I ran across Vivi Nevo's name on a list here : "Vivi Nevo, Israeli-born international investment tycoon who holds large takes in Time-Warner, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft. (One of his principal associates is Israeli arms dealer, Arnon Milchan, a major backer of Israel’s secret nuclear weapons development program.)"

2008

Vivi Nevo A Media Powerhouse Everyone and Nobody Knows

http://archive.is/VqLDd#selection-2011.43-2011.52

Over the Fourth of July weekend at the billionaire Ronald O. Perelman’s 57-acre East Hampton estate the Creeks, Vivi Nevo was in his element.

Mr. Nevo, with his fiancée, the megawatt Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi (the star of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), sitting on his lap, watched Jon Bon Jovi give an impromptu performance before taking a turn on the dance floor to Dave Mason’s “Feelin’ Alright.”

A wind-up doll of kinetic energy, who bounds about like a shortstop, Mr. Nevo, who is 43, is said to be the largest individual shareholder of Time Warner, was once the largest private investor in Goldman Sachs, is engaged to China’s most famous actress, vacations on Rupert Murdoch’s sailboat, is the godfather of Lachlan Murdoch’s son, counts Lenny Kravitz as a good friend and attended Madonna’s wedding in 2000.

And many people, including even some of his close friends, a few of whom joined him at Mr. Perelman’s estate over the Fourth of July — and spoke about the party anonymously because it was a private event — have no idea what his background is or how exactly he made his fortune.

Twenty years or so ago, Vivi Nevo, his first name a nickname for Aviv, was living in a studio apartment in the Concorde building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Today he is the media industry’s Zelig, often referred to among his media friends as “the international man of mystery.”

“He is everywhere, all the time, like no one I have ever seen,” said Graydon Carter, the editor in chief of Vanity Fair, which frequently hosts Mr. Nevo at its high society parties.

Who is Mr. Nevo? An Israeli who took a modest inheritance from his family and parlayed it into a sizable fortune through savvy investing, much of it in media and Internet companies — and into connections in the media world.

Behind the scenes, his influence on the media industry is subtle. For upstart Internet companies, he has been an important broker of relationships with traditional firms; and for Time Warner, in particular, he was an advocate, when the Yahoo takeover battle erupted, of trying to assemble a three-way partnership among Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN and Time Warner’s AOL.

Of all the characters the media business attracts — and creates, for that matter — perhaps no one is more remarked upon, wondered about or marveled at than Mr. Nevo. Among his many overlapping circles of friends, nearly all say that Mr. Nevo is a force in their lives: a loyal friend, a trusted conveyor and keeper of information and someone who never forgets a birthday or a bar mitzvah.

“He’s someone I’ve really liked,” said John J. Mack, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, who met Mr. Nevo several years ago while he was at the helm of Credit Suisse. “I trust him. He’s got great instincts for the business.”

Gordon Crawford, senior vice president and a director of Capital Research and Management and one of the best-known media investors, met Mr. Nevo around 10 years ago and the two became close. This month they flew together to Sun Valley, Idaho, for the investment bank Allen & Company’s annual media conference. “I don’t know anyone who’s worked harder at developing contacts,” Mr. Crawford said. “It’s definitely more than social. I think he’s a pretty astute observer of what’s going on in the media.”

Mr. Nevo has an uncanny ability to network and a knack for putting himself in the right place at the right time.

In the spring of 1999, John Thornton, who was then president of Goldman Sachs, was in Los Angeles for the bank’s road show before it went public, and after giving a presentation, he sat down. “The guy sitting next to me was Vivi Nevo, and we just started talking and developed a nice rapport right then.” Later, Mr. Thornton became an adviser to Time Warner. “So I dealt with him a lot there,” Mr. Thornton recalled. “He was very active in talking with management. I can’t think of anyone who is principally a private investor who is that focused on one industry.”

Mr. Nevo’s discretion, combined with a lack of a paper trail, equates to a constant chirping of questions in the media industry about his back story.

“He’s a great character, so that draws attention to him,” said Lachlan Murdoch, explaining the growing fascination that people in the media business have about Mr. Nevo. “He’s also a very private individual.

“When I moved back to Australia” — after leaving the News Corporation, where his father is chairman, in 2005 — “we spoke a lot. He’s been a friend through thick and thin.”

Those who knew Mr. Nevo in the 1980s, after he moved to New York from Israel, have watched his rise with curiosity.

“You’re asking questions I’ve asked myself many times,” said Nicolas Rachline, who met Mr. Nevo in the late 1980s when both were part of a fashionable New York expatriate crowd that hung out at Le Bilboquet, a French restaurant on the Upper East Side. “What the hell does Vivi do? He seems to be a powerful player in the entertainment industry. How, I don’t know.”

Mr. Perelman met Mr. Nevo years ago on the Los Angeles social scene — either at Barry Diller’s or at the house of a Creative Artists Agency partner, Bryan Lourd, he said — and the pair’s relationship is purely social. “There’s no business element,” Mr. Perelman said. “It’s purely social, but it’s a deep social. He’s around my family, I’m around his fiancée. We take a lot of trips together.”

The glittery social world that Mr. Nevo inhabits is secondary — and the byproduct of — what is the core of his professional existence: a sizable stake in Time Warner he has maintained for years, apparently with impeccable, buy-and-sell timing. Mr. Nevo, through his firm NV Investments, has never owned 5 percent or more of the company, which would require public disclosure, but it is widely believed in the industry that he is the largest private shareholder; Mr. Nevo himself often says so.

A Time Warner spokesman said that Mr. Nevo is a shareholder but could not verify the size of his holding. But Mr. Nevo does have, and has had for years, the ear of management.

Mr. Nevo, whose workaday uniform is snug, black Christian Dior suits, has a particularly close relationship with Richard D. Parsons, Time Warner’s chairman, who stepped down in January as chief executive. Like many of his media mogul friendships, his relationship with Mr. Parsons started years ago in Sun Valley. “I first met Vivi at the duck pond in Sun Valley,” Mr. Parsons recalled in a phone interview. “In typical Vivi Nevo fashion, we shortly became best buds.”

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