Biography for
Meshulam Riklis More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

Spouse

Trivia

His son's godfather is Don King.

Endowed a Chair of Practice of Creative Management at the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania)

He is known as the father of the leverage buyout, a more polite term for "corporate raider." As a stockbroker, he traded exotic securities, such as high-paying preferred stock, high-yield bonds, and convertible bonds. He pioneered takeovers using bond issues, acquiring companies by paying little or no cash. Riklis has been accused of draining funds from his acquisitions, then driving them into bankruptcy. His MBA thesis at Ohio State University was on "the effective non-use of cash."

Used some of his fortune to build an entertainment career for his then wife Pia Zadora, bankrolling some of her early films [Butterfly (1982), Fake-Out (1982)] as well as some of her music albums. The most notorious use of his money was to allegedly 'buy' the Golden Globe Award for Best New Star for Pia, even though the film it was for (Butterfly (1982)) was pretty bad, to say the least. After this incident, the Foreign Press Association (who run the Globes) decided to eliminate the New Star category all together.

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