How Patrick Soon-Shiong Made His Fortune Before Buying the L.A. Times

In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Lee Iacocca, the celebrated executive who had run both Chrysler and Ford, visited the Los Angeles laboratory of Patrick Soon-Shiong, a surgeon at U.C.L.A. Iacocca’s first wife had died of Type 1 diabetes a few years earlier; he was searching for a cure. Soon-Shiong, who was in his thirties, specialized in pancreas transplant, a risky treatment reserved for severe diabetics. Soon-Shiong was a skilled surgeon who had trained under organ-transplant pioneers, but he’d grown unhappy with the procedure: pancreas transplants carried a high risk of organ rejection, and he didn’t feel that the outcomes were worth the danger. He wanted to shut down U.C.L.A.’s pancreas-transplant program and embark on a new line of research. Instead of replacing the entire pancreas, Soon-Shiong would replace only the insulin-producing islet cells inside it.

Soon-Shiong set up a laboratory at the Veterans Affairs hospital in West L.A. There, working with a staff of three, he began sourcing islet cells from pigs and human cadavers. “The lab was primitive,” Iacocca’s daughter Kate Hentz told me. Hentz had toured many such research facilities with her father; Soon-Shiong, she sensed, was a maverick.

She and her father were impressed. “Patrick is just brilliant,” Hentz said. Soon-Shiong was extraordinarily charismatic; he was fit and trim, wore rimless glasses, and had a long shag haircut. He was Chinese by ancestry and South African by birth, and he spoke with a soft Anglo-South African accent. He could talk for hours about medicine and the human body, then switch to history, or business, or literature. Soon-Shiong’s wife, Michele B. Chan, was an actress who’d played a marine biologist on a Canadian TV show; the couple lived in a modest bungalow in Brentwood. “Their house was just adorable,” Hentz said. “You could feel they had all these little creative touches, without being overboard.” Among those touches were his-and-hers doorframes, cut into silhouettes of their profiles.

Iacocca agreed to fund Soon-Shiong’s research, and also encouraged him to commercialize his work. Soon-Shiong was hesitant. “He was really excited about what he was doing, but kind of quiet about it,” Hentz said. “He was modest. He was humble.” Iacocca won him over.

“Lee Iacocca, O.K.? I bring him into my little lab in the V.A. He sits me down and says, ‘Patrick, you’ll never survive academia,’ ” Soon-Shiong told me this summer. “I never had any intention of going into business. I wanted to be the chairman of the department of surgery.”

Today, at sixty-nine, Patrick Soon-Shiong is worth at least eight billion dollars. He has been called the richest man in Los Angeles; he is one of the richest doctors in the world. He has taken four companies public and runs a medical-research initiative with a thousand employees and a half-dozen state-of-the-art laboratories. He is seeking a cure for cancer and developing his own COVID-19 vaccine. He owns a portion of the Los Angeles Lakers, and in 2018 he bought the Los Angeles Times. The bungalow is now his guesthouse; over time, he has acquired twelve adjacent parcels of land and built a sprawling complex. The centerpiece is an underground basketball court, constructed according to N.B.A. regulations, beneath his living room. The court is illuminated by natural light, based on a design on which Soon-Shiong holds three patents. He hosts pickup games there; Kobe Bryant sometimes played.

Soon-Shiong likes to present himself as an accidental billionaire. “I would like to be remembered, primarily, as a physician-scientist,” he said. His manner is gentle, and maybe a little paternal; talking with him, you get the sense that he just knows better than you do. He is patient and kind, never pushy, and he listens carefully.

But, in the mid-nineties, after funding his research, Hentz told me, Iacocca grew concerned. Soon-Shiong’s relationship with U.C.L.A. seemed strained, and the Iacoccas were given little information about their funds. Eventually, Iacocca pulled out. By then, Soon-Shiong had stepped down as a full-time faculty member. “It was a little odd, our exit, to say the least,” Hentz said. “Things weren’t totally clear for us.”

Few figures in modern medicine have inspired as much controversy as Soon-Shiong. “He gets very enthusiastic, and sometimes he might exaggerate,” Hentz said. “He can embellish a little.” Outcomes for his diabetes treatment were disappointing, and one case ended tragically. While pursuing this therapy, he also began researching chemotherapy. At the center of his fortune is a cancer treatment that costs more than a hundred times as much as another drug, available as a generic, that is prescribed for some of the same conditions. Soon-Shiong has been repeatedly accused of financial misrepresentation, self-dealing, price gouging, and fraud. He has been sued by former investors and business partners; he has been sued by other doctors; he has been sued by his own brother, twice; he has been sued by Cher.

Nevertheless, in recent years, Soon-Shiong has emerged as one of Los Angeles’s most prominent civic leaders. He paid five hundred million dollars for the L.A. Times, along with its sister paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune—double what Jeff Bezos spent to buy the Washington Post, which had three times the number of subscribers. Hoping to turn the Times into a multimedia platform, Soon-Shiong appointed Norman Pearlstine, who had run Time Inc.’s editorial operations, as executive editor. “He made the acquisition with very little due diligence, because he thought that it had to be easier than curing cancer,” Pearlstine told me. “I’m not sure whether he still believes that.”

The Times’ newsroom had been shrinking for years; Soon-Shiong halted the layoffs, and invested more than a hundred million dollars in infrastructure and staff. He invested in video content, podcasting, and the company’s mobile presence. He relocated the offices from downtown Los Angeles to the suburb of El Segundo. His wife took over the design of the space, which would include an enormous test kitchen, intended to support the company’s expanded food coverage.

