From Cancer-Drug Billionaire to Los Angeles Times Owner: How Patrick Soon-Shiong Connected Medicine, Capital, and Media Power

1. The most important correction is that Patrick Soon-Shiong did not found the Los Angeles Times.

The paper’s predecessor, the Los Angeles Daily Times, first appeared on December 4, 1881. Its original founders were Nathan Cole Jr. and Thomas Gardiner, with A.W. Francisco as a silent partner, and the paper was initially printed by the Mirror Printing Office. The venture ran into financial trouble within roughly a year, after which the printing operation took control.

The person who transformed the fragile local paper into a major political, economic and civic power center was Harrison Gray Otis. He became editor in 1882, acquired two-thirds of the company in 1884, eventually consolidated ownership, and—with Harry Chandler, who later became his son-in-law—created the Otis–Chandler newspaper dynasty. Library of Congress historical documentation describes the early Times as a vehicle that promoted Southern California growth, conservative interests and the family’s broader business agenda.

The more accurate hierarchy is therefore:

Nathan Cole Jr. and Thomas Gardiner = original founders;
Harrison Gray Otis = institutional builder;
the Otis–Chandler family = long-term dynasty;
Patrick Soon-Shiong = modern owner, capital provider and central source of ownership authority since 2018.

2. The Los Angeles Times matters because historically it has been more than a newspaper.

During the Otis and Chandler eras, the Times influenced urban development, business investment, labor politics, Republican politics and the growth of Southern California. Under Otis Chandler, publisher from 1960 to 1980, it dramatically increased investment in national and international journalism and evolved from a strongly partisan regional institution into a nationally prestigious newspaper.

That transformation created a durable reputational asset. By 2024, the Los Angeles Times had accumulated 52 Pulitzer Prizes since 1942, including six Public Service gold medals. Former film critic Justin Chang won the newspaper’s 52nd Pulitzer in 2024.

The Times currently says latimes.com attracts more than 40 million unique visitors per month, while Sunday print readership is around 1.6 million and combined local weekly print-and-digital reach is about 4.4 million. Its investment portal uses a different metric and cites approximately 47 million monthly visitors across the broader media business, so the figures should not be treated as directly interchangeable.

3. Soon-Shiong acquired an institution that had already passed through dynastic, corporate and financialized ownership.

After the Otis–Chandler era, Times Mirror was acquired by Chicago-based Tribune Company in 2000. The paper then experienced years of corporate restructuring, debt stress, bankruptcy at its parent, staff reductions, slow digital transformation and eventually the Tronc era.

When Soon-Shiong moved to acquire the Times in 2018, the newsroom had experienced repeated leadership turnover, had recently unionized, and its corporate parent was considering further substantial reductions, including the possible elimination of the Washington bureau. Soon-Shiong later said he believed failure to act quickly could have dealt a “death knell” to the institution as it then existed.

He was therefore not buying a stable cash-generating newspaper. He was buying a peculiar asset combining historical prestige, civic influence, expensive journalism, significant infrastructure requirements and structural financial risk.

4. Patrick Soon-Shiong’s childhood background was very different from that of the stereotypical American billionaire.

Soon-Shiong was born in 1952 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, now Gqeberha. His parents were Hakka Chinese immigrants who came to South Africa after the Japanese invasion of China. In an interview preserved by his alma mater, Wits University, Soon-Shiong described them as ordinary shopkeepers. His father had practiced herbal medicine in China and continued functioning informally as a doctor for the local Hakka community in South Africa.

A detailed Los Angeles Times profile reports that Patrick was the fifth of eight children. His parents operated a general store near a lead-acid battery plant, tire manufacturer and meatpacking facility. His father received traditional herbs from China, and neighbors would come to the family home for remedies; Patrick watched him prepare them.

Soon-Shiong has explicitly connected those childhood experiences to his later belief that the human body contains endogenous mechanisms capable of protecting and healing itself. That intellectual thread can be traced from pancreatic islet transplantation through his later work in cancer immunotherapy.

