SFX Entertainment Founder Robert F.X. Sillerman Has Passed Away at Age 71

Investor and media executive Robert F.X. Sillerman has passed away at age 71, according to The New York Times. Silverman's brother Michael confirmed his death.

Robert Franklin Sillerman was born in Manhattan on April 12, 1948. While attending Brandeis University, he founded Youth Market Consultants, which sold magazine subscriptions to students. He graduated from Brandeis in 1969. Three years later, he sold Youth Marketing Consultants to Ingalls, an advertising firm in Boston. While at Ingalls, he met copywriter Laura Baudo, who would later become his wife.

Sillerman is best known for buying and selling numerous media and entertainment businesses. Beginning in the 1970s, Sillerman built a portfolio of radio and television stations worth nearly $1 billion. He founded SFX Broadcasting with a partner, R. Steven Hicks in 1993, and quickly amassed a chain of more than 70 stations, which they sold in 1997 to a larger rival, Capstar Broadcasting, for $2.1 billion.

In the late 1990s, Sillerman started his new company SFX Entertainment and spent more than $2 billion acquiring dozens of concert promoters and venues.

In 2000, the radio chain Clear Channel Communications bought SFX for $4.4 billion. Five years later, Clear Channel spun off those concert assets into a separate company, Live Nation, which in 2010 merged with Ticketmaster to become Live Nation Entertainment, the biggest concert promoter in the world.

In addition to Mr. Sillerman is survived by his brother and his wife. Their daughter, Mackinley, died in 2012.

Read the original story on The New York Times.

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