Then COVID hit. “We would speak several times a week, occasionally several times a day, until March of 2020,” Pearlstine said. “We had far less communication from that time on.” Pearlstine was gone by the end of the year, and the new office remains unfinished—a company spokesperson told me that the test kitchen is “ninety per cent done.” Kevin Merida, who succeeded Pearlstine at the Times, started his job in June, but didn’t meet Soon-Shiong in person until September; reporters, Soon-Shiong said, hadn’t been inside the Times building in more than a year. He takes COVID as seriously as anyone I’ve encountered. He rarely leaves his compound, and refused to meet with me in person. His P.R. rep hasn’t been in the same room with him since March, 2020. I asked Merida how frequently he talks to Soon-Shiong. “We don’t have a cadence,” he said.

Employees at Soon-Shiong’s other businesses told me that he is focussed on developing his COVID vaccine, which is in clinical trials in South Africa, the intended pilot market. Soon-Shiong told me that he had been vaccinated, but, when I asked him which vaccine he’d received, he said, “I can’t tell you that.” When I persisted, he implied that, while waiting for the South African trials to be completed, he’d used his experimental vaccine on himself.

My first conversation with Soon-Shiong took place this summer, over Zoom. He was indeed brilliant, charismatic, and enthusiastic, although I wouldn’t call him modest. Our conversations were wide-ranging and at times difficult to follow; he answered my first question with a five-minute monologue on protein interactions, the Large Hadron Collider, climate change, Kobe Bryant’s Achilles tendon, the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the history of the human race. When a concept got technical, he would pull up a digital whiteboard, diagramming networks of cells, proteins, and computers.

Soon-Shiong traces his expository nature to childhood. “To me, as a kid, everything was a circle—there’s no beginning and no end,” he said. “And what I mean by that, as a systems engineer, is really looking at integrating—connecting dots.” His parents, who were ethnically Hakka, moved to South Africa after the Japanese invasion of China. His father ran two small grocery stores while his mother brought up ten kids. At home, Soon-Shiong said, he spoke Hakka Chinese and English, with a smattering of Afrikaans and Xhosa.

His family lived in the nonwhite section of Port Elizabeth, in the Eastern Cape. “Surrounding me was a battery factory, a car-tire factory, a meat factory, and the ocean,” he said. “I would play with Black kids, what were called ‘Coloured’ kids, and Indian kids. There weren’t a lot of white kids.” He was sent to a school for Chinese students, run by the Anglican Church. “My science teacher was a priest who fought in World War One,” he said. “He suffered from mustard gas. He could barely talk.” Soon-Shiong excelled at the school, where he acquired his cultivated Anglo accent. Upon graduation, in 1969, he applied to medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. The school registered two hundred students that year, following a strict racial-quota system: a hundred and ninety-six white students, two Indian, and two Chinese. To gain acceptance, Soon-Shiong had to be one of the best Chinese test-takers in the country.

The school awarded M.D.s to students after six years of concentrated study. While his counterparts in America were suffering through organic chemistry, Soon-Shiong was practicing medicine in a Black township. “I graduated when I was twenty-three,” he said. “I think at that point I had delivered a hundred babies.” His ethnic identity put him outside South Africa’s racial dichotomy, but as a nonwhite citizen he was required to carry an I.D. card with him at all times.

After medical school, Soon-Shiong was sent to work in what was known as a “non-European” hospital. Seeking better training, he requested permission to intern at a “white” hospital in Johannesburg. His wish was granted, on the condition that he work for half pay. He remembers being the only Asian doctor in the facility. “I go to see this Afrikaans guy, he’s got a fever and he won’t let me touch him,” Soon-Shiong said. After his supervisor threatened to remove the patient, he relented; Soon-Shiong diagnosed him as having a sinus infection and had it drained. “So then he’s running around the hospital saying, ‘You’ve got to let the Chinaman look at you!’ ”

During his rotations, he also worked in a hospital in the Black township of Soweto. He described working there in 1976, at the time of the Soweto uprising, which was led by Black schoolchildren. South African police opened fire, and at least a hundred and seventy-six people were killed. “I was looking after these kids, and now I’m visiting them in the I.C.U.,” he said. “That really scared me.”

In 1977, he and Michele immigrated to Canada. She was a Chinese South African as well; the two met at a basketball game when he was in medical school. They have two children. (“They’re best friends. I’ve seen them fight once, over luggage,” their daughter, Nika, told me. “My dad unpacked a bag that my mom packed.”) In Canada, Soon-Shiong practiced surgery, and in 1983 he was recruited to U.C.L.A.

He brought a bit of South Africa with him. Apartheid had left South Africa isolated from the international community, and the medical culture had a swashbuckling feel. In 1967, Christiaan Barnard had performed the world’s first human-heart transplant there; Soon-Shiong trained under Barnard’s rival Bert Myburgh, who had performed the country’s first kidney transplant. “South Africa formed me, in a funny way,” Soon-Shiong said. “I’m fighting under apartheid, but I’m also being trained by these giants.”

I asked Soon-Shiong whether he had experienced discrimination as an Asian man in America; élite American universities have been accused of limiting Asian enrollment, too. “The good news in South Africa was that it wasn’t hidden,” Soon-Shiong said. Still, he told me that he had not been personally discriminated against. “The Asian guy is a technical guy that talks funny, right?” he said. “Only I have a different accent. So maybe that’s it.” He went on, “But, frankly, it’s the surgeon in me. You know, the self-belief that I’m doing the right thing.” Michele had a harder time. In 1989, she had a bit part in “MacGyver,” and led an army of genetically engineered assassins in “American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt”; not long afterward, she quit acting.