5. Apartheid was the second major formative force.

Soon-Shiong has described Chinese South Africans of his generation as neither Black nor white in the apartheid hierarchy. His family experienced segregation in everyday life, and he grew up with Black friends whom he also saw as institutional “underdogs.” He later said the experience gave him a lasting respect for the dignity and strength of people without power.

That theme later appeared both in his medical rhetoric and in the civic case he made for owning the Los Angeles Times.

There is, however, an important distinction between autobiographical philosophy and management outcomes. His early rhetoric about supporting underdogs later sat in tension with large newsroom layoffs, labor disputes and direct owner intervention in editorial policy.

6. He also had an early and often-overlooked connection to newspapers.

As a teenager, Soon-Shiong delivered the Port Elizabeth Evening Post to earn money for his education. Decades later he recalled the sound of the printing presses, the smell of machine oil and ink, and the excitement of seeing the day’s headline coming off the press.

This does not explain the economics of his 2018 acquisition, but it helps explain why physical newspapers carried personal as well as financial meaning for him.

7. His formal education was overwhelmingly medical and surgical—not financial, managerial or journalistic.

Soon-Shiong entered medical school unusually young and graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1975 with a medical degree. He later studied at the University of British Columbia, where he received a master’s degree. ImmunityBio’s current SEC biography continues to list his Wits medical degree and UBC M.Sc.

His business mindset therefore did not emerge from a conventional Wall Street or MBA education. It more closely resembles translational medicine turned into a corporate method:

identify a scientific problem → experiment → establish intellectual property → create a company → move through regulation and commercialization → realize value through public markets, partnerships or acquisitions.

That sequence became the central template of his wealth creation.

8. Apartheid directly shaped his first medical employment as well.

Soon-Shiong has said that becoming one of the first Chinese interns permitted to work in a white hospital required special South African government permission and that he earned only about half what comparable white physicians received. The Los Angeles Times similarly reported that he needed special authorization to work at Johannesburg General Hospital, then effectively reserved for whites.

The experience matters for two reasons.

First, he learned early to gain access to institutions that were not structurally designed to welcome him through professional excellence.

Second, throughout his later career he displayed an unusually strong desire not merely to participate in systems, but to control platforms—drug companies, data infrastructure, computing networks and eventually a major newspaper.

9. Transplant surgery created his core professional identity.

After moving into academic medicine in North America, Soon-Shiong became deeply involved in pancreatic and pancreatic-islet transplantation at UCLA. Professional biographies credit him with UCLA’s first whole-organ pancreas transplant and pioneering work in encapsulated human islet-cell transplantation. Institutional accounts vary somewhat in dates and in how individual “firsts” are defined, so the safest formulation is that he was an important early innovator in pancreas and islet-cell transplantation and its attempted translation into diabetes therapy.

The fundamental question was whether insulin-producing cells could be transplanted and protected from immune destruction.

That became one of the deepest recurring themes of his career: rather than simply treating a symptom, intervene at the level of cells and the immune system.

10. Around 1991, he made the decision that fundamentally altered his wealth trajectory: leaving purely academic medicine for commercialization.

The New Yorker’s detailed reconstruction of his career describes how his islet-cell work attracted support from figures including Lee Iacocca and gradually moved toward commercialization. The diabetes program did not ultimately produce the decisive clinical success originally hoped for, but it transformed Soon-Shiong from an academic surgeon into a scientist-entrepreneur.

Had he remained exclusively within the university system, he might have become a prominent transplant professor.

By moving his research into corporate structures, he created the possibility of becoming a billionaire.

11. His great fortune came not from media but from APP, Abraxis and Abraxane.

Soon-Shiong built and controlled American Pharmaceutical Partners and Abraxis BioScience. According to ImmunityBio’s 2026 SEC filing, he served from 1997 through 2010 as founder, chairman and CEO of those two global pharmaceutical businesses.

The defining product was Abraxane.

Abraxane combined paclitaxel chemotherapy with albumin-bound nanoparticle delivery technology. The FDA approved it for metastatic breast cancer in 2005, lung cancer in 2012 and pancreatic cancer in 2013.

It was the product that truly moved Soon-Shiong from successful medical entrepreneur into the global billionaire class.

