Can Patrick Soon-Shiong Turn the LA Times into a Media Hub?
By Goldsea Staff | 19 Jan, 2026

The Chinese South African immigrant's early billions from selling APP Pharmaceuticals and Abraxis BioScience have been followed by struggles with money pits LA Times and ImmunityBio.

Patrick Soon-Shiong—like onetime South African compatriot Elon Musk—has one of those spectacular immigrant success stories that makes you believe the American Dream is still very much alive thing. The Chinese-South African surgeon turned billionaire entrepreneur made his fortune twice over by building and selling pharmaceutical companies, pocketing nearly $6 billion in the process.  But lately, his Midas touch seems to have worn off, and he's found himself in the unenviable position of trying to resuscitate two ailing ventures hemorrhaging cash at an alarming rate.

The most public of these struggles is the Los Angeles Times, which Soon-Shiong bought in 2018 for $500 million with what seemed like noble intentions.  Save a 144-year-old legacy newspaper, preserve journalism, be a civic hero.  Seven years and $750 million in additional investments later, the Times is still losing money hand over fist.  We're talking about a $48 million loss in fiscal 2024 on revenue of just over $237 million. That's a 20 percent loss margin, which is the kind of number that make CFOs break down in tears.

Now Soon-Shiong is pitching an audacious plan to turn the struggling newspaper into something much grander: the centerpiece of a digital media and entertainment empire. The vision involves bundling the Times with LA Times Studios, NantStudios, and NantGames into a hybrid media platform that could eventually go public in 2027. To bridge the gap until then, he's looking to raise up to $500 million in preferred stock with a 7 percent annual dividend. That's expensive money by any standard, and those dividend payments alone would eat up about 15 percent of last year's revenue.

The question everyone's asking is whether this is brilliant strategic thinking or just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Let's start with what Soon-Shiong actually built his fortune on, because that context matters.  He's not some dilettante playing with inherited wealth.  He has real pharmaceutical chops.  He sold APP Pharmaceuticals to Fresenius in 2008 for $3.8 billion, then followed that up by selling Abraxis BioScience to Celgene in 2010 for around $2 billion in cash. The crown jewel of that second deal was Abraxane, a novel formulation of chemotherapy that became a legitimate breakthrough in treating pancreatic cancer.

Abraxane is still considered credible medicine today.  It's listed as a preferred first-line treatment for metastatic pancreatic cancer in the NCCN Guidelines, which is about as gold-standard as you can get in oncology.  The drug showed real survival benefits, extending median survival from 6.7 months to 8.5 months when combined with gemcitabine.  In the grim calculus of pancreatic cancer treatment, those extra months matter enormously to patients and families.

But pharmaceutical success has a shelf life.  Abraxane's patent protections have expired, and generic competition hit hard in 2024 with the first approved generic launching in October. Bristol Myers Squibb, which now markets the drug, has explicitly flagged continued pressure from generic entrants. While the overall market for protein-bound paclitaxel is still growing as a drug class, the branded Abraxane revenue stream that made Soon-Shiong wealthy is rapidly eroding.  Peak sales hit $848 million back in 2014, but those glory days are long gone.

So Soon-Shiong did what many successful entrepreneurs do: he tried to replicate his success.  Enter ImmunityBio, a publicly traded biotech that's supposed to be his next big pharmaceutical play.  The company finally got its first drug approved in April 2024. ANKTIVA, a bladder cancer treatment, hit the market and revenue has been growing at eye-popping percentage rates. Full year 2025 revenue came in around $113 million, which represents a 700 percent year-over-year increase.

Sounds impressive until you look at the other side of the ledger.  ImmunityBio is burning through cash like a wildfire.  Net losses in Q2 2025 alone were $92.6 million, with R&D expenses running around $50 million per quarter.  The company ended 2025 with about $243 million in cash, which gives it some runway but not indefinite runway.  Aggregate annual losses likely exceed $250 million to $300 million.  That's a lot of red ink for a company with only $113 million in revenue.

This is where Soon-Shiong's situation can seem precarious.  His net worth sits at about $12 billion according to Bloomberg and Forbes, so he's still firmly in billionaire territory.  But much of that wealth is tied up in his 76 percent stake in ImmunityBio, a stock that fluctuates wildly. His net worth dropped by $1.2 billion in just one month in early 2025 because of biotech market volatility.

Now add the LA Times' $48 million annual losses on top of ImmunityBio's $250 million to $300 million burn rate, and you're looking at aggregate losses approaching $400 million per year across his portfolio.  Even for a billionaire, that's real money walking out the door every twelve months.

The LA Times situation has its own special complications beyond just the financial bleeding.  The newsroom has been gutted, with more than 20 percent of staff cut in 2024 alone through multiple rounds of layoffs.  The union authorized a strike in October after going nearly three years without a collective bargaining agreement.  This isn't the stable foundation you want when pitching investors on a visionary media platform.

The paper also faces structural disadvantages that make a turnaround genuinely difficult.  It has no economies of scale and doesn't even own its own property.  Meanwhile, the pivot strategy to a diversified media and entertainment model is being pitched into a market that has not been kind to media IPOs.  Remember BuzzFeed? That went public and promptly crashed and burned.  Investors have long memories about media companies that promised digital transformation and delivered shareholder destruction instead.

Then there's NantOmics, another piece of Soon-Shiong's empire that was supposed to revolutionize cancer diagnostics. The company raised $261 million in total funding over the years, but current operational data suggests it's essentially dormant.  Public records show only five employees at one location, and there's virtually no recent news about commercial activities.  For a company that was supposed to be transforming personalized medicine, that's a pretty quiet existence.

So here's Soon-Shiong in 2025: still a billionaire with legitimate accomplishments, but also a guy trying to keep multiple struggling ventures alive while markets and circumstances work against him.  The LA Times transformation into a media platform hub isn't inherently crazy.  Bundling content creation with gaming and entertainment studios could theoretically create synergies and multiple revenue streams. Stranger business pivots have worked.

But the execution challenges are enormous. He needs to turn around a newspaper that's losing money faster than it's making it, negotiate with an angry union, compete in a brutal media landscape, convince investors that media IPOs aren't toxic, and do all this while his biotech company burns cash and his net worth bounces around based on stock market sentiment.

The 2027 IPO timeline gives him some breathing room, but it also means years more of subsidizing losses while trying to build revenue momentum. The $500 million preferred stock raise would help, but those dividend payments create their own pressure.  You're essentially taking on expensive debt that requires servicing before you've fixed the underlying business model.

Can Patrick Soon-Shiong pull this off? He's proven he can build valuable companies before.  But pharmaceutical innovation and media transformation are very different games.  Drug development has clear endpoints and regulatory pathways.  Media platforms succeed or fail based on fickle consumer attention and advertiser sentiment in a market that's already oversaturated with content.

The honest answer is that this looks like a long shot.  Not impossible, but definitely swimming upstream against strong currents.  Soon-Shiong has the personal wealth to keep funding these ventures for years if he chooses to. The question is whether he should, and whether investors will buy into a vision that requires believing a struggling legacy newspaper can become the foundation of a thriving digital empire.

Time will tell. But right now, it looks less like a transformation story and more like an expensive rescue operation with an uncertain ending.