By the early nineteen-nineties, there were at least a dozen biotech startups pursuing islet-cell therapies for diabetes. Outcomes were generally disappointing; in most cases, patients would enjoy a few days of remission before the cells were rejected. Soon-Shiong believed that he had solved this problem by encapsulating the cells in alginic acid, a gel derived from seaweed which is also used to thicken ice cream. In 1992, he implanted these capsules in a dog, using cells sourced from pigs. It seemed to work.

By 1993, Soon-Shiong had recruited Steven Craig, his first human patient. Craig had been ravaged by Type 1 diabetes; although he had received a kidney transplant, he was gaunt and walked with a cane, and his eyesight was failing. At the time of his first islet-cell procedure, he was thirty-eight years old and had been unemployed for seven years. Soon-Shiong made a two-inch incision in Craig’s abdomen, then poured in hundreds of thousands of islet cells, taken from cadavers and wrapped in alginic gel. “It was a simple procedure,” Soon-Shiong said. “I wouldn’t even call it surgery.”

Before any long-term results could be determined, Soon-Shiong persuaded Craig to appear at a press conference. A week after the surgery, the “CBS Evening News” showed Craig eating a meal “without insulin, for the first time in thirty years.” Craig’s second procedure, later that year, was covered by the Los Angeles Times. “They’ve done miracles for me,” Craig told the paper.

Other researchers were skeptical. “I had people calling me up saying, ‘Diabetes has been cured!’ ” Scott King, who ran a competing islet-cell startup, said. “But then he’d take Craig to a conference, and people would ask to see clinical data, and Patrick would skillfully parry them.” Craig enjoyed being a star patient. “He got to go to Australia,” his stepson Matthew, who now works as a long-haul trucker, told me. “They seemed to treat him pretty damn well. We all got to stay at Beverly Garland’s hotel.” Soon-Shiong published his results in The Lancet, in 1994, but eventually Craig’s remaining kidney began to fail. The media stopped calling. “He grew depressed after that,” Craig’s ex-wife, Melodie, said. “He liked the attention.” In 1998, Craig checked into a hotel in Orange County and shot himself in the head.

Craig’s family told me that they did not blame Soon-Shiong for the suicide. “We understand that sometimes medical practices go wrong,” Matthew said. “That’s how they find out shit.” But Soon-Shiong’s promotional tactics may have damaged his reputation as a physician. He was publicly chastised by the head of the American Diabetes Association. “He told the world he was curing diabetes,” Michael Zinner, the former chief of surgery at U.C.L.A., told Forbes in 2003. “But, in the scientific realm, you need to have your results reproduced by others to have them validated.”

Following Iaccoca’s advice, Soon-Shiong sought to commercialize his islet-cell research. In 1991, he co-founded a startup called VivoRx, with his brother Terrence, a London real-estate developer. “He was the businessman of the family,” Patrick said. In 1994, VivoRx secured five million dollars in funding from the generic-drug maker Mylan Laboratories; that year, Patrick started a new company to develop a chemotherapy drug. The companies were independent, but some employees worked for both.

The arrangement agitated VivoRx’s investors. On June 29, 1998, the company convened a special board meeting in Santa Monica. Patrick told me that he was asked to sign a document, which he did. By the end of the day, he’d been kicked off VivoRx’s board, and the company was suing him.

Patrick persuaded Terrence to drop the lawsuit, but in 1999 VivoRx, now under Terrence’s control, sued Patrick again, this time alleging fraud. The second lawsuit accused him of “betrayal, arrogance, greed, and personal aggrandizement that resulted in corporate misconduct of enormous proportions.” (Patrick says that there was no misconduct.) The brothers reached a settled agreement: Patrick’s companies were ordered to transfer assets worth twenty-four million dollars to Terrence’s company, Terrence was awarded the islet-cell patents, and Patrick agreed not to conduct further diabetes research for five years. “That I would not work on diabetes for five years—now that, to me, was evil,” Patrick told me. “I said, ‘You’ve hurt mankind,’ because I was this close.” Terrence has never publicly discussed the rift, and could not be reached for comment; Patrick told me that the two remain estranged.

Patrick had acquired two pharmaceutical factories in 1998. (According to a 2001 article in the Los Angeles Business Journal, Terrence’s lawsuit alleged that the acquisition was made possible by the diversion of research funds. Patrick denies this, and says that he obtained independent financing.) Those two factories, in Illinois and New York, became part of American Pharmaceutical Partners, another of Patrick’s companies. At the time of their acquisition, the factories, which manufactured generic injectable drugs, had lost money for nine straight years. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who had no background in manufacturing, restored them to profitability, doubling American Pharmaceutical’s revenues in the process. In 2001, American Pharmaceutical conducted an I.P.O.

Meanwhile, Soon-Shiong continued to develop his chemotherapy drug. In the early two-thousands, he showed up at the annual conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncologists. He had scheduled a meeting with William Gradishar, a breast-cancer specialist at Northwestern University. Soon-Shiong was pitching a new formulation of the generic chemotherapy drug paclitaxel, which is derived from the bark of the Pacific yew tree. Paclitaxel was reasonably effective, but it had to be dissolved in a castor-oil product, which could cause allergic reactions—on rare occasions, fatal ones. Soon-Shiong said that he could make the drug safer and more effective by binding paclitaxel to albumin, a protein produced in the liver. He asked Gradishar to oversee a clinical trial.

