Richard Parsons, the executive nicknamed “Emergency Captain” for his work in stabilizing troubled companies such as AOL Time Warner, Citigroup, and New York Dime Savings Bank, has died. He was 76 years old.
Parsons died Thursday at his home in Manhattan. The New York Times, citing his friend Ronald S. Lauder, reported that the cause of death was bone cancer. Parsons was appointed chairman of CBS in September 2018, but resigned less than a month later due to complications from multiple myeloma, a blood cancer.
Mr. Parsons was appointed chief executive officer of AOL Time Warner in 2002 after the $124 billion merger between the dial-up Internet provider and the largest entertainment and media company began to unravel. Shortly before he took over, the combined company posted a record $54.2 billion loss as the dot-com bubble burst and stock prices plummeted following the sudden resignation of CEO Gerald Levin.
“My biggest dream for this company is to rebuild Time Warner, to get Time Warner back to where it was, and more than that, to make it the greatest company in the world of media and entertainment. That’s true,” Parsons said. Became chairman in 2003.
Mr. Parsons, a tall black man with a gentle management style that some liken to a teddy bear, dropped AOL from the company’s name, changed key executives, fired employees and sold non-core divisions. strengthened its finances. Two years after starting his repair job, Fortune magazine listed Parsons at number 23 on the Power 25, a list of the most influential people in business, just above Apple’s Steve Jobs.
By the time Mr. Parsons stepped down as CEO of Time Warner in late 2007, the company was financially stable. He remained chairman until 2009, when his successor, CEO Jeffrey Bewkes, separated AOL from its parent company.
The company was later acquired by AT&T Inc. and is now known as Warner Bros. Discovery.
Mr. Parsons joined Citicorp’s board in the 1990s with the support of philanthropist Lawrence Rockefeller, but in 2009 he became chairman of its successor company, Citigroup. He took on the responsibility of a bank that could not be destroyed. In the midst of the Great Recession.
He served as legal advisor to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller in Albany and at the White House after he became Gerald Ford’s vice president, bringing vital know-how to how government works. Mr. Parsons used his experience to negotiate a way for New York-based Citigroup to avoid the fate of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bankruptcy. The government acquired a stake in the bank and sold its final holding in 2010 for a profit of $12 billion.
In February 2011, President Barack Obama named Parsons one of his outside economic advisors.
In 2014, when Donald Sterling, owner of the National Basketball Association’s Los Angeles Clippers franchise, was embroiled in a scandal for allegedly making racist remarks, Parsons was again called in to defuse a horrifying situation. Ta. After Sterling was kicked out of the NBA, Parsons, who played basketball while attending the University of Hawaii, agreed to become the team’s interim CEO. A few months later, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer bought the Clippers for $2 billion.
Early in his career, Parsons, a lawyer by training, was hired by CEO Harry W. Albright, Jr., a former aide to Nelson Rockefeller, to manage a troubled New York business. Selected as Chief Operating Officer of Dime Savings Bank. Dime was a client of the law firm where Parsons was working at the time. The company had more than $1 billion in bad debt, but Mr. Parsons, who became Dime’s CEO in 1990, worked with regulators to reduce the debt to $335 million. This was a prelude to merging the company with Anchor Savings in 1994, a year before Levin hired him as president of Time Warner based in part on his board membership.
“People were wondering what I was doing,” Levin told Bloomberg Businessweek about a 2011 profile of Parsons. “But given his style, approach and interpersonal skills, I was confident, and I was proven right.”
Richard Dean Parsons was born on April 4, 1948 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Sperry Rand electrician Lorenzo Parsons and former housewife Isabel Judd. One of five children, he grew up near South Ozone Park in Queens, a wetland that later became JFK Airport. He did well in school, skipping grades in elementary school and high school. He graduated from the University of Hawaii a few credits short of completing his degree, but enrolled at Albany Law School in New York.
After graduating at the top of his class in 1971, he worked for Governor Rockefeller and followed him to Washington.
After President Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976, Parsons worked for the Rockefeller family for a year before joining the politically connected New York law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, whose clients included Nelson Rockefeller’s widow was also included.
After bailouts at Dime, Time Warner and Citigroup, Mr. Parsons became an advisor at Providence Equity Partners, where he worked part-time evaluating potential acquisitions of media companies.
After serving on the board, he became chairman of the $4 billion Rockefeller Foundation in 2016, ending his ties to the family that had employed his grandfather as a groundskeeper at the family’s estate just north of New York.
New York-based CBS hired Parsons as interim chairman in September 2018 to fill the vacancy left by Leslie Moonves, who was accused of sexual harassment.
Parsons and his wife, the former Laura Ann Bush, had three children: Gregory, Leslie, and Rebecca.
Oster writes for Bloomberg.
