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.
(Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/ Getty Images for Davidson & Choy Publicity)
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.
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