“Patrick is a surgeon by training,” Gradishar told me. “He was not and is not a medical oncologist. So no one would have known who the hell he was in our world.” Gradishar heard him out. “He handed me a manila folder,” Gradishar said. “And he goes, ‘I want you to read this. You’re going to hear some stuff about me, so here it is.’ ” Inside the folder was a magazine article about the lawsuits Terrence had filed against him. “You know, that was a little bit strange,” Gradishar said. “But at least he was up front about it.”

Gradishar was wary of Patrick, but impressed by the data he shared and the team of oncologists around him. He agreed to be the principal investigator for the clinical trial of the new drug, called Abraxane.

​​Gradishar had inadvertently wandered onto an active Wall Street battlefield. The rights to make Abraxane in the U.S. were held by American Pharmaceutical, Soon-Shiong’s publicly traded company, but the world rights and patent were owned by a private company called American BioScience. Soon-Shiong owned eighty per cent of American BioScience, which was also American Pharmaceutical’s largest shareholder. Some investors challenged this structure, and short sellers began to target the stock. Wall Street analysts also raised questions about the drug’s trial design. Soon-Shiong had fired the American company conducting the trial, and finished it in Russia. At one point, nearly all of American Pharmaceutical’s available shares had been sold short.

When Gradishar’s clinical data were published, they suggested that Abraxane was a marginal improvement over standard paclitaxel. Among four hundred and fifty-four breast-cancer patients enrolled in the trial, tumors shrank in thirty-three per cent of those who received Abraxane, compared with nineteen per cent of those who were given the standard treatment—in other words, an additional thirty-four women had responded to the new drug. The survival rate was not much better for women given Abraxane than for those given paclitaxel. In addition, paclitaxel performed worse by some metrics than it had in other studies, potentially boosting Abraxane by comparison. But the tumors had shrunk.

It is the nature of the American health-care system that marginal improvements can result in vast fortunes. In early 2005, against the expectations of the short sellers, the Food and Drug Administration approved Abraxane. Shares of American Pharmaceutical went up forty-seven per cent, and Soon-Shiong commissioned a commemorative paperweight displaying the stock chart.

A comprehensive independent review, published in Annals of Oncology in 2006, concluded that Abraxane and similar drugs did “not really” offer a significant therapeutic benefit over established medicines, and termed them “old wine in a new bottle.” But Abraxane is much less likely to trigger allergic reactions, and that has made it popular among American physicians. “It has a slightly different toxicity profile,” Harold Burstein, a breast-cancer specialist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told Fortune in 2013. “For some patients it’s a nice trick to know about. But in terms of its benefit in breast cancer, there is none.”

Gradishar agrees, to some extent. But he said that Abraxane was easier to administer, and noted that, unlike the alternative, it did not require an accompanying dose of a steroid. He said that he regularly prescribed Abraxane to his patients. “They have independent statistical analysis at the F.D.A., and they take a very rigorous look,” he told me. “You don’t just hand them an envelope and say, ‘Well, these are our results,’ and they stamp it. ” He had not been to Russia, but he said that the data had been thoroughly analyzed by Michael Hawkins, the chief medical officer at American BioScience.

From a business perspective, the details of the clinical trial were unimportant; Abraxane now had a medical-billing code for insurance reimbursement. A 2006 article in the New York Times reported that Abraxane was selling for forty-two hundred dollars per dose. (Soon-Shiong says that he had thought the cost was much lower.) Generic paclitaxel, dissolved in the castor-oil derivative, the article said, cost one-twenty-fifth as much. Doctors who administer drugs like Abraxane are permitted to receive a percentage of the price. “The incentives were exactly backwards,” Peter Bach, a doctor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who tracks ballooning medical costs, said.

Following additional clinical trials, the F.D.A. also approved Abraxane as a therapy for lung cancer and pancreatic cancer, when used in combination with other treatments. These developments suggest that Soon-Shiong had helped invent a better drug.

Still, some insurance companies have questioned Abraxane’s clinical value relative to its price. In 2014, the insurer Anthem started a program that identified effective cancer treatments, then paid doctors an additional fee to prescribe them. When treatments were equally effective, Anthem chose the one that cost less. Abraxane made the cut only for pancreatic cancer; for breast and lung cancers, Anthem deemed paclitaxel a less expensive and equally effective drug. (Anthem still reimburses costs for Abraxane when used for any of the three cancers.) Jennifer Malin, the oncologist who developed Anthem’s program, remembered meeting Soon-Shiong to talk about products he was developing. “You go into the conference room, and he just talks for like three hours straight and fills up this giant whiteboard with all his theories of the way things work, whether or not they’re based in reality,” Malin said. “Other people—even clinical people who don’t have expertise in oncology—you would say, ‘Maybe he’s just brilliant.’ You really have to be an oncologist to be able to say, ‘You know, this stuff is kind of wacky.’ ”

Shortly after Abraxane’s initial approval, Soon-Shiong announced that, at the urging of investors, he was finally combining American Pharmaceutical Partners and American BioScience into a single company. In a transaction known as a reverse merger, publicly traded American Pharmaceutical issued millions of new shares to acquire privately held American BioScience—its own largest shareholder. When the transaction was completed, Soon-Shiong owned more than eighty per cent of the shares of the company he’d brought to market just a few years before.

