Brad Greenspan is an internet entrepreneur best known for overseeing eUniverse’s launch of Myspace.com in August 2003.
Greenspan founded eUniverse, Inc. an internet company which in 1999 acquired CDUniverse.com with approximately 300,000 monthly users. It survived the 2001 .com-bust, diversified, listed to Nasdaq, and grew to over 49 million monthly unique visitors by the end of 2001 while becoming cash flow positive.
What is Brad Greenspan’s Net Worth?
Brad Greenspan is an American entrepreneur who has a net worth of $5 million. Brad Greenspan earned his fortune thanks to his involvement in the founding of several large web properties, most notably MySpace.
In 1998, he founded eUniverse Inc.. In 2003 eUniverse launched the early social network MySpace. Greenspan worked with Chris DeWolfe, Josh Berman and Tom Anderson to develop the popular website. Brad resigned from eUniverse in late 2003. At the time of his resignation, Brad Greenspan owned 23% of eUniverse, which was actually a publicly-traded company. When NewsCorp acquired MySpace for $580 million in October 2005, Greenspan owned 10% of the company. He therefore presumably received a roughly $58 million pre-tax windfall.
Greenspan famously did NOT want MySpace to sell to NewsCorp for only $580 million. He, perhaps correctly, believed MySpace was worth significantly more. He launched a lawsuit that was not successful. To his point, less than a year after the acquisition, MySpace signed a deal with Google that guaranteed it $900 million in revenue for being an exclusive ad partner.
Greenspan went on to develop Asian web company Broadwebasia, a line of health products called Borba and a secondary social network known as LiveUniverse.
Net Worth: $5 Million
Date of Birth: Mar, 1973 (50 years old)
Place of Birth: Los Angeles
Gender: Male
Profession: Businessperson, Investor
Nationality: United States of America
Career Beginnings
Brad Greenspan was born in 1971 in Los Angeles, California. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied political science. After graduating from UCLA, Greenspan worked as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. In 1995, he founded his own investment bank, Palisades Capital.
eUniverse and MySpace
In February 1999, Greenspan founded eUniverse (Entertainment Universe), an internet company that focused on building and buying online communities. Over the course of its existence, eUniverse acquired several smaller internet companies, including CDUniverse and Excite@Home. He actually took eUniverse public. Years later when MySpace was thriving, eUniverse was traded on the Pink Sheets under the ticker symbol EUNI.
In 2003, eUniverse launched a social net working site they called MySpace. They bought the domain from a business called YourZ which had been planning to use it as an online storage and sharing site.
Several of the company’s early employees and founders wanted MySpace to charge users a fee for the service. It was Greenspan who insisted it stay a free service. Obviously that was a smart choice as MySpace soon became became one of the most popular websites in the world.
Greenspan resigned from eUniverse in October 2003 amid a board room battle. He stepped down as a company director in December 2003. At that point he released a statement in which he claimed his fellow directors had breached their fiduciary duties. At this point he owned 23% of eUniverse’s equity.
In 2004 eUniverse was renamed Intermix Media and Richard Rosenblatt was named CEO.
NewsCorp Acquisition
In 2005, News Corporation acquired MySpace for $12 a share, a total value of $580 million. Brad Greenspan was one of the largest shareholders, owned 10% of MySpace’s parent company which had been renamed Intermix Media. That would imply he received a $58 million windfall from the sale.
Interestingly, Greenspan actually opposed the sale, believing that $580 million was drastically too low. He launched an effort called FreeMySpace LLC in an attempt to rally other shareholders to demand a bigger upside in the acquisition. Those efforts ultimately failed and NewsCorp successfully acquired MySpace in October 2005.
News Corporation made a number of changes to MySpace, but the site lost popularity to newer social networking sites, such as Facebook.
In 2011, News Corporation spun off MySpace into a separate company. The new company, MySpace Inc., was acquired by Specific Media in 2013. Specific Media has made a number of changes to MySpace, but the site has not regained its former popularity.
