Michael Ovitz

Ovitz grew up in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, and in 1964 he was vice president of the student body at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, a class behind Sally Field and Michael Milken. He went on to attend the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he was president of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, and graduated in 1968 with a B.A. in psychology.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][2]

After graduating in 1968, Ovitz joined the mail room of the William Morris talent agency, the traditional starting point for would-be agents. He rose to become assistant to the television agent Howard West, and after a year quit to attend law school, then promptly changed his mind and asked for his job back; the agency at first refused, but let him return after West interceded on his behalf. Once promoted to agent, he specialized in packaging television game shows.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

Dissatisfied with their prospects at William Morris, Ovitz and Ron Meyer planned to strike out on their own with Bill Haber, Michael Rosenfeld, and Rowland Perkins, three agents who also came from the agency’s television department; when word leaked out, William Morris pushed out all five. On January 20, 1975, they founded Creative Artists Agency (CAA), and Ovitz, though the youngest, quickly emerged as the most driven and became its president.⁠[3][3][3][3][1]

At the outset, William Morris’s star clients did not follow them, and the roughly 90 clients signed in the first year were mostly television professionals, including Rob Reiner and Barry Levinson, then a television writer. In 1977, CAA merged with the company of veteran agent Martin Baum, gaining its first significant film clients, such as Sidney Poitier and Peter Sellers. CAA also cut the fee for “packaging” television shows from the customary 10% to 6% of a show’s total revenue, which helped it become a major packager of prime-time television series in the 1980s.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

By 1989, CAA had about 600 clients, with directors including Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, and Robert Zemeckis and stars including Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise, and Robert Redford, and it was regarded as one of the most powerful show business institutions since the breakup of MCA’s talent agency business. Ovitz, then 42, was president and, by buying out early partners’ shares, held 55% of the company, with Meyer and Haber splitting the rest equally. Drawing on Japanese management methods, they required agents to suppress individual ego in service of the company and its clients, and deliberately avoided the press.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

It was widely assumed that Ovitz had introduced Columbia Pictures to Sony, but a Sony insider said Ovitz had no involvement in brokering that deal and had only helped educate Sony’s investment bankers about Hollywood. In 1990, Ovitz took part in Matsushita’s acquisition of MCA as its adviser; a price he had talked Matsushita into was vetoed by its investment bankers, and the deal was ultimately brokered by attorney Bob Strauss as mediator and closed for $6.6 billion.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

In 1990, Ovitz persuaded the architect I. M. Pei to design CAA’s new headquarters building at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Little Santa Monica Boulevard. By the time the building was completed, his influence in the industry was regarded as unmatched since the agenting days of MCA’s Lew Wasserman. Revenue from CAA’s consulting services for companies such as Coca-Cola and Nike went into a separate consulting partnership, and most CAA agents did not know where that money came from or how it was allotted.⁠[1][1][1][1]

In 1995, Matsushita was considering what to do with its MCA unit. MCA President Sid Sheinberg and Lew Wasserman hoped Ovitz would help them persuade the Japanese owners to let them keep running the company, but Ovitz in fact played a bit part in the sale of MCA to Seagram heir Edgar Bronfman Jr., and Sheinberg later said Ovitz had pretended not to know what was going on when he did. That same year, talks between Ovitz and Bronfman about Ovitz taking the helm of MCA collapsed, which many industry figures believed led to broken relationships with his friends, clients, and colleagues and left Disney as his only option.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

In August 1995, Disney Chairman Michael Eisner told his top aides that he intended to hire Ovitz as the company’s president, stunning the senior executives. Ovitz signed a five-year employment agreement with Disney commencing October 1, 1995, with an annual salary of $1 million plus a discretionary bonus; Disney paid him no signing bonus, instead using early-termination provisions to induce him to give up his controlling stake in CAA. On October 16, 1995, he was granted two stock options, for 3 million shares and 2 million shares, each at an exercise price of $57 per share. He formally joined Disney on October 2, 1995.⁠[1][1][4][4][4][4][4][4][5]

When Ovitz was hired, Disney’s chief financial officer Stephen Bollenbach and Sanford Litvack, the general counsel in charge of corporate operations, both said they would not report to him, and the head of the animation division continued to report directly to Eisner. Once in the job, Ovitz faced resentful colleagues and ill-defined responsibilities; Bollenbach recalled that he had trouble setting an agenda. Projects he pursued, such as buying the Los Angeles Lakers and moving the Seattle Seahawks to Los Angeles, came to nothing.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

On December 12, 1996, Disney announced that Ovitz would leave the company. His employment ended on December 27, and on the same day he resigned as a Disney director. Under the agreement, Disney paid him $38,869,000 upon termination, and his option for 3 million shares also vested on an accelerated basis.⁠[5][4][4]

Beginning in January 1997, Disney shareholders sued Eisner, Ovitz, and other directors in California courts and the Delaware Court of Chancery, alleging that they had breached their fiduciary duties of loyalty and care and wasted corporate assets in entering into and terminating Ovitz’s employment agreement, and seeking to have the agreement declared void or Ovitz’s departure deemed a termination “for cause” with his severance forfeited. The company’s management said the allegations were without merit.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

On October 8, 1998, the Court of Chancery dismissed all counts; on February 9, 2000, the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed the dismissal but allowed the plaintiffs to amend their complaint. On May 28, 2003, the Court of Chancery denied the directors’ motion to dismiss the amended complaint. After trial, the Court of Chancery entered judgment against the plaintiffs and in favor of all defendants on August 9, 2005, and the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed on June 8, 2006; the similar California suits were dismissed on November 28, 2005.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6]

In February 1997, Ovitz, then chair of the UCLA Medical Sciences executive board, pledged $25 million to his alma mater through the Ovitz Family Foundation to help rebuild the UCLA Medical Center, damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake; it was then the second-largest philanthropic contribution in UCLA history and the lead gift of the private fundraising campaign for the medical center’s reconstruction.⁠[7][7][7][7][7]

After leaving Disney, Ovitz was a private investor from January 1997 to December 1998. From December 1998 to June 2002, he was a principal of the talent representation company Artists Management Group.⁠[2][2][2]

In 1999, Ovitz and Eli Broad each sought to bring an NFL expansion team to Los Angeles. Ovitz had the architect David Rockwell design a plan called “The Coliseum at Exposition Park” to convert the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum into a 68,000-seat stadium; an NFL official who had seen a preview of the plan said the design “just blew everyone away.”⁠[8][8][8][8][8]

From July 2000, Ovitz served as a director of Opsware Inc., and he was still on the board as of 2007; the company’s chairman was Marc AndreessenMarc AndreessenMarc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While in college he helped develop the graphical web browser Mosaic, then co-founded Netscape and Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware), and has long served as a director of Meta; he has also published essays such as “Why Software Is Eating the World.”Open the full entry and its president and chief executive officer was Ben Horowitz.⁠[2][2][2]

From July 2002, Ovitz served as a principal of the consulting company CKE Associates. As of 2007, he also served as a director of D.A.R.E. America, a member of the Board of Advisors of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.⁠[2][2][2]

On November 23, 2025, David Senra’s eponymous podcast released an episode of his conversation with Ovitz; on August 9, 2026, the show released a conversation from Ovitz’s second appearance.⁠[9][9][9][9]

After brief stints at Disney and at a mobile content start-up of his own, Ovitz shifted the focus of his career to Silicon Valley, working as an adviser.⁠[10]