12. The 2008–2010 transactions crystallized that wealth.

ImmunityBio’s SEC biography values the sale of APP to Fresenius in 2008 at about $4.6 billion and the 2010 sale of Abraxis BioScience to Celgene at about $3.8 billion.

Contemporaneous reporting sometimes used lower figures—around $2.9 billion for the Abraxis transaction—because transaction values varied depending on announcement date, cash-and-stock treatment and contingent consideration. Forbes currently summarizes the two exits as having a combined value of roughly $9.1 billion.

The central point is not the precise headline valuation.

Soon-Shiong completed the full cycle:

medical intellectual property → pharmaceutical company → FDA approval → commercial scale → strategic acquisition → massive private capital.

The money that later funded the Los Angeles Times came fundamentally from that healthcare capital machine, not from journalism.

13. After selling his early pharmaceutical businesses, he did not become a passive retired billionaire. He attempted to construct a cross-industry technology ecosystem.

In 2011, he founded NantWorks. ImmunityBio’s 2026 SEC filings describe it as a Soon-Shiong-controlled collection of healthcare and technology businesses originally intended to build secure medical/genomic information networks and next-generation pharmaceutical-development infrastructure.

“Nant” became his corporate architecture:

NantHealth for healthcare information technology;

NantKwest for cell-based immunotherapy;

NantCell/ImmunityBio for next-generation immunotherapy;

Nant Capital as an investment vehicle;

and later NantStudios and NantGames in production, entertainment and gaming.

Soon-Shiong was therefore building a privately controlled corporate network, not merely running one company.

14. The most important publicly traded biotechnology asset in that network today is ImmunityBio.

NantKwest and the private ImmunityBio business combined in 2021 into today’s Nasdaq-listed ImmunityBio, Inc. Soon-Shiong currently serves as founder, Executive Chairman and Global Chief Scientific and Medical Officer.

Control matters as much as title.

The company’s 2026 proxy states that Soon-Shiong and affiliated entities held approximately 62.5% of outstanding common stock as of the relevant record date. ImmunityBio explicitly identifies itself as a “controlled company” under Nasdaq rules.

His preferred model is therefore not to build a company and gradually relinquish authority.

It is to raise outside capital while retaining long-term strategic control whenever possible.

15. ImmunityBio also demonstrates that Soon-Shiong is not living solely on a drug breakthrough from decades ago.

In April 2024, the FDA approved Altor BioScience/ImmunityBio’s ANKTIVA (nogapendekin alfa inbakicept-pmln) in combination with BCG for a defined group of patients with BCG-unresponsive non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer.

There is a clear intellectual continuity from Abraxane to ANKTIVA:

drug delivery → cellular therapy → innate immunity/NK cells → cancer immunotherapy.

His primary professional identity today remains that of a biotechnology scientist, entrepreneur and controlling shareholder. Media ownership is a second axis of power rather than the original source of his fortune.

16. Soon-Shiong’s first major entry into American newspaper ownership came through Tribune Publishing in 2016.

He acquired a significant Tribune stake and entered its board-level ecosystem. By 2021 he still owned roughly 24% of Tribune Publishing, making him one of the largest shareholders alongside Alden Global Capital.

That sequence matters because it allowed him to observe the economics and governance problems of legacy newspapers before buying the Los Angeles Times outright.

The progression was essentially:

minority investment → board-level exposure → strategic disagreement → direct acquisition of the asset he valued most.

17. In February 2018, Nant Capital reached the agreement to acquire the Los Angeles Times.

The package included:

the Los Angeles Times;

the San Diego Union-Tribune;

Hoy Los Angeles and related Spanish-language/community assets.

Nant Capital agreed to pay approximately $500 million and assume roughly $90 million in pension liabilities. The transaction was completed in June 2018.

The transaction returned the Times to local Los Angeles ownership after roughly eighteen years under a Chicago-based corporate parent.

18. His first strategy as owner was expansion and rebuilding, not austerity.

Soon-Shiong initially said he wanted the Times to compete again with the New York Times and Washington Post. During the first several years, the company added more than 150 journalists and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in its newsroom, technology, audio/video operations and new El Segundo campus.

