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
Morita takes the camera away from Kirk, puts it in a box and seals it and thanks him for the meeting and said, Kirk said, can I have the camera? He said, no, if you sell me the studio. So we left. We couldn't make a deal. We tried to make a deal. We couldn't make a deal. And then I started getting involved with a guy named Walter Yednikoff, who was a client of mine who ran CBS Records.
And there was an opportunity to take CBS Records away from the Tisch family who really didn't want to keep it. And Sony became the candidate. And Pete was on the board of Sony and I was working for Mr. Morita. And we got to be friends aside from we knew each other from MoMA. So it made a great common denominator. And Steve was the banker.
And you'll die when I tell you who was the number cruncher was Roger Altman. He was at Black Sun at the beginning. And there was a tiny little office that they had. But Steve had something that Pete didn't have. that nobody else had.
Steve had my template, the common denominator amongst all these guys that I'm crazy about, a drive that had no end, a desire to do something different, a desire to break all the rules illegally, but to not stand on ceremony and to create a financial institution out of thin air. It's easy to look at it now. They have $450 billion credit fund.
I was having dinner with the heads of one of the banks in New York, and we were talking about Blackstone, and Steve in particular, and I said, would you ever have thought that someone from scratch would create a competitor to you in the credit markets? Because they get the first call, you don't. And they're the biggest bank in the city. And Steve had a drive and a brain
And I kept, I related to him so much because in 1974, when I wanted to start CA, I will never forget this as long as I live, an agent at William Morris, we were friends and he said to me, why are you doing this? You're going to fail. And I said, what do you mean I'm going to fail? And he said to me, no one could build an independent agency. There are 200 agencies. You're going to get killed.
You're not going to get any clients. You won't be able to represent movie stars. You're not going to get writers. You're going to be looking for a job in a year. Why not just stay at William Morris? It'd be easier and you'll make more money. And I kept sitting there saying, what's wrong with this guy? I'm saying that to myself. What's wrong with this guy? And Steve was the same way.
I know people said to him, and they talked behind his back, yeah, yeah, Blackstone, sure. It'd be a boutique bank, great. Maybe someone will buy it. Well, look who's got the last laugh now. CA is 50 years old. Blackstone's an institution. It's all about the founder. And Steve had a vision. I'm going to be an institution. And never did he stop.
So when we started, we started representing people on television only. Then we went to movies, then to music. What's next? We just kept going. Investment banking, advertising, consulting. Steve did the same thing. One business line after the other, but...
The genius move is the people, same as Stefan Cohn at Ballantyre, got the best people, picked up the best men and women in the financial universe, paid them more money, gave them more freedom, creativity, and let them run. And now you go into the Blackstone building and it's like, you know, it's crazy. It's like, it feels like it's been there a hundred years.
And this is what Andreessen Horowitz is doing. And Mark are building an institution that's going to outlive them. And that's their goal. They don't want to be a boutique. They don't want to be small. And one has to admire that vision because it's the driving factor to success. And success spawns philanthropy, jobs, social movements, and basic running the wheels of the economy.
It's much different than A couple people being in charge of everybody. I said to someone the other day, I wouldn't want to be a startup guy in Beijing if my life depended on it. I don't want to see what happened to Jack Ma and say, oh my God, I want to kill myself to do this, but I got to walk around quaking in my boots. We live in the greatest country in the world.
I don't care what anybody says about anything or any elected official. It's not going to happen here. We run our own lives and we're creative. I'll put our tech scene up against anyone's in the world. Hands down, we'll kill them. We'll kill them. We're just motivated, free thinkers.
I'm still doing it.
I haven't asked you for money yet. Yes, you have.
Oh, no. It's a postulate for me, and it's a great question because it's highly overlooked. They don't teach it in business school. As a matter of fact, in the curriculum in most business schools, they're impractical. They don't teach the things that I needed to know. No one taught me how to be an investment banker. Yeah, sure, I can.
I can look at a balance sheet and read it. But so what? So can everybody else. You know, there's only four or five numbers that mean anything anyways. But they don't teach you about momentum. Steve Schwartzman understands momentum. Alex Karp understands momentum. Mark Andreessen understands momentum. Josh Kushner understands momentum. Bill Ackman understands momentum.
Teddy Forsman understood momentum. Glenn Lowry understood creative momentum. All these executives in their varying silos never took no for an answer. If they were shut down in one silo, they went right to the next. They hired people that could take their jobs. I remember when some of these executives hired people that there was all this back channeling. Are they crazy?
They're going to take their job, you know? I remember Steve hiring a guy to run Blackstone, who we all know who's fantastic, Tony James. And everyone was saying, is Steve leaving? And my answer was, he just got an amazing guy, makes him 10x stronger than he was. He had confidence. I had a meeting yesterday with a young guy that Ollie and I are recruiting.
And I called Ali after the meeting and I said, we've got to shore this guy's confidence up. He's much better than he thinks he is, which is odd for me to say, because as an employer, you want them to think they're not, so they're weak. I want them to realize what his strengths are to make a decision from a positive place, not a negative one. And all these people that I've mentioned are
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