $35 billion in investments in companies like chemical maker LyondellBasell, the Sunset Tower in West Hollywood, the indie film company A24 and French streaming platform Deezer, among others. Len’s son Val Blavatnik, 26, was elected to Warner Music Group’s board in April 2023, taking the seat vacated by Len’s brother Alex Blavatnik, and named senior director, business development of Warner Chappell Music. Val is currently following in his dad’s footsteps, pursuing an MBA at Harvard Business School, which is among the many schools to which Blavatnik has donated.  

The most successful investor in history and the sixth richest man in the world, Warren Buffett, 93, has made his wealth buying large stakes in unsexy companies. Known for his frugality — he lives in the same five-bedroom house in Omaha, Nebr., that he bought in 1958 — Buffett buys into companies that have strong brand affinity because he believes that being part of consumers’ lives for a long time protects them from market downturns. This has led to investments in companies like GEICO, the shaving company Gillette, See’s Candies and Bank of America.  Known as “The Oracle of Omaha,” Berkshire-Hathaway’s annual investor presentations are held in a 19,000-person arena, where people pack in to hear Buffett’s pithy stock strategies — like his adage that what the market thinks a stock is worth should not influence what you think it’s worth. To that end, Buffet first bought Liberty Media’s tracking stock in 2016 and this fall increased its stake to now own 32% of the New York-based satellite radio company. 

Billionaire hedge fund manager and activist shareholder Bill Ackman, 57, is known for his take-charge approach to investing and some famously aggressive bets — some of which he’s won and some of which he’s lost. He founded his hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management in 2004, and its fund, Pershing Square Holdings, now owns 10.25% of Universal Music Group’s stock. Ackman, whose Pershing funds have invested in restaurant companies like Chipotle and airline manufacturers, caused a stir when he called on UMG to move its stock listing and legal headquarters to the United States from Amsterdam after there were violent attacks on Israeli soccer fans in the Dutch capital in November. Ackman argued it makes business sense for UMG to list on a U.S. exchange like the NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange, and in early December Pershing Square said it will be moving its shares from the Amsterdam Euronext exchange to consolidate all of its publicly traded stock on the London Stock Exchange. UMG has said it will uphold its contractual obligations with Pershing, one of its largest shareholders, but that Ackman does not have the ability to require UMG to delist in Amsterdam and move where it is currently domiciled. 

The “Cable Cowboy,” John Malone earned this moniker and his wealth by building up the cable TV company TCI from 1973, when he was named chief executive officer, to 1999, when he sold the firm to AT&T for more than $50 billion. Bloomberg estimates Malone’s net worth stands at just shy of $10 billion as a result of his companies’ investments in Warner Bros. Discovery, Formula One, iHeartMedia and more. Malone is the chairman/interim CEO of Liberty Media Corporation, which last year owned 83.4% of SiriusXM’s stock, according to the audio entertainment company’s most recent proxy. Liberty Media has since spun off most of its assets apart from Formula One, and SiriusXM merged with Liberty Media’s tracking stock this year to become its own listed company. However, Malone still owns 6.5% of SiriusXM stock as of September 2024.