Moving from historic Times Mirror Square to El Segundo was both a financial and technological decision. The new campus fit his ambition to integrate journalism with data, software, video and other modern media functions.

19. His wider portfolio can be divided into three categories.

The first consists of direct financial and operating assets: ImmunityBio holdings, NantWorks businesses, Nant Capital, the Los Angeles Times and LATMG-related companies.

The second consists of assets combining economic value with status and access. The clearest example is the Los Angeles Lakers. Soon-Shiong acquired roughly a 4% stake from Magic Johnson in 2010, and as of August 2026 he has explicitly said he does not plan to sell it despite another major change in the team’s control.

The third consists of influence assets: the Chan Soon-Shiong Family Foundation, the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute of Molecular Medicine, and associated academic and nonprofit networks. His 2026 SEC biography continues to list him as chairman of those organizations.

Together, they give him a combination of:

scientific authority + corporate control + sports prestige + metropolitan media power + philanthropy + public-policy access.

20. His capital system is also different from that of a conventional private-equity founder.

He does not operate primarily through an institutional buyout fund financed by outside limited partners in the manner of Blackstone or TPG.

His system has been built around:

wealth created through pharmaceutical exits;

personally controlled entities such as Nant Capital;

public-equity financing;

strategic corporate partners;

proceeds from pharmaceutical acquisitions;

and a network of affiliated NantWorks companies.

He is closer to a founder-controlled permanent-capital platform than a traditional asset manager.

As of August 27, 2026, Forbes estimated his real-time net worth at approximately $9.6 billion. Because a substantial part of his wealth is linked to volatile public biotechnology shares and difficult-to-value private assets, competing wealth estimates have varied materially over time; no outside estimate should be treated as an audited number.

21. Soon-Shiong’s underlying business model can be summarized as turning complex science into controllable intellectual property, then turning that intellectual property into capital.

The first capability is scientific or engineering problem selection.

The second is embedding the technology in patents and companies.

The third is using clinical evidence, regulatory approval and manufacturing capability to construct barriers to entry.

The fourth is monetization through public markets, strategic sales, partnerships or continued ownership.

APP, Abraxis, Abraxane, NantKwest and ImmunityBio all reflect this pattern.

The Los Angeles Times became a different kind of experiment: an attempt to transfer his biotechnology playbook of technology, platforms and patient capital into journalism.

The fundamental problem is that news is not a pharmaceutical product.

A patented drug with regulatory approval can produce powerful economic exclusivity. Journalism competes against search engines, social media, YouTube, TikTok, AI systems and an enormous supply of free information.

That difference lies at the center of his difficulties with the Times.

22. His Los Angeles Times strategy has passed through three distinct phases.

The first, from roughly 2018 through 2021, was reconstruction.

He financed hiring, technology renewal, new facilities, podcasts, video and digital subscriptions, using personal capital to absorb costs the traditional public newspaper market might not have tolerated.

The second, from roughly 2022 through 2024, was retrenchment.

Digital subscriptions failed to grow fast enough to offset continuing pressure on advertising and print. In 2024, Soon-Shiong said the paper was losing approximately $30 million to $40 million annually, and at least 115 newsroom positions—more than 20% of the newsroom—were eliminated. The Guild staged a historic labor action.

The third, beginning in 2025, is platformization.

Soon-Shiong is combining:

the Los Angeles Times newsroom and digital operation;

LA Times Studios;

NantStudios;

NantGames;

streaming, podcasts, branded content, virtual production, events and esports.

The paper is increasingly being treated as an audience and intellectual-property gateway around which multiple revenue streams can be built.

23. His largest new bet is to transform the Los Angeles Times from a personally financed newspaper into an investable media group.

In 2025, Soon-Shiong began preparing Los Angeles Times Media Group for access to public capital.

The current Series A Preferred Stock offering for accredited investors advertises:

a targeted annual dividend of about 7%;

conversion into common stock at a 25% discount to a future IPO price;

a planned future NYSE listing under the proposed ticker $LAT;

and a stated maximum offering size of up to $500 million.