Less than fifteen months after the merger, Soon-Shiong announced that he was splitting the companies up again. The generic manufacturer would now be known as APP Pharmaceuticals; the Abraxane rights holder would be called Abraxis BioScience. In 2008, APP Pharmaceuticals was sold to the German company Fresenius for $4.6 billion. In 2010, Abraxis BioScience was sold to the biotech firm Celgene for nearly three billion dollars. Soon-Shiong became Celgene’s largest individual shareholder, and in the next four years the company’s stock tripled. Having started from nothing fourteen years earlier, and operating outside his medical specialty, Soon-Shiong was now worth more than seven billion dollars.

Soon-Shiong’s wealth and networking skills have given him access to the upper strata of American life. He has appeared with Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, and has invested in a clean-energy venture with Bill Gates. When I asked him who his friends were, he gave me three names: the composer Burt Bacharach, the basketball player Metta Sandiford-Artest (known in his playing days as Ron Artest and later as Metta World Peace), and Jerry Zucker, who produced the movie “Airplane!”

Soon-Shiong was not name-dropping; these men really are his close friends. “Patrick is brilliant,” Zucker told me. “I find him fascinating, on the rare occasion that I understand what he is talking about.” Sandiford-Artest praised Soon-Shiong’s basketball skills. “He can pull up left, pull up right, he has a one-dribble fade,” he said. “He really knows how to play the game.” But it was Bacharach, now ninety-three, who spoke of Soon-Shiong in the warmest terms. “That guy’s so brilliant,” he said. “A man who is interested in all things. And such a good friend.” Bacharach related an anecdote about his son Oliver, who was hospitalized with an antibiotic-resistant staph infection. “Patrick’s not on the staff, but he drops by and asks to see the chart,” Bacharach said. “And, you know, you’re treading on someone else’s ground. But he’s very gentle, the way he went about it, and he talks to the infectious-disease doctor and suggests they switch the antibiotic to another one. The next day, Oliver was better.”

Soon-Shiong’s friends told me about his compound in Brentwood. “I see it more as a campus,” Bacharach said. Everyone brought up the basketball court. “This court is the best court I’ve ever seen in my life,” Sandiford-Artest, who played in the N.B.A. for nineteen seasons, said. “It’s insane. It’s deep under the floor, and it’s a big, N.B.A.-sized court, with locker rooms and televisions. And bowling alleys. Just like a big N.B.A. practice facility, sixty to a hundred feet underground.”

Soon-Shiong and Kobe Bryant were close. When Bryant ruptured his Achilles tendon, in 2013, during a Lakers game, Soon-Shiong rushed to the locker room to meet him. An Achilles rupture can cause heavy swelling around the ankle, and the standard medical procedure is to wait until the swelling subsides before surgically reattaching the tendon. But Soon-Shiong had ruptured his own Achilles playing basketball a few years earlier, and claimed to have devised a novel approach to treating the injury. He advised Bryant to have the operation immediately.

Soon-Shiong’s surgery had been conducted by Neal ElAttrache, a sober and evidence-driven physician, whose prudence and skill have made him one of the most respected orthopedists in sports. He’d been watching the game on TV, and immediately recognized Bryant’s injury as an Achilles tear. “About forty-five minutes later, my phone rang at home, and it was Patrick, in the locker room with Kobe,” ElAttrache told me. ElAttrache was booked to operate the next morning on the ace pitcher Zack Greinke; at Soon-Shiong’s urging, he performed back-to-back surgeries, operating on Bryant afterward. Soon-Shiong, who had not performed surgery in years and had no background in orthopedics, was in the operating room. “The body’s natural healing elements are activated shortly after the tear, so it made sense to me, what he was saying,” ElAttrache said. “You know, the inflammatory elements from the injury are at their peak.”

Bryant returned to the court the following season, but never won another championship. (“He wasn’t a hundred per cent after that,” Sandiford-Artest said. “No way.”) ElAttrache said that Soon-Shiong’s input hadn’t changed his approach to surgery, but he admired Soon-Shiong’s daring, and his willingness to experiment. “Patrick functions on the edge,” he said. “You need people like that. I ask myself, ‘Is there some kernel of genius in there that can help the people I need to take care of?’ So I listen to him. I definitely listen.”

Soon-Shiong purchased his share in the Lakers in 2010, from Magic Johnson. By this time, he had returned to U.C.L.A. as a visiting professor. In 2012, he was part of an unsuccessful bid to buy the Dodgers. In 2013, he invested in the startup Zoom, which was valued at fifty million dollars. The company is now worth seventy billion dollars. Soon-Shiong invested in clean-tech ventures and marketed his own I.T. systems for health care. His wife, Michele, opened a movie studio, and he invested in an e-sports platform. Michele, a practicing Catholic, persuaded him to donate to several Christian charities. (Soon-Shiong grew up in the Anglican Church, and still occasionally attends services.) He acquired a controlling stake in the parent company of Verity Health Systems, which ran six hospitals in California. In late 2016, he and Michele gave a hundred thousand dollars to Hillary Clinton’s campaign; twelve days after the election, he had dinner with Donald Trump.

Not all of Soon-Shiong’s ventures have been successful. Verity Health filed for bankruptcy in 2018; critics noted that the hospital chain had spent more than twenty million dollars upgrading its I.T. system, employing a vender in which Soon-Shiong had a financial stake. After Verity failed, Soon-Shiong acquired control of St. Vincent Medical Center in downtown L.A.—the hospital where he had performed the islet-cell transplant on Steven Craig. That, too, failed, and the building was subsequently repurposed as a temporary COVID ward. (“The nuns hadn’t funded their pensions,” Soon-Shiong told me, in explanation.)

