His work history reads like a list of high-stakes corporate crises that include Citigroup, Time Warner and the Los Angeles Clippers.
Richard Parsons, known for his compassionate business tactics, earned a reputation as a go-to problem solver for struggling corporations like Time Warner, CBS and Citigroup. His expertise made him a highly valued consultant among top leaders in American industry.
He passed away on Thursday at his home in Manhattan at the age of 76.
The reason was cancer, said Ronald S. Lauder, a member of the Estée Lauder board and one of Parsons’s lifelong friends.
Parsons’s diverse career followed major players in American media and finance, as well as the most significant challenges they faced. Time after time, he took charge during critical situations with a calm leadership approach that settled the most difficult and disgruntled shareholders.
A jazz enthusiast and wine lover who served on the board of the Apollo Theater, owned a winery in Tuscany, and resuscitated Harlem’s beloved jazz club, Minton’s Playhouse; Parsons excelled in the business world during a time when he often stood out as the only Black executive in the boardroom. Identifying as a “Rockefeller Republican,” he stood up for social justice following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. He also signed a letter opposing a 2021 law that placed restrictions on voters in Georgia and played a key role in founding the Equity Alliance, a fund dedicated to supporting early-stage ventures led by women and people of color.
We honor the legacy Richard Parsons, a trailblazer in the media industry and a powerful voice for equity and inclusion. His leadership as CEO of Time Warner paved the way for many, and his contributions will not be forgotten. #RichardParsons pic.twitter.com/umTmeAqGHE
— AFRO News afro.com (@afronews) December 27, 2024
Parsons’s résumé reads like a record of the corporate calamities he saved. He helped minimize losses at Dime Bancorp during the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, remedied the fallout from the catastrophic merger of AOL and Time Warner after the dot-com collapse at the start of the 2000s, and intervened at Citigroup as it faced challenges following the 2007-08 financial crisis. Additionally, he took on the role of board chairman at CBS after its disgraced CEO, Leslie Moonves, clashed with controlling shareholder Shari Redstone. Most recently, he emerged from semi-retirement to stabilize the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers after the team’s owner, Donald Sterling, was banned and fined for making racist remarks to his mistress, sparking one of the biggest scandals in NBA history.
Throughout his career, Parsons used his friendly demeanor and vast network of contacts – having previously served as an aide to Nelson A. Rockefeller, the former vice president and New York governor – to navigate and restore critical situations in the corporate sector. In 2007, as Time Warner bounced back, Parsons reflected on his career during an interview at a steakhouse with The New York Times.
“I want my legacy to be simple: I left the place in good shape and in good hands,” he said.
Richard Dean Parsons was born on April 4, 1948, in Brooklyn, New York, as one of five children of Lorenzo and Isabelle Parsons. His father worked as an electrical technician.
A fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Richard later moved with his family to Ozone Park in Queens. He possessed a strong interest in astronomy and physics as a student, once almost causing an explosion while trying to make rocket fuel on a stove at a friend’s house. He skipped two grades and finished high school at just 16 years old, then decided to attend the University of Hawaii on a whim.
“I put down University of Hawaii, not actually really knowing if there was one,” Mr. Parsons recalled in a 2008 interview with the Brooklyn Historical Society. “I just assumed there was. I had sat next to this girl in physics class who was from Hawaii who was just gorgeous.”
When he arrived in Hawaii, he wasn’t ready for college life – he hadn’t arranged for any accommodations – but everything eventually worked out. After running out of money in just a few weeks, he figured out how to budget, chose history as his major, and became a member of a fraternity. He later remembered a conversation with one of his white fraternity brothers, who mentioned that even though he hadn’t had any Black friends while growing up near Detroit, he felt a connection with Parsons, saying, “because you’re different.”
“On reflection, I’ve thought, different than what, or different than whom?” Parsons shared in an interview with Citigroup in 2021. “Was I different than his other Black friends? No, because he didn’t have any other Black friends. In fact, I was different from an image he had in his head of what Black people were supposed to be like.”
Parsons met his wife, Laura, while he was a sophomore at the university. She helped him out during an English class when he hadn’t completed the reading. According to Mr. Parsons in a PBS interview from 2008, she allowed him to look at the paper she was working on. The two quickly fell in love and got married.
Laura survives him, and he is also survived by their three children: Gregory, Leslie, and Rebecca.
When he secured a position on Governor Rockefeller’s staff, it marked a significant moment for the Parsons family. Many years earlier, his grandfather had been the head groundskeeper at Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate located in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. Parsons later became the chair of the Rockefeller Foundation’s board of trustees. When Rockefeller took on the role of vice president under President Gerald R. Ford, Parsons moved to Washington D.C., where he worked on Rockefeller’s legal team and contributed to Ford’s Domestic Council. After his time in the White House, he returned to New York and joined the law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler.