As of August 2026, however, this is still a planned listing, not a completed NYSE IPO. The investment website continues to say “Before We Pursue an NYSE IPO” and that the company “plans to pursue” a listing. In March 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported that Soon-Shiong was becoming more cautious about timing, potentially pointing toward 2027 while saying the final outcome remained uncertain.

24. The rhetoric of letting the public own the Times does not necessarily mean surrendering corporate control.

Soon-Shiong has described a future ownership concept in language reminiscent of community participation in the Green Bay Packers.

Yet LATMG investment materials contemplate different classes of common stock, with Class B shares carrying substantially greater voting power per share than Class A. The governance implication is that broadening economic ownership would not automatically democratize control in equal measure.

That is consistent with his approach at ImmunityBio.

His preferred model appears to be:

bring in external capital without unnecessarily giving up strategic authority.

25. Judged by financial return, the Los Angeles Times cannot yet be described as a successful Soon-Shiong investment.

In March 2026, the Wall Street Journal, citing financial information associated with the proposed offering, reported that:

the broader media business generated about $237 million in 2024 revenue, down from more than $500 million in 2019;

the company recorded a 2024 pre-tax loss of about $48.1 million;

management said the core news operation reduced its loss to roughly $5 million in 2025 and expected to approach break-even in 2026.

The numbers reveal that Soon-Shiong has not solved the economic model of modern journalism.

What he has done is use substantial personal capital to give a strategically important but financially challenged institution more time to search for one.

By 2025, the Times itself reported that his cumulative investment in the newspaper had grown to more than $750 million.

26. His strongest accomplishment at the Times is therefore institutional endurance rather than financial return.

At the time of the 2018 purchase, another major round of cuts—including a potential shutdown of the Washington bureau—was under discussion.

Soon-Shiong initially stopped that trajectory, hired aggressively and recapitalized the newsroom and technology organization.

Even after subsequent reductions, the organization has continued producing nationally recognized journalism.

It won its 52nd Pulitzer in 2024, and in 2026 continued receiving major honors for investigative journalism, regional politics, crime reporting, design, culture, food and public-service reporting.

The fairest conclusion is therefore neither that he definitively “saved” nor definitively “destroyed” the Times.

Rather:

he prevented an earlier and potentially more severe contraction, but after nearly eight years he still has not established a stable, uncontested and broadly replicable business model for the newspaper.

27. Across his entire career, Abraxane remains his most extraordinary commercial achievement—not the Los Angeles Times.

Abraxane required him to bridge:

scientific research;

clinical medicine;

drug engineering;

FDA regulation;

manufacturing;

commercialization;

capital markets;

and strategic M&A.

It ultimately turned physician-created medical technology into billions of dollars of corporate value.

The Times has a different purpose within his portfolio.

It is not his greatest wealth-creation asset. It is arguably his most consequential social-power and legacy asset.

Owning the Times gives him stewardship over a historically important institution capable of influencing the civic agenda of Los Angeles and California.

That value cannot be measured only through newspaper margins.

28. One of the longest-running controversies around Soon-Shiong is whether he should be viewed primarily as a scientist or as an exceptionally sophisticated promoter and dealmaker.

His medical achievements are real: pancreatic-islet research, Abraxane and ImmunityBio cannot plausibly be reduced to marketing.

Yet Forbes noted as early as 2014 that some critics viewed him as more of a dealmaker than a scientist, while the New Yorker’s 2021 investigation portrayed a career combining authentic medical innovation, remarkable commercial ability, enormous promises and recurring controversy.

The two identities are, in fact, inseparable.

His scientific credibility makes the commercial story powerful; his commercial skill gives his science access to vastly more capital than a conventional academic scientist could command.

29. The NantHealth–University of Utah episode became one of the clearest controversies involving conflicts between philanthropy and commercial interest.

STAT reported in 2017 that Soon-Shiong-related organizations had provided $12 million for genomic research at the University of Utah, after which approximately $10 million was used to purchase sequencing services from NantHealth, the company founded by Soon-Shiong. NantHealth also counted related tests within commercial order metrics. Soon-Shiong denied that the arrangement was designed to funnel charitable money back into his company.

The significance goes beyond the dollar amount.

The episode challenged a recurring structure in his ecosystem in which philanthropy, scientific research and commercial companies overlap.