In 2015, Soon-Shiong bought a stake in Tribune Publishing, the media conglomerate that controlled the Los Angeles Times. By 2018, Soon-Shiong had emerged as the sole owner of the paper. In our initial conversation, he recalled his first real job, as a teen-ager, delivering copies of the Evening Post off the back of a truck in Port Elizabeth. “The first thing I did with the L.A. Times, I drove to the printing press,” he said. “I wanted to hear the clickety-clack.” I was surprised by the respect he held for journalists, who have given him a mixed reception through the years. (Soon-Shiong has been the subject of laudatory features on “Nightline” and “60 Minutes,” but a 2014 profile in Forbes presented him as a daffy eccentric, and the biopharma trade publication STAT News has run a series of highly critical articles about him.) When I asked him about his ideas for the paper, he invoked the appropriate buzzwords—“podcasting,” “storytelling,” “test kitchen”—without mentioning anything that sounded like a business plan.

The L.A. Times has long been a trophy for the city’s élite. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Harrison Gray Otis, a former Army general, used it to promote his vision of Los Angeles as an exclusive paradise for the “Anglo Saxon” ideal. Otis’s son-in-law Harry Chandler, the man responsible for the Hollywood sign, treated the paper like a real-estate circular. The paper’s politics were initially quite conservative—its offices were once bombed by labor activists. In the nineteen-sixties, along with the rest of California, the paper tacked left. An era of liberal respectability followed: the paper won numerous Pulitzers and carried a thick classified-advertising section. At its peak, in the eighties, the Times’ offices downtown took up a city block. By the time Soon-Shiong acquired control, the paper was much reduced. Declining revenues from local advertising had led to cuts in staff, and the paper’s Art Deco headquarters had been sold.

The modern news business relies more on paid digital subscriptions than on display advertising. That model is well suited for large platforms like the New York Times, which tripled its subscriber base while Trump was in office. Such growth can come at the expense of local papers; the Times now has more subscribers in Dallas than the Dallas Morning News does. The middle ground is vanishing, and, to survive, the L.A. Times needs a national audience. “You’re not going to compete with the Washington Post, but you don’t have to be the San Jose Mercury News, either,” Pearlstine, the former executive editor, said. But the paper’s growth has been disappointing, particularly relative to the size of Soon-Shiong’s investment. The Los Angeles Times currently has four hundred thousand paying subscribers; the New York Times has eight million.

After the murder of George Floyd, in 2020, when Pearlstine was the editor, the L.A. Times Guild’s Black Caucus wrote a public letter addressed to Soon-Shiong. “The nation’s reckoning over race has put a much-needed spotlight on inequities at The Times,” the letter read. “Most of us who do work here are often ignored, marginalized, under-valued and left to drift along career paths that leave little opportunity for advancement.” A similar letter from the Guild’s Latino Caucus followed.

Erin B. Logan, the twenty-six-year-old chair of the Black Caucus, told me that Soon-Shiong was receptive to the journalists’ concerns. “Shortly after I arrived, we did a head count, and I was, like, ‘Wow, there are not a lot of Black faces here,’ ” she said. “And Patrick, with his background, I think, was immediately in touch with that.” After receiving the letter, he hired more Black journalists; he also commissioned an apology for the paper’s past coverage, which was often racist. Logan was impressed. “Newspapers tend to be owned by a certain kind of person,” she said. “But Patrick is different. He’s personally experienced discrimination like this.”

This February, the Wall Street Journal reported that Soon-Shiong was considering selling the Times. The next day, Nika, Patrick’s twenty-eight-year-old daughter, tweeted, “WSJ is 100% wrong.” Journalists at the Times told me that Nika, who runs an experimental basic-income program in Compton and is a doctoral candidate at Oxford, has taken an interest in the paper. “​​A light switch has gone off for me, in the past year, of understanding the influence that public perception and mass narratives have over public-policy decisions,” she told me.

In December, 2020, Pearlstine left the Times. Still, he remains fond of Soon-Shiong, who, he said, had never interfered in editorial coverage. This May, Soon-Shiong announced that Kevin Merida would succeed Pearlstine. Merida, who is Black, previously ran the multimedia platform the Undefeated, at ESPN, which focussed on the cultural intersection of race and sports. He told me that he thought the Times could reach a million subscribers. “I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t feel good about Patrick and Michele,” Merida said.

Soon-Shiong seems less interested in the news business in general than in the L.A. Times specifically. To buy the paper, he had to take a substantial minority stake in Tribune Publishing, the parent company of the Baltimore Sun, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and several other regional newspapers. Earlier this year, he approved—or, at least, did not contest—the sale of Tribune Publishing to Alden Capital, a hedge fund that the columnist Joe Nocera called the “destroyer of newspapers” for its cost-cutting tactics. “Local benefactors should manage local papers,” Soon-Shiong said of the deal. “I couldn’t manage the Baltimore Sun.”

Before my first conversation with Soon-Shiong, his representative sent me a one-page fact sheet listing areas in which he is currently active. Of the twenty-five business lines, the L.A. Times was in the twenty-third spot, alongside a bioplastics company, a cloud-computing venture, a water-purification system, and a “next generation urban scooter.” Journalists looking for a savior may have to settle for the occasional pep talk from a distracted billionaire. “He’s like Bill Clinton. When Bill Clinton is talking to you, you get the feeling that you’re the only person in the world,” Scott King said. “He gives you the impression that he’s instantly there for you, all out, even though you know that can’t possibly be true.”

