Haim Saban

Haim Saban
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Haim Saban (Hebrew: חיים סבן; born 15 October 1944 in Alexandria, Egypt) is a television and media proprietor. With an estimated current net worth of around $2.8 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the 98th richest person in America.
Contents[hide]
1 Career
2 Politics
3 Family
4 References
5 External links
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Career
Saban and his family, along with much of the Egyptian Jewish community, fled Egypt for Israel after the 1956 Suez War. He currently resides in Beverly Hills, California, and in Israel.
Saban started his career as a concert organizer. In France, he participated in the introduction of Japanese anime and sentai TV series in the country. He produced the scores and opening themes for UFO Robot Grendizer and Candy Candy. He also did the same work on early imported series from America such as Starsky & Hutch and Dallas.
In the United States, he became a television producer, founding Saban Entertainment in 1983. During that time, Haim Saban and partner Shuki Levy became known for soundtrack compositions for children's television programs of the 1980s. Although Levy and Saban composed for their own properties (such as Kidd Video and Maple Town), they scored for other production companies as well (such as Inspector Gadget, The Mysterious Cities of Gold, M.A.S.K., Dinosaucers, Dragon Quest, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, She-Ra, and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors).
In the 1990s, Saban's company became best known for the adaptations of Power Rangers, Masked Rider, VR Troopers and Big Bad Beetleborgs. In 2003 he headed the $5.7 billion purchase of Kirch Media Group, the then-bankrupt German media conglomerate.
In 2001, he and News Corporation sold Fox Family Worldwide for $5.1 billion to The Walt Disney Company for ABC - the network was renamed ABC Family Channel. Saban made about $1.6 billion from this sale, making it the largest transaction between a company and a private citizen ever.
In June 2006, he was part of an investor group led by Texas Pacific Group of Fort Worth, Texas and Thomas H. Lee Partners that won the bid for Univisión, the largest Spanish-language media company in the United States. The bid was for $12.7 billion (USD). Shareholders have filed a lawsuit over the handling of the deal. [1]

Politics
Saban summarized his politics in a 2004 New York Times interview with the statement, "I'm a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel."[2]
Saban has donated to the US Democratic Party and the Israeli Labor Party, he has also donated to Republicans including George W. Bush, and has business affiliations with Rupert Murdoch. In the 2001-2002 election cycle, his Saban Capital group donated over $10 million to the Democratic National Committee[3], the largest donation from a single source up to that time.
He also founded the Saban Center for Middle East Policy[4] at the Brookings Institution, installing Martin Indyk as its director.
Saban joined Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg in endorsing the re-election of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Republican Governor of California, on August 7, 2006.

Family
Saban is married to Cheryl Saban (née Chackler), with whom he has two children. Through Cheryl, he is also the step-father of Tifany and Heidi Lenhart.

References
Bio from Tv.com
Forbes 400
Forbes info
Official website Bio

External links
Haim Saban at the Internet Movie Database
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haim_Saban"