Brad Greenspan

Brad Greenspan is an internet entrepreneur who has been involved in the founding and proliferation of various web properties including MySpace. Greenspan founded eUniverse Inc. in 1998, which went public in 1999. The company survived the .com-bust of 2001 and was the incubator that launched MySpace.com in 2003. Greenspan left his position as CEO at eUniverse towards the end of 2003, after accounting problems which led to three quarters of financial results having to be revised forced a four-month halt in trading of eUniverse stock.^[1] Greenspan retained a significant percentage of shares in the company and owned 10% of the company when it sold to News Corp in 2005.^[2] Greenspan opposed the acquisition, and has been fighting News Corp both legally and publicly ever since. He increased the market capital of Euniverse from $70m to $650m when the company was sold to News Corp.

Greenspan has established several other businesses, e.g. Broadwebasia (an Asian internet company, out of business), Borba (a health product-line, not available any more), and LiveUniverse (a social network focused internet company, out of business).

Dow Jones

In mid-2007, Brad Greenspan presented a takeover bid for Dow Jones' Wall Street Journal (WSJ) against News Corp.^[3] Greenspan was unsuccessful in his bid against News Corp.^[4]

History

Brad Greenspan attended UCLA, where he launched his first company Palisades Capital from his dormitory room.

MySpace

The MySpace service was founded in August 2003 as a new initiative and 100% owned division of publicly traded internet company eUniverse (which later in mid-2004 changed its name to Intermix). eUniverse created and marketed the Myspace website, providing the division with a complete infrastructure of finance, human resources, technical expertise, bandwidth, and server capacity right out of the gate so the MySpace team wasn’t distracted with typical start-up issues. The project was overseen by Brad Greenspan (eUniverse's Founder, Chairman, CEO), with Chris DeWolfe (MySpace's former CEO), Josh Berman, Tom Anderson (MySpace's former president), and a team of programmers and resources provided by eUniverse.

Greenspan was forced to resign from the company he founded, eUniverse. Greenspan battled with board members, who changed the company's name to Intermix Media shortly after his departure. Among the disputes: restated earnings during his watch that prompted an Securities & Exchange Commission accounting investigation and a temporary delisting of its stock by NASDAQ. Separately, both the company and Greenspan were charged by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for inserting spyware on unknowing consumers' Web pages.

Brad Greenspan / The MySpace Report

In October 2006, Brad Greenspan launched a website, called freemyspace.com, and published reports that called for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the United States Department of Justice and the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance to investigate News Corp's acquisition of MySpace as "one of the largest merger and acquisition scandals in U.S. history."^[5] The report's main allegation is that News Corp. should have valued MySpace at US$20 billion rather than US$327 million, and had, in effect, defrauded Intermix shareholders through an unfair deal process.^[6] The report received a mixed response from financial commentators in the press.^[7] A lawsuit led by Greenspan challenging the acquisition was dismissed by a judge.^[8]

References