In satellite photographs, the town of El Segundo looks like an abandoned game of SimCity. Some sixteen thousand people live there, in a small rectangle of tract housing, penned in by LAX, an oil refinery, an industrial park, and a sewage-treatment plant. El Segundo is also the sandbox for the second phase of Soon-Shiong’s business career, which involves numerous ventures gathered under an umbrella organization called NantWorks.

Inside the NantWorks galaxy, there is NantHealth, which builds diagnostic medical software; NantCloud, which offers cloud-computing services; ImmunityBio, which develops immunotherapy treatments for cancer; and NantStudios, a movie soundstage and visual-effects studio. There are also NantMobile, NantBioScience, NantEnergy, NantOmics, and NantGames. In 2018, Soon-Shiong relocated the Times to a nondescript office building in this industrial suburb, facing the highway, steps from the airport.

Soon-Shiong’s COVID effort, which is based in El Segundo, is run under the ImmunityBio business line. In July, I visited ImmunityBio’s vaccine factory, where genetically engineered virus cells are grown in stainless-steel tanks. The facility looked a bit like a brewery. “I always joke with Patrick that, if we don’t succeed, we’ll make the best I.P.A.,” Leonard Sender, the company’s C.O.O., said.

Soon-Shiong manages activity at NantWorks virtually. Our first conversation took place in June, 2021, after L.A. County had loosened its mask requirements. Soon-Shiong thought that this was foolish. “The Delta variant hasn’t hit here yet,” he said. “When it does, with all these unmasked people, it’ll spread like wildfire.” He was right. When we spoke a month later, amid a spiking caseload, the mask mandate had been reinstated. Soon-Shiong also predicted that the vaccines would be less effective against the Delta variant; this proved true as well.

Soon-Shiong’s vaccine, like Johnson & Johnson’s, uses a neutralized adenovirus to deliver a genetically engineered payload that stimulates an antibody response. His innovation, he told me, is to further stimulate the body’s T-cell response. “The antibodies you get with a vaccine are merely bait,” he said. “The virus will look for the antibody and mutate around it.” He pulled up a virtual whiteboard, and his video-chat window shrank into a thumbnail in the upper-right corner. Using his finger on a touch screen, he drew a color diagram of the COVID virus, with the famous spike protein labelled “S.” “Everybody knows this guy,” Soon-Shiong said. He then drew a structure within the virus, which he labelled “N.” “But this is the nucleocapsid. This is actually the factory, where the virus reproduces itself.” Soon-Shiong said that, if vaccines did not target the viral nucleocapsid, manufacturers would be playing an endless game of catch-up. “I know Moderna’s trying to make another antibody that will go after the Delta variant,” he said. “But you’re chasing your own tail, because next week you’re going to have a Delta-plus.”

Soon-Shiong continued diagramming various biological structures. “The only way to make sure this guy doesn’t propagate, frankly, is to kill the factory. Antibodies will not kill the factory. The only way to kill the factory is to have a T cell,” he said. “I kill the factory, I kill transmission, we end the pandemic.” Soon-Shiong began talking of H2 receptors and recombinant DNA, and soon the screen was covered in squiggles. “You can take a picture of this,” he said at the end. “This is how I communicate with all my scientists.”

After visiting the vaccine facility, I was driven to see another lab, where new treatments for cancer are in development. One of the products was the so-called natural-killer cell, better known as the NK cell, a component of the immune system that has been shown to prevent tumor growth. A mystery of cancer is how the disease manages to hide from these cells; one proposed solution is to genetically engineer the NK cells so that they can better track down cancers, a process that Sender, the C.O.O., called “sending the cells to college.” At the facility, people in hairnets and booties worked feverishly under the gaze of their boss, replicating trillions of college-educated NK cells and packaging them in liquid nitrogen for distribution to cancer patients.

Soon-Shiong has labelled his approach to cancer “quantum oncotherapeutics,” although it does not rely on findings from quantum physics. He has a tendency to make his therapies sound more innovative than they are. When I asked him about Kobe Bryant’s Achilles-tendon surgery, he said, “The treatment for Achilles rupture is completely wrong. I asked Kobe if he wanted to dunk again, and he said yes. So we went completely against the doctor’s orders, and Kobe has his treatment, and he dunked again.” ElAttrache, who performed the surgery, told me, “That this was some sort of novel thing that no one else had considered, you know, I just, I don’t know . . . I think that’s a little bit of an overstatement.”

Soon-Shiong likes to present himself as an intellectual iconoclast, fighting a lonely war against the establishment. In reality, he has operated inside the boundaries of mainstream medical research, even in the islet-cell days. “At the time, I found this kind of self-promotion unethical,” Scott King said. “But I will say, now that I’m older, I realize you need someone like that on your side. He was good at raising money.”

Following the I.P.O. for another NantWorks company, NantKwest, in 2015, reports suggested that Soon-Shiong’s hundred-and-forty-seven-million-dollar compensation package likely made him America’s best-paid C.E.O. that year. The stock subsequently traded as low as a dollar, but it popped in 2020 after Soon-Shiong announced another reverse merger, which left him with more than eighty per cent of the surviving company, ImmunityBio.

When I talked with David Nierengarten, a specialist in NK-cell therapies at Wedbush Securities, he cautioned that ImmunityBio had plenty of competition, that it was not the industry leader, and that its technology could be three to five years away from being marketable. ImmunityBio’s market value is currently more than three billion dollars, but Wall Street isn’t reacting as if it’s about to cure cancer. “I don’t have any questions from investors on it,” Nierengarten told me. “No one. No one cares.”