MySpace is still in existence today, but it is no longer one of the most popular social networking sites in the world. The site has around 1 million active users, compared to Facebook’s 3 billion active users.
LiveUniverse
After the dust from the MySpace sale settled, Brad launched a new company called LiveUniverse. LiveUniverse soon launched or bought more than 30 properties, including video-sharing site called Revver and MySpace-like site called Pageflakes.
LiveUniverse was effectively shuttered in late 2010.
In October 2012 LiveUniverse and Brad Greenspan personally were hit with a $6.6 million default judgement by a federal judge over running a lyrics website that did not pay licenses for the lyrics. The judgement worked out to $12,500 per song for 528 songs whose lyrics were allegedly used without a license.
Real Estate
In November 2004 Brad Greenspan paid $2.9 million for a home in the Hollywood Hills. In May 2008, a burglary at the home earned a few headlines in the LA papers. Brad listed this home for sale in April 2009 for $3.55 million. He ultimately accepted $2.43 million in June 2013.
Strategic Microsoft Gaming Partnership
Greenspan led efforts to capture strategic partnerships for Skilljam.com a skilled online gaming property launched by eUniverse in 2002. In March 2003, Skilljam announced it had struck an exclusive multi-year partnership to run skilled pay-per-play gaming for Microsoft’s MSN property. Forbes described the partnership in a March 18, 2003 article titled “Win Bill Gates’ Money”
Greenspan resigned from eUniverse in late October 2003 as CEO and as a Director in December 2003, stating that he felt that other “directors have breached their fiduciary duties to the Company and its stockholders.” The company was sold to News Corp in 2005 for $12.00 per share in cash, which Greenspan, the largest non-insider stockholder opposed. In September 2005 Greenspan formed FreeMySpace LLC for the purpose of giving shareholders the “opportunity to participate in the exciting future of MySpace.com as a free and independently thriving business”.
On September 23, 2005, an investor group led by Greenspan, FreeMySpace LLC urged shareholders to vote against News Corp’s offer which “significantly undervalued” MySpace which had the “potential to achieve values in the coming years approaching that of other publicly traded online companies such as Google, Yahoo, and eBay.” FreeMySpace made a counteroffer allowing each shareholder to sell up to 50% of their shares at $13.50 a “significant premium to the proposed News Corp offer” continue to own shares in MySpace’s publicly traded parent company which would be “transformed to focus exclusively on MySpace, divest non-MySpace assets to generate resources necessary for growth and development and be renamed and trade as MySpace.
MySpace’s publicly traded parent company rejected FreeMySpace LLC’s offer calling it “speculative” before completing the transaction with News Corp in early October 2005
Brad Greenspan & The MySpace Report
In October 2006, Brad Greenspan launched a website, called freemyspace.com, and published reports that called for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the United States Department of Justice, and the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance to investigate News Corp’s acquisition of MySpace as “one of the largest merger and acquisition scandals in U.S. history.” The report’s main allegation is that News Corp. should have valued MySpace at US$20 billion rather than US$327 million, and had, in effect, defrauded Intermix shareholders through an unfair deal process. The report received a mixed response from financial commentators in the press. A lawsuit led by Greenspan challenging the acquisition was dismissed by a judge.
Greenspan’s claims were validated when in June 2010 Judge George H. King ruled in favor of shareholders in a summary judgment decision. According to Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times, “Viewed as a whole, Judge King wrote, the evidence indicates that “there are at least triable issues of fact” about whether Mr. Rosenblatt acted in good faith or tilted the auction in favor of the News Corporation “for a purpose other than maximizing shareholder value.”
A trial might also determine if the rest of the Intermix board improperly put Mr. Rosenblatt in charge of the auction process and then turned a blind eye to his actions, the judge concluded.” Further, the Judge refused to dismiss the damage report finding “shareholders suffered economic damages in the News Corporation bid of $506 million to $667 million”