His first big corporate rehab project was coming up. In 1988, he left Patterson Belknap and became the president and later the CEO of Dime Bank. The bank was sinking, having faced a huge loss of $92.3 million in 1989 due to bad loans, and its stock price had plummeted.
Parsons faced some skepticism from those close to him about his decision to accept this challenge.
“Both of my daughters dropped their silverware, literally,” he recalled in the PBS interview. “The oldest one whipped around and looked at her mother and said, ‘Has he talked to you about this?’ Then she looked back at me and said, ‘What do you know about running a bank?’”
Parsons played a crucial role in revitalizing Dime. He implemented a strategy to address problematic loans, reduce expenses and introduce new services to the bank’s clients. In 1994, he announced his decision to leave the bank after assisting in its merger with Anchor Savings Bank.
The Black Economic Alliance released the following statement on the passing of BEA Advisory Board Member Richard “Dick” Parsons. pic.twitter.com/dyiFHBRgJN
— Black Economic Alliance (@BlkEconAlliance) December 27, 2024
However, it was during his tenure at Time Warner that Parsons witnessed one of the most monumental failures in corporate history up close. In 2000, just a few years after stepping into the role of president, Time Warner decided to merge with AOL in a staggering $165 billion deal, an ambitious move intended to blend conventional media with the burgeoning influence of the internet.
“Fundamentally, I thought it was a good idea,” Mr. Parsons told The New York Times.
In reality, the merger was far from successful. The traditional media ethos of Time Warner clashed with AOL’s more carefree culture, revealing that AOL had been exaggerating its advertising profits. Ted Turner, the trailblazer of cable television who claimed to have lost $8 billion personally because of the deal, remarked to The Times in 2010 that it should be remembered as a historical blunder akin to the Vietnam War and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When Gerald M. Levin, the CEO of Time Warner, retired in 2002 (he passed away in March), Parsons had to clean up the mess. The company’s stock had crashed, causing billions in losses for shareholders. Parsons took decisive action by selling the Warner Music division, helped remove AOL’s founder, Steve Case, and mediated the incessant fighting between Time Warner’s different divisions. He managed to keep the company from collapsing or being sold off, and then he handed over leadership to Jeffrey Bewkes at the end of 2007.
Parsons quickly took on his next corporate fixer-upper by becoming the chairman of Citigroup after the financial crisis. Citigroup had received two government bailouts, so he traveled back and forth between New York and D.C. to improve the bank’s relationship with regulators. Although he played a key role in helping Citigroup recover, some critics argued that he should have done more as a long-time board member to prevent problems before they occurred.
After leaving Citigroup in 2012, Parsons stayed active. He had already started working as an adviser at Providence Equity Partners, a big private equity firm connected to the media industry. In 2014, when the NBA was dealing with the fallout from racist comments made by Sterling, the league’s commissioner, Adam Silver, chose Parsons to be the interim CEO of the team.
Parsons established himself as a trusted leader after Sterling was banned from the league and fined $2.5 million. The Clippers were then sold to Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO, for $2 billion, and Parsons helped facilitate the transition.
By that time, he was already well-known as someone who could address and solve big company problems. A profile in Bloomberg Businessweek from 2011 referred to him as “Captain Emergency,” highlighting his skill in building relationships through friendly gestures, disarming jest and interesting stories.
In September 2018, Parsons became the chairman of CBS after Mr. Moonves left the company due to accusations of sexual misconduct. However, he stepped down about a month later because of health issues: he had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a type of cancer that can damage the bones, immune system, kidneys and red blood cell count. Despite this, he played a key role in managing the situation after Moonves’s exit, helping to find his replacement and select new board directors.
Even though he was done with leading big corporations, Parsons kept busy. In 2021, he joined forces with Kenneth Lerer, an investor and former Time Warner executive along with Lauder to start the Equity Alliance, a fund dedicated to supporting businesses led by women and individuals of color. In early 2023, Mr. Parsons shared with The Wall Street Journal that the fund anticipated nearly a 300% return.
During a PBS interview in 2008, just after his departure from Time Warner, journalist Soledad O’Brien asked Parsons to look back on his professional journey. “If you had to condense your essence into three sentences, what would they be?” she inquired.
He paused briefly before replying, “A devoted husband, a caring father, and a loving grandfather. My grandmother always believed that the true nature of a good man lies in his humility and grace. I’ll stick with that.”
Rest in power, Mr. Parsons.