Prospects for Soon-Shiong’s covid vaccine are equally uncertain, although again the problem is not unproven science but a simple excess of competition. The Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society lists twenty-three covid vaccines currently authorized for use around the globe, and ninety-one still in development, including Soon-Shiong’s. Separating himself from the pack will require an extraordinary breakthrough.

Soon-Shiong promises that such a breakthrough is coming, and perhaps it is. Still, if there is a parallel to be drawn between ImmunityBio’s work and quantum physics, it might be termed the Soon-Shiong uncertainty principle: Ask him a question about medicine and you will receive an answer about business; ask him a question about business and you will receive an answer about medicine; but rarely will you receive both answers at the same time. When I asked him about COVID, he told me that he was fighting against “the same dogma” he had confronted his entire career, before directing me to a fifty-six-page business plan he had included in an ImmunityBio corporate filing. When I asked him about his reverse mergers, he switched back to medicine. “The reverse merger has nothing to do with money or stock,” he said. “It’s to do with putting the right ingredients into the right mixing bowl. So you can cure patients.”

NantWorks’ logo is a feather emerging from a circle. When I asked Soon-Shiong what “Nant” referred to, he gestured to a ropework basket hanging from the bookshelf behind him. “You see this Apache basket? The word ‘Nantan’ stands for ‘he who speaks for the people,’ ” Soon-Shiong said. “I’m an honorary Navajo, and I’m on the Apache council. Because my job, frankly, is to help the marginalized and underserved.”

In 2015, NantPharma acquired the rights to Cynviloq, a paclitaxel formulation that sold in South Korea for a lower price than Abraxane did. The deal specified that, in addition to an up-front payment, NantPharma would pay Sorrento Therapeutics, Cynviloq’s maker, $1.2 billion upon completion of certain sales and regulatory milestones, including the drug’s approval by the F.D.A. But, shortly after acquiring Cynviloq, Sorrento says, Soon-Shiong abandoned the F.D.A. approval process and let the drug’s key patents lapse—a tactic that resembles what in the industry is called “catch and kill.” Soon-Shiong no longer had to pay the $1.2 billion, plus Abraxane would have one less potential competitor. Sorrento sued him, alleging fraud.

Soon-Shiong, who has denied the allegations, told me that Sorrento had manipulated Cynviloq’s clinical data, and that this made it more difficult to pursue F.D.A. approval. He also said that the drug was “falling apart,” and had manufacturing issues. Steve Feldman, an attorney representing Sorrento in the case, rejects this claim as “baseless post-hoc explanations.” “Just because someone’s charismatic, and just because they’re a billionaire, that doesn’t mean what they’re saying is true,” Feldman told me.

Soon-Shiong said that his financial interest in Abraxane is negligible. The drug’s patents are beginning to expire, and it is now owned by Bristol Myers Squibb, which bought Celgene in 2019. Last year, Abraxane did more than a billion dollars in sales. In 2019, around eighteen thousand Medicare beneficiaries were treated with the drug, at an average spending per beneficiary of more than seventeen thousand dollars. (Paclitaxel cost Medicare about a hundred and thirty dollars per beneficiary.)

Sorrento and NantWorks had also established a joint research venture to develop other drugs. Sorrento’s lawsuit alleges that Soon-Shiong repurposed the funds in the venture for other uses, which Soon-Shiong also denies. In a separate case, in 2017, Soon-Shiong was sued by the singer Cher; she alleged that he and others had deceived her, by persuading her to sell her shares in a promising drug company and withholding relevant data to suppress the price of her stock. Soon-Shiong denied the claims, and Cher’s case was dismissed in 2018.

Sorrento’s lawsuit is in arbitration. Cher could not be reached for comment. Cynviloq remains unavailable in the United States.

Peter Bach, of Memorial Sloan Kettering, has devoted his career to fighting for lower drug prices, and he is a longtime critic of the cost and the effectiveness of Abraxane. But Bach is also friends with Soon-Shiong. “I’ve been on his plane. I’ve gone skiing with him,” Bach said. “Knowing Patrick has enriched my life considerably.” Jennifer Malin, the oncologist formerly at Anthem, was also friendly with Soon-Shiong. She recalled meeting him for a business dinner. “His wife and his two kids were eating dinner on the other side of the restaurant, so he would, like, spend fifteen minutes at their table, and chat with them, then come back over to our table,” she said. “If I was married to him, I’d be livid! Anyway, that’s pretty funny. He’s like an excited kid. It’s hard to get upset.”

Soon-Shiong has a tendency to wander into areas in which he has no background. The NantStudios soundstage in El Segundo features “the Volume,” a wraparound visual-effects wall that he hopes will replace the green screen. About the size of a baseball infield, it surrounds actors on all sides with L.E.D. backdrops, then uses rendering effects from a video-game engine to create seamless perspectives for the camera. “It’s the next generation of how movies, commercials, and TV production will happen,” Soon-Shiong said. The technology is impressive—but it was developed by Lucasfilm’s visual-effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, and many production companies are building one. In Soon-Shiong’s telling, he and Michele had built the movie studio of the future. In reality, they had joined a crowded field.

When I asked Soon-Shiong what personal qualities had allowed him to succeed in medical school, in an atmosphere of explicit white supremacy, I suddenly saw in him a glimpse of the modesty that the Iacoccas had witnessed. He hadn’t thought about this question before—he genuinely didn’t seem to know. “Well, I have a good memory, right?” he said, after a time. “I think I was given a little bit of a gift, that I can see things in a different way.” ♦