Gerald M. "Jerry" Levin (born May 6, 1939) is an American mass-media businessman. Levin was involved in brokering the merger between

AOL AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017� ...

and Time Warner in 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble, a merger which was ultimately disadvantageous to Time Warner and described as "the biggest train wreck in the history of corporate America."

Early life and education

Levin was born in Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaReference for Business: "Gerald Levin - Retired chairman and chief executive officer, AOL Time Warner"
retrieved March 29, 2015 to a Jewish family of Russian and Romanian origins. His father was a "butter-and-eggs man" and his mother was a piano teacher. He lived as a child in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in Upper Darby and then Overbrook Hills. After graduating second in his class at Lower Merion High School, where he was named to the Honor Society, he attended

Haverford College Haverford College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Haverford, Pennsylvania. It was founded as a men's college in 1833 by members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), began accepting non-Quakers in 1849, and became coeducational ...

. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1963.

Career and later life

In 2000, he claimed that "media will become the dominant industry in the 21st century, and the global media will become even stronger than the government." Levin spent most of his career with Time Inc. (later Time Warner, then AOL Time Warner), starting there in 1972 as a programming executive for the new Home Box Office (HBO) and eventually becoming CEO of the corporation after the ouster of his nemesis Nicholas J. Nicholas Jr. Interviewed by the journalist Nina Munk, Levin would later admit: "It is absolutely true that I plotted the departure of Nick Nicholas after working with his for 20 years. And I don't have any justification for it other than I am a strange person." Levin is best known for orchestrating with

Steve Case Stephen McConnell Case (born August 21, 1958) is an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist best known as the former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL). Case joined AOL's predecessor company, Quantum Computer ...

the disastrous merger between AOL and Time Warner in 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble, which destroyed $200 billion in shareholder value as the bubble collapsed. Following the deal, CNBC named him as one of the "Worst American CEOs of All Time." According to The New York Times, the merger is used by business schools as a case study of "the worst ealin history." In her book about the deal, Munk writes, "The disastrous merger...epitomizes the culture of corporate America and Wall Street in the late 1990s. It records the climate in executive suites, where as long as a company's stock price kept going up and up, a CEO was all-powerful, like a king with divine rights." Whereas Levin had once been "perhaps the most powerful media executive in the world,", he largely disappeared from public view after the collapse of AOL Time Warner. In 2007, he was reported by

New York (magazine) ''New York'' is an American biweekly magazine concerned with life, culture, politics, and style generally, and with a particular emphasis on New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to ''The New Yorker'', ...

to be "presiding director of Moonview Sanctuary, a “holistic healing institute” with a full-time staff of fewer than twenty people" founded by his new wife, Laurie Ann Perlman, a clinical psychologist. In 2013, he was named chairman of a start-up called Elation Media, raising $150,000 of seed funding, according to Crowdfund Insider, to launch a "live and on-demand service" with programming topics that include "alternative medicine, world peace, visionary art, personal growth and the environment." As of July 2022
Elation TV
does not appear to have launched.

Personal life

Levin has been married three times and fathered five children. His first wife was Carol Needleman, whom he met at summer camp in the 1960s; they divorced in 1970. In 1970, he married Barbara J. Riley; they divorced in 2003. His third wife was Laurie Ann Perlman, a Hollywood agent turned psychologist who had been formerly married to Jack Rapke; they divorced in 2020.

Murder of Jonathan Levin

One of his children, Jonathan Levin, a 31-year-old high school English teacher at Taft High School in the Bronx, was murdered on May 31, 1997 during a robbery by one of his own students. The student, Corey Arthur, was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to the maximum allowed term of 25 years to life in prison in November 1998, with the judge concluding that Arthur had taken sadistic pleasure in the crime and shown no remorse. A purported accomplice, Montoun Hart, was acquitted on the same charges in February 1999. While Hart had written a confession, jurors were not able to find out how it was obtained and felt it was unreliable. The murder occurred after Jonathan had mentioned in the classroom that his father was Time Warner head Gerald Levin. The former student, Corey Arthur, assumed that Jonathan was wealthy. Arthur stole Jonathan's bank card and tortured him to obtain the account's PIN, obtaining about $800 from the account. Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications in The Bronx, New York City, is named after the murdered teacher.

References

External links