In 2021, he got himself named interim CEO of the HFPA, then led a restructuring that transferred the Globes’ intellectual property to a for-profit entity. Despite morning-after snipes over host Jo Koy’s jokes, Nielsen reported that the 2024 Golden Globes, which aired January 7, garnered 9.5 million viewers, a 51% increase over last year. The incremental growth was good enough for Boehly, whose Eldridge holdings also include Oscar-winning film distribution and production company A24, which took home three Globes that night for Beef, a Netflix miniseries starring Ali Wong. His holding company, Eldridge Industries, already owned a piece of the show’s producer, Dick Clark Productions, later joined by Penske Media. In June 2023, six months before the next awards ceremony, Boehly and Penske acquired the Globes outright.
Established himself as the controlling shareholder.
Wyss was in for $550 million. Boehly rolled his stakes into a new holding company called Eldridge. Like Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, which generates large amounts of capital from Geico, insurance provides the fuel for Todd Boehly’s empire. Most insurance companies invest the premiums paid by policyholders in publicly traded bonds, trying to match their long-dated liabilities with the securities they hold. Established himself as the controlling shareholder. According to SEC disclosures, at least $21 billion of Security Benefit Life’s $48 billion in assets as of the end of 2022 (the most recent available data) was invested in “related parties.” This includes $334 million in American Media Productions, which runs SportsNet LA, the regional sports network that airs Dodgers games. A large percentage of Security Benefit Life’s assets, by contrast, are in the form of loans, leases and other structured debt held by Boehly’s 100-plus portfolio companies.
“On average, 9 million people watched the five World Series games last year. Boehly became fascinated with English Premier League soccer while working on real estate deals in London in the early 2010s. Jonathan Goldstein, Guggenheim’s former head of European real estate and now CEO of Cain International, got him hooked. We had roughly 70 million people view Ohtani’s press conference,” Boehly points out. Roman Abramovich, facing sanctions imposed by the British government after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, said he would sell his soccer club, Chelsea F.C., with the net proceeds going to a foundation to benefit victims of the war. Ten years after buying his piece of the Dodgers, and a year after acquiring a minority stake in the Los Angeles Lakers in 2021, Boehly jumped at a unique opportunity to add another sports jewel to his crown.
“If you run with a lot less leverage and therefore much more capital, you have much more flexibility in how you can manage the assets,” he says, citing as one example buying claims on the defunct crypto exchange FTX in 2023 that were trading at 35 cents on the dollar. “I have very sticky, long-dated liabilities,” says Boehly of the annuities that fund his asset buying. Thanks to a surge in crypto prices, they’re now at 90 cents.
Security Benefit Life also has $1.3 billion invested in Cain International, a London-based real estate firm co-owned by Eldridge. Billions more have been invested in entities associated with Eldridge-owned asset management businesses like Maranon Capital, Panagram Structured Asset Management and Stonebriar Commercial Finance. Cain has $16 billion in assets including the Beverly Hilton and Boston’s Raffles Hotel. In all, Security Benefit Life’s annuity filings list more than 1,500 “common control” entities over 30 pages, ranging from A24 Films and FlexJet, which sells fractional ownership in private planes, to the Soul Train Cruise, run out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Thirteenth Floor Entertainment, owner of attractions like Fear Farm, a “haunted fairground” in Phoenix. The spider web is a bit baffling.