When one person exerts influence over the donor, the technology provider and the commercial upside, the dividing line between public benefit and private economic benefit becomes difficult to evaluate.

30. The Sorrento Therapeutics dispute raised a more direct question about competitive business conduct.

In 2019, Sorrento sued Soon-Shiong and related businesses, alleging that after acquiring the experimental cancer drug Cynviloq they failed to pursue its approval and instead engaged in a “catch-and-kill” strategy that protected Abraxane from a potential competitor. Sorrento sought substantial damages through litigation and arbitration.

Soon-Shiong denied the allegations.

It is therefore essential to distinguish allegation from established fact:

“catch-and-kill” was Sorrento’s legal allegation, not a proven judicial finding that can simply be stated as fact.

Even so, the case reinforced a persistent criticism of Soon-Shiong: that he is not merely a scientific inventor but an exceptionally aggressive user of acquisitions, corporate structures and intellectual-property strategy.

31. In 2026, his cancer-drug promotion faced a fresh and official regulatory issue.

The FDA issued a warning letter to ImmunityBio in March 2026 concerning promotional statements associated with ANKTIVA. The agency said certain claims made by or on behalf of the company suggested uses for which the drug was not approved, including claims relating to broader cancer indications, certain lung-cancer settings and cancer prevention.

ANKTIVA itself is a legitimately FDA-approved medicine, but its approved indication is much narrower: a defined form of BCG-unresponsive non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer.

The controversy therefore concerns not whether the therapy exists, but where the line should be drawn between real medical innovation and expansive promotion of what that innovation might eventually accomplish.

That tension has recurred throughout Soon-Shiong’s career.

32. At the Los Angeles Times, the most consequential controversy has shifted from economics to the limits of owner authority over editorial judgment.

The defining event occurred during the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

The Times editorial board had prepared to endorse Kamala Harris, but Soon-Shiong decided the newspaper would make no presidential endorsement. He said he wanted to reduce divisiveness and allow readers to decide for themselves. At least three editorial-board members resigned, and thousands of subscribers canceled.

The fundamental governance question was not whether Harris deserved an endorsement.

It was:

should a billionaire proprietor overrule an independent editorial board at the final stage of a major political decision?

Supporters can argue that an owner has the right to reset an opinion operation perceived as ideologically narrow.

Critics argue that doing so breaches the firewall major news institutions attempt to maintain between ownership and editorial judgment.

33. After the endorsement conflict, Soon-Shiong did not retreat from editorial-system redesign. He moved further into it.

He called for a broader ideological mix on the opinion side and promoted AI-assisted tools intended to expose readers to alternative viewpoints and perceived bias.

The Times began deploying AI-based “Insights” features around selected opinion content. Critics have argued that automated ideological analysis can itself introduce mistakes and that such tools increase the owner’s influence over editorial presentation. Soon-Shiong has framed the changes as part of an attempt to break ideological “echo chambers” and rebuild trust.

His media philosophy has therefore evolved from:

“give journalists more resources”

to:

“redesign the product, opinion architecture and mechanisms through which readers judge bias.”

That is one of the most important identity shifts of his ownership.

34. Labor relations constitute another serious contradiction.

In 2024, amid continuing losses, the Times eliminated more than 20% of its newsroom positions—at least 115 jobs—and the newsroom union staged a historic walkout.

By 2025, while LATMG was simultaneously telling prospective investors a story about future growth in journalism, studios, gaming and technology, Los Angeles Times Guild contract negotiations had dragged on for roughly three years. Guild members voted by about 85% to authorize leadership to call a strike if necessary.

The contrast is striking.

To investors, the narrative is one of AI, content, virtual production, esports and a new media platform.

To newsroom workers, the immediate issues remain employment security, compensation, contracts and editorial resources.

35. The 2023 sale of the San Diego Union-Tribune was also a significant strategic retreat.

Soon-Shiong bought both the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2018 and initially pledged support for both organizations.

In 2023, however, the family sold the Union-Tribune to MediaNews Group, controlled by Alden Global Capital, a firm widely associated with aggressive newspaper cost reduction. The transaction effectively reduced the family’s major news holdings to the Los Angeles Times.

