Photo Credit: Time Warner
Former Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons, who was instrumental in preserving New York’s Apollo Theater, passed away Thursday, aged 76.
Former Time Warner CEO Richard “Dick” Parsons, who was instrumental in saving the Apollo Theater in New York, died on Thursday in Manhattan at age 76. His friend Ronald S. Lauder told The New York Times his cause of death was bone cancer.
“All of us at Warner Bros. Discovery suffered a terrible loss today,” said current Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who called Parsons “a great person, a great friend, and a great leader.”
“All who got a chance to work with him and know him saw that unusual combination of great leadership with integrity and kindness,” he continued. “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 many of us looked up to him and sought his wise advice.”
Richard Parsons was born in Brooklyn in 1948 and graduated from Albany Law School at the top of his class. He worked for New York governor and eventual vice president Nelson Rockefeller, a connection that led to him being named to the board of Time Warner. Parsons became president of the company in 1995.
During his tenure at Time Warner, he worked to reduce the company’s massive debt accrued from the merger with AOL. That includes selling off properties like Warner Music Group and the Atlanta Hawks. Parsons was also the one who decided to remove “AOL” from the company’s name once the merger was completed.
He stepped down from his role as CEO in 2007 and resigned as chairman the following year. Parsons went on to advise New York governor Eliot Spitzer, former New York mayors Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani, and President Barack Obama.
In addition to serving as chairman of Citigroup, Parsons was interim CEO of the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014, and interim chairman of CBS Corp. in 2018. He was instrumental in the preservation of Harlem’s Apollo Theater in the ‘90s, organizing a fundraising campaign to save the venue.
Parsons stepped down from his chairman responsibilities in recent years due to his battle with multiple myeloma, which created “unanticipated complications.” Still, he continued to invest in causes near and dear to his heart, such as co-founding the Equity Alliance, a fund that supports ventures by women and people of color.