Michael Ovitz
speaker
1,371 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 3 Feb
Michael Ovitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I'm crazy about. Calls me and says, you got to go see this young artist that I'm looking at. And I said, sure. So I go to this young artist, her name's Cecily Brown. And I look at the work and I just was mesmerized by the work. She hadn't had a show yet. And I called Larry and I said, she's amazing. He said, yeah. I said, she's really good. I just had lunch with her last week.
She's about as important an artist as there is right now working. I just saw something I liked. And it was the same with Carp. When I met Alex... We met at a conference and we spent, I think at the Allen & Company conference, and we spent three and a half hours talking about everything, not about his business, just about life, about tech, where it's going, what's happening politically.
trends of the past, things that point to the future. And man, I really liked this guy. I said, we can build a business around this guy. He had something very special. And you could tell that he could be a leader. Glenn had that too. All these people that I've been fortunate enough to come in contact with all have very similar experiences. They're interesting.
They're aggressive to certain degrees in their own way, some blatantly, some not so. They're wicked intelligent. They are perceptive. And they all have this extraordinary burning desire to learn. They want to learn something every minute of the day. and they don't want to waste time. Time is a valuable commodity. So that's pretty much my philosophy.
When I started as an agent, I was 21 years old, and I knew right off the bat that time was my enemy, even at that age. Because if I went and met with someone to judge if I could do something for them, if I made a mistake, that mistake was irreparable and a time sink that can't be recovered. And it's not a hiatus. It's a loss. There's a big difference. It's a loss.
You could be doing something else with that time. So I started to make a set of parameters when I met people about why I want to continue the dialogue. And I have kind of like a pilot's checklist in my head of things that are important to me. And it doesn't really matter what the vocation of the person is.
It doesn't matter whether it's Ted Forsman when he called me to help him with Gulfstream, which was a dying company they were going under amazing turnaround opportunity and went on the board. And we made a decision to recruit. Ted was, I was on five of Ted's 13 boards and spent a ton of time with him. He was a very close friend until he passed away.
And he said, what can I do to make Gulfstream different? And Bombardier was killing them at the time because they had a bigger cabin. And I said, Teddy, there's only one thing you can do. You need to recruit a board that becomes the greatest set of super salesmen in history because you don't need our advice. You don't need our financial engineering. You don't need us to read balance sheets.
You need us to sell airplanes. And what he did is he went out and he put a list together and he brought it back to me and we went through it. And on the list... was the who's who of certain areas. So on the list was Roger Penske.
On the list was Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger, a guy who was the CFO of GE when they were the most important company in New York City when Jack Welch was there. Dale Fry was his name. He had Charlotte De Beers, who was the most important female advertising executive in New York City. And he had Bill Aquavella, the great art dealer.
And all of us had assignments and we all covered areas. So Bill covered art, Kissinger covered politics, Colin Powell covered the US Army and the DOD. Everybody had an assignment. And we met monthly, not quarterly.
And the attendance at the meetings was 100% every time because everyone had, we had so much fun at the board meetings and board dinners that after we sold the company seven years later, we all continued the board meeting.
Well, we divided up the list and called, People we had relationships with. So I call Cole and Paul.
Well, everything's relationships at the end of the day or the beginning of them.
The whole idea is to make them and then keep them. And if you've made a mistake, that's why you don't want to make a mistake. So I call Cole and Paul, who I knew. And I said, before you say no, you want to have some laughs. And do you want to make a little money? The answer was yes to both. Yeah. And then when I told them, What were you doing? He said, what a hoot. He said, okay.
And I called Henry because I was friends with Kissinger because he was on the board of MGM. I said the same thing to him and he thought it was hysterical. He said, what? I can't do his accent, but it was hysterical. He said to me, what do I know about airplanes and this thick, heavy accent? I said, you're flying them, don't you? And he said, yeah. I said, great.
You'll find someone to sell them to. And we used to stand up at the beginning of each meeting and announce what we'd sold. So like- At the board meetings. At the board meetings. So that was the first thing we did. Teddy'd approve the minutes, 100% attendance. Board meetings were always like five o'clock. Then we all went to dinner.
And, you know, Colin would stand up and say, well, I've sold three G4s to the U.S. Air Force. And Kissinger was saying, I've sold five G4s to this royal family. It was like crazy. You know, I got up, I said, I sold a G4 to two actors and I'd give their names, you know. And everybody did that. And the sales went crazy on the company. And at the end of the day,
You have two issues with a company like that. Great product, which they had in sales. There is nothing else, you know, and they had great product and we provided the sales. Then he took the company from bankruptcy to a huge sale. You know, to general dynamics.
Well, first of all, you have to see if there's a visceral connection. That's not anything that's on the list. You know, do you feel some kind of rapport with the person? That's a given and a critical. Okay. The list is amorphous. And, you know, I learned...
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