The reversal is particularly notable because in 2021 Soon-Shiong’s organization had publicly denied reporting that the papers might be sold and stated its intention to continue owning them.

The episode demonstrates that even strongly stated media commitments can change when strategy or economics change.

36. Between 2018 and 2026, Soon-Shiong’s identity as a newspaper owner passed through three stages.

Initially he was the rescuer.

He halted a planned contraction and financed renewed ambition.

Then he became the cost controller.

When digital growth failed to cover expenses, he authorized major layoffs and made clear that sustained annual losses of $30 million to $40 million were unacceptable.

Now he is increasingly the architect of a redesigned media system.

He speaks directly about ideological balance, AI, video, creators, gaming and capital structure.

He has therefore moved from being a relatively passive billionaire patron toward being an increasingly active media operator.

37. As of August 2026, the formal power structure of the Los Angeles Times is relatively clear.

Patrick Soon-Shiong remains Executive Chairman and has also been described as Chairman and CEO of Los Angeles Times Media Group. The newsroom is led by Executive Editor Terry Tang, formally appointed in 2024 as the first woman to hold the top editorial role in the newspaper’s history.

The structure is therefore not one in which Soon-Shiong personally serves as editor in chief.

Rather:

corporate capital and strategic authority ultimately sit with Soon-Shiong;
day-to-day journalism is managed by Terry Tang and the newsroom leadership;
but recent history demonstrates that Soon-Shiong is willing to exercise owner authority directly on major opinion or strategic questions.

38. What position does Patrick Soon-Shiong actually occupy in the real world today?

Calling him simply the “billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times” dramatically understates his position.

He sits across at least five systems.

In medicine, he is a transplant surgeon turned biotechnology inventor with genuine drug-development achievements.

In capital, he is a founder-investor whose APP and Abraxis exits created a multibillion-dollar pool of permanent private wealth.

In biotechnology, he still exercises direct power over ImmunityBio and serves as one of its senior scientific leaders; as of 2026, he and affiliates controlled about 62.5% of its common stock.

In the Los Angeles civic establishment, he owns the Los Angeles Times and retains roughly 4% of the Lakers.

In the influence ecosystem, he operates through foundations, research institutes, universities, media and public-policy relationships.

That combination is unusual even among American billionaires.

39. His greatest strength and his greatest weakness appear to come from the same trait.

Soon-Shiong repeatedly identifies enormous, technically complicated problems that others consider extremely difficult and then assumes they can be redesigned through science, engineering, capital and organizational architecture.

That mindset led him to pursue cellular approaches to diabetes;

redesign chemotherapy delivery;

build NantWorks;

push new models of cancer immunotherapy;

and believe he could rebuild a century-old newspaper suffering from structural industry decline.

The same trait creates risks.

It encourages grand ambitions;

it can lead to applying technological solutions to problems that are fundamentally institutional, cultural or political;

it can import founder-control instincts into a newsroom whose credibility depends heavily on editorial independence;

and it can make outsiders uncertain where genuine scientific breakthrough ends and premature extrapolation begins.

40. In one sentence, the relationship between Patrick Soon-Shiong and the Los Angeles Times is this:

He did not become a billionaire through journalism.

He first became a billionaire through medicine, intellectual property, pharmaceutical commercialization and corporate transactions, and then used that wealth to acquire a historically prestigious and politically influential news institution with a deeply troubled business model.

In 2018, he presented himself as its rescuer.

By 2024, he had become the executive responsible for painful cost reductions.

By 2025–2026, he was attempting to reinvent it as Los Angeles Times Media Group—a combination of journalism, studios, virtual production, gaming, live events and ultimately outside public capital.

The experiment remains unresolved.

In medicine, Soon-Shiong has already demonstrated that he can turn technology into multibillion-dollar assets.

In media, he is still trying to prove something much harder:

whether a century-old newspaper backed by billionaire patient capital can simultaneously preserve journalistic credibility, survive economically, absorb technological disruption, broaden its audience, invite outside shareholders—and still avoid becoming merely an extension of its owner’s personal power.