Donald Edward Newhouse (born 1929) is an American billionaire heir and business magnate. He owns Advance Publications, founded by his father, Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr., in 1922, whose properties include Condé Nast (publisher of such magazines as Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker), dozens of newspapers across the US (including The Star-Ledger, The Plain Dealer, and The Oregonian), cable company Bright House Networks and a controlling stake in Discovery Communications. According to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he has an estimated net worth of $19.4 billion. He resides in New York City.
The majority of Newhouse’s fortune is derived from US media assets he controlled with his late brother Si. The bulk of their wealth came from the $10.4 billion sale of cable operator Bright House Networks to publicly traded Charter Communications in May 2016. From the sale, the brothers received 31 million Class B common units, more than $2 billion in convertible preferred shares and $2 billion in cash.
The fortune is controlled through closely held partnerships that don’t disclose individual ownership stakes. The analysis assumes the wealth was split evenly between the two and that Si Newhouse’s half was passed to his estate upon his death in 2017.
The Advance/Newhouse Programming Partnership owns an 8% stake in publicly traded television and digital media company Warner Bros. Discovery, formerly Discovery Communication, according to an April 2022 filing.
Revenue for closely held newspaper business Advance Publications and magazine publisher Conde Nast isn’t disclosed and is derived using information reported by Privco, a research group that specializes in private company data, trade magazine Advertising Age, and financial analysts.
Conde Nast revenue is calculated at about $1.8 billion in 2021, using the company’s print revenue as reported by Privco in 2016 and the performance of peer company Meredith. A 15% liquidity discount is applied due to uncertainty about future cash flows.
Advance Publications revenue is calculated at about $1.9 billion in 2021, based on 2011 revenue reported by Advertising Age — the last year it conducted a survey of the top 100 media companies — and revenue performance since then for the New York Times, EW Scripps and McClatchy.
Media representatives at Advance didn’t respond to emails requesting comment on the net worth calculation.
Early life
Newhouse’s father, Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr., was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and began the family media business. His mother, Mitzi Epstein, was an arts patron and philanthropist who grew up in an upper middle class family on the Upper West Side, the daughter of a silk tie importer. Donald Newhouse is Jewish, and was listed on the Jerusalem Post’s list of the world’s 50 richest Jews in 2010
After his father’s death in 1979, Newhouse and his late brother took charge of the family business. Donald ran the newspaper group; Si focused on magazines. The company revived Vanity Fair, bringing in celebrity editors Tina Brown and Graydon Carter, who transformed the glossy into one of the most talked about magazines in the world.
Newhouse has been enduring the downturn in the print publishing business since 2008. The company has closed half a dozen magazines, including old stalwarts such as Gourmet and House & Garden, and have made big cuts on the newspaper side, including reducing the frequency of an award-winning daily broadsheet, the New Orleans Times-Picayune.He and his wife are art collectors and the named benefactors for the humanities center at Wellesley College.
Philanthropy
In January 2020, Newhouse donated $75 million to Syracuse University‘s S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. The communications school is named after his father, Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr.
It was announced in March 2021 that Newhouse and his wife Susan would launch a fund at the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration (AFTD) with a $20m donation, the largest donation in the charity’s history
Personal life
Newhouse married Susan Marley in 1955, just after she had graduated from Wellesley College.
- Katherine Irene Newhouse – school teacher at the Town School in New York; married Dr. Joseph Patrick Mele in 1991.
- Michael Andrew Newhouse – assistant publisher of the Times of Trenton; member of Associated Press board of directors since 2017; married Elyse Sue Applebaum in 1988. Elyse’s brother, Scott Applebaum, is founder and CEO of Multispark, LLC. Elyse works as the president of global development at Advance’s magazine company Conde Nast International.
- Steven O. Newhouse (b. 1957) – editor of the Jersey Journal; married in 1993 to Gina Sanders, later publisher of Gourmet and Teen Vogue.
The couple’s primary residence was in New York City, but they often spent weekends on their farm in New Jersey. They remained married until her death in 2015 of primary progressive aphasia, the same rare disorder that afflicted his brother, Si Newhouse
Milestones
- 1929 Donald Newhouse is born.
- 1955 Marries Sue Marley, who he met at Syracuse University.
- 1959 Father Samuel I. Newhouse Sr. buys Conde Nast Publications.
- 1966 Drops out of Syracuse University and joins his father’s newspaper empire.
- 1975 Brother, Si, becomes chairman of Conde Nast.
- 1979 Father dies at age 84; Si takes reins of the company.
- 1980 Advance purchases book publisher Random House.
- 1983 Begins publishing Vanity Fair, which had been shuttered since 1936.
- 1998 Buys technology magazine, Wired, for $25 million.
- 2017 Brother Si dies at age 89.
