Mortimer Zuckerman

Mortimer Benjamin Zuckerman (born June 4, 1937) is a Canadian-American billionaire media proprietor, magazine editor, and investor. He is the co-founder, executive chairman and former CEO of Boston Properties, one of the largest real estate investment trusts in the United States. Zuckerman is also the owner and publisher of U.S. News & World Report, and its editor-in-chief. He formerly owned the New York Daily News, The Atlantic, and Fast Company. As of August 2024, his net worth is estimated at US$2.6 billion.

Zuckerman was born on June 4, 1937, in Montreal, Quebec, the son of Esther and Abraham Zuckerman, who owned a tobacco and candy store. His family is Jewish, and his grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi. Zuckerman was raised in Outremont, and attended Adath Israel School and Strathcona Academy. He entered McGill University in Montreal at the age of 16. He graduated from McGill with a B.A. in 1957 and a B.C.L. in 1961, although he never took the bar exam. That same year, Zuckerman entered the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he earned an M.B.A. degree with distinction. In 1962, he received an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School.

After graduating, Zuckerman remained at Harvard Business School as an associate professor for nine years. He also taught at Yale University. Zuckerman spent seven years at the real estate firm Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, where he rose to the position of senior vice president and chief financial officer.

In 1980, he purchased the literary magazine The Atlantic, where he was the chairman from 1980 to 1999. In 1999 he sold the magazine to David G. Bradley for US$12 million. Commenting on this sale and that of Fast Company magazine, which he sold for $365 million at the height of the tech boom in 2000, he quipped, "I averaged out."

While he still owned Atlantic Monthly, in 1984, Zuckerman bought U.S. News & World Report, where he remains its editor-in-chief. In 1993, he bought the New York Daily News, which he ran until 2017 when he sold the paper to Tronc.

In addition to his publishing and real-estate interests, Zuckerman is also a frequent commentator on world affairs, both as an editorialist and on television. He regularly appeared on MSNBC and The McLaughlin Group and writes columns for U.S. News & World Report and the New York Daily News.

Zuckerman has varied in his party affiliations over time, since the late 1970s.

On July 12, 2010, Zuckerman said in an interview that he had helped to write one of President Barack Obama's political speeches. Long-time Obama speechwriters Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes disputed that and asserted that neither "has ever met or spoken to Mort Zuckerman." Zuckerman later published a clarification of his remarks by stating that his help had come in the form of private conversations with various political officials in which he had offered advice and perspective on different issues.

Zuckerman, a long-time supporter of the Democratic party who cast his vote for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, was critical of President Obama on several fronts. Following the downgrade of US treasury debt by Standard & Poor's in 2011, Zuckerman wrote in The Wall Street Journal: "I long for a triple-A president to run a triple-A country." After initially supporting Obama's call for heavy infrastructure spending to revive the economy, Zuckerman criticized the composition of the plan: "if you look at the make-up of the stimulus program, roughly half of it went to state and local municipalities, which is in effect to the municipal unions which are at the core of the Democratic party."

On Obama's healthcare reform bill, Zuckerman stated, "Eighty percent of the country wanted them to get costs under control, not to extend the coverage. They used all their political capital to extend the coverage. I always had the feeling the country looked at the bill and said, 'Well, he may be doing it because he wants to be a transformational president, but I want to get my costs down!'"

Before marrying, Zuckerman's dating history included writers Betty Rollin, Nora Ephron, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington and a four-year relationship with feminist activist Gloria Steinem in the late 1980s, early 1990s.

In 1996 Zuckerman married Marla Prather, a curator of the National Gallery of Art. He and Prather have a daughter, Abigail, together. The couple divorced in 2001, and Prather later married lawyer Jonathan D. Schiller. Zuckerman's second daughter, Renee Esther, was born on December 19, 2008. Zuckerman was 71 at the time; the mother has not been identified.

In May 2004, Zuckerman pledged $10 million to Harvard University to fund a fellowship for students who are pursuing or have earned professional degree in law, business or medicine but are interested in a degree at Harvard’s Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, or the Harvard Kennedy School. The Zuckerman Fellowship funds a scholarship for full tuition, fees, and health insurance plus an annual stipend for one academic year.

In May 2006, Zuckerman pledged $100 million from his charitable trust towards Memorial Sloan Kettering's new cancer research facility. His donation was the largest single commitment by an individual in Memorial Sloan Kettering's history.

In December 2012, Zuckerman pledged $200 million to endow the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University.

Between 2001 and 2003, Zuckerman was the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Typically, the nominating committee attempts to choose a person who is both respected and uncontroversial. However, Zuckerman was widely opposed by liberal Jewish factions. Nonetheless, Zuckerman was eventually elected and served a full term.

In their 2006 paper The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer, political science professor at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, academic dean of the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University, named Zuckerman a member of the media wing of the "Israeli lobby" in the United States. Zuckerman replied: "I would just say this: The allegations of this disproportionate influence of the Jewish community remind me of the 92-year-old man sued in a paternity suit. He said he was so proud, he pleaded guilty."

George W. Bush appointed Zuckerman to serve on the Honorary Delegation to accompany him to Jerusalem for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel in May 2008.

Zuckerman serves on the boards of trustees of several educational and private institutions such as New York University, the Aspen Institute, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Hole in the Wall Gang Fund, and the Center for Communications. He is a member of the JPMorgan's National Advisory Board, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He has been a president of the board of trustees of the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Zuckerman is known to be a mentor to and close associate of Daniel M. Snyder, former owner of the NFL football team Washington Commanders, and has been a financial backer to Snyder's business ventures (CampusUSA magazine), and was a shareholder and director in Snyder Communications Inc., a marketing services business which was taken over in 2000 (by Havas Advertising).