Strauss Zelnick

Opening his Thirty Minute Mentors interview, published on April 10, 2024, Adam Mendler said that he was originally from Boston, that his mother died when he was 10, and that he and his siblings then moved to New JerseyNew JerseyNew Jersey is a state in the eastern United States on the Atlantic Ocean, bordered by New York State, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, with the Hudson River forming its northeastern boundary and the Delaware River its western boundary; its capital is Trenton and its largest city is Newark. One of the original 13 colonies, it became the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution on December 18, 1787, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 9,288,994.Open the full entry, where they were raised by “your aunt and your uncle.” He answered: “You captured, certainly, at least some of the tragedy of my childhood.”⁠[1]

In the same interview he said that, besides his mother’s sudden death when he was 10, his father subsequently abandoned the family, and that he felt he had lost “my first family.” There were two paths after such events, he said: feeling victimized, or deciding to surmount the challenges. He decided at the time that if he were perfect at everything, bad things would no longer happen to him, and so he felt that he had to be the best at everything.⁠[1]

Between the ages of 10 and 18, he said, he did not put much of this into action and believed that wanting something would make it happen; he described himself in high school, college and graduate school as “kind of a smartass” with a sharp tongue.⁠[1]

In his 2026 interview with David SenraDavid SenraDavid Senra is the founder and host of the Founders podcast, on which he reads biographies of entrepreneurs to discuss starting and running businesses and making personal decisions. He began producing the show in 2016, partnered with Colossus in 2022, and in 2025 launched David Senra, a long-form interview show under his own name.Open the full entry he said that he read a great many biographies while growing up and was very focused on success, political success included; trying to find the factor most common among highly successful people, the only one he could come up with was that they knew what they wanted.⁠[2]

He recalled that he was not admitted to Harvard College and learned only then that real hard work was required; Wesleyan University was the only school that accepted him as an undergraduate, and there he worked very hard for the first time in his life and did well.⁠[1]

A Wesleyan University event notice identifies him as a member of the class of 1979 who earned a BA in English and psychology there; his official Take-Two Interactive biography likewise lists a BA from the university.⁠[3][4]

He holds a JD from Harvard Law School and an MBA from Harvard Business School, both schools of Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry; The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry wrote in January 2004 that he graduated from Harvard Law School with a dual degree in business and law. In the David Senra interview he said that he graduated in 1983.⁠[4][5][6][2]

He said that his graduate thesis was a history of the electronic entertainment business from its inception in 1895 to the time he graduated, covering the beginnings of recorded music (wax cylinders and player pianos) and of motion pictures; he said he had “always been a futurist,” and that his goal on leaving graduate school was to run a movie studio.⁠[2]

Before graduating, he said, his only business experience was summer work.⁠[1]

His first full-time job after graduation was at Columbia Pictures. He recalled that it was a very junior position and the only offer he received in the entertainment business, a low-paying sales job taken while his classmates went into consulting and financial services; he was responsible for international television distribution, selling films and programs to free television, which he called “the last stop” on the distribution chain. In a 2025 interview with LEADERS magazine he said that the closest job offer he got to that ambition was at Columbia Pictures Television.⁠[1][2][7]

He said that in 1983 “new media” meant home entertainment, then videocassette distribution, and pay television; he was one of a small cadre of business-school graduates newly recruited into the industry, and when the company wanted someone to take charge of new media it chose “the least valuable executive”: “And that was me.” He took on new media in addition to his day job, and called this the best thing that ever happened to him.⁠[2]

He said that he worked out how to double his division’s revenue in six months and then became the youngest vice president of Columbia Pictures; he also said that his boss was promoted and then promoted him. His official Take-Two Interactive biography gives the post as Vice President, International Television. The editors’ note in LEADERS magazine gives the post as “Vice President of International Television Sales.”⁠[2][1][4][7]

He left Columbia Pictures for Vestron, which he described as then the largest independent home entertainment company, with ambitions to become a diversified entertainment company and to start a movie studio; about nine months after arriving he became president: “I was now president of a public entertainment company, and I was 29, 3 years out of school.”⁠[2]

His official Take-Two Interactive biography states that he spent three years at Vestron Inc., rising to President and Chief Operating Officer; SALT’s speaker profile says that he held that post for two of the three years.⁠[4][8]

A UPI article of March 28, 1988 calls him Vestron’s 30-year-old president and describes the company, based in Stamford, as having started as Vestron Video and grown by buying video rights to films at bargain rates, with the aim of becoming the country’s major independent film producer; Dirty Dancing, which it released the previous year, cost less than $6 million, the most that Vestron would spend on a film, and grossed more than $62 million at the box office. “Early 1986 we realized what was happening in the video marketplace,” he says in the article, and: “The film business’s problem, in my opinion, is expensive films that don’t work.”⁠[9]

Vestron’s main business, he said, was putting films on videocassettes distributed through video rental stores, at first by buying content made by others; when he arrived, its new movie division had not yet made any pictures and its team was already in place, and he took responsibility for the division and began making films. He said that the first picture he approved became a huge hit, and that Dirty Dancing, which he approved, was at the time the highest-grossing independent film ever.⁠[2][9]

After two years at Vestron he grew worried about its business model. “You can never have a competitive advantage in the entertainment business through distribution only,” he said: a pioneer can start with distribution but must move into production at once, which he said is also why NetflixNetflixNetflix is a U.S. entertainment company that offers streaming series, films, games, and live programming, headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997, it grew from online DVD rental into an international subscription entertainment service and also runs original content, advertising, and in-person experience businesses.Open the full entry produces content, and Vestron was not capitalized to be a diversified film and television production company. At 31 he began looking for another job.⁠[2]

Music Business Worldwide gives his years as President and Chief Operating Officer of 20th Century Fox as 1989 to 1993; The New York Times wrote in April 2007 that he started in the post at 32 and held it for four years, leaving in 1993; his official Take-Two Interactive biography states that he spent four years as President and Chief Operating Officer, managing all aspects of the studio’s worldwide motion picture and distribution business.⁠[10][11][4]

By his account he was recruited to Fox by the studio’s newly named chairman, an independent producer who had made films for Vestron and had never worked at a major studio, with the support of Barry DillerBarry DillerBarry Diller is an American media and internet executive who was chairman and chief executive of Paramount Pictures and of Fox, Inc., where he created the Fox network, and later led IAC (renamed People Incorporated in 2026) and Expedia, serving as chairman and senior executive of both.Open the full entry and Rupert MurdochRupert MurdochRupert Murdoch is a media entrepreneur, chairman emeritus of News Corp and Fox Corporation, and an investor awarded restitution in the Theranos case.Open the full entry. Barry Diller, he said, was then chief executive of Fox, which Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp owned; he later learned that Barry Diller had asked the chairman to hire a business executive as his partner.⁠[2]

He said that he telephoned the chairman to congratulate him and was asked whether he wanted to come and work at Fox; he went to Los Angeles, the two had breakfast on a Friday, and that same morning he met Barry Diller and Rupert Murdoch. Barry Diller, he recalled, asked a series of incisive questions, while Rupert Murdoch hardly asked one; as he left the office the head of human resources came up to ask whether he would take the job, and he signed the contract on the spot. He was responsible for film production and for worldwide home entertainment distribution of film and television.⁠[2]

He said that during this period Fox went from last place at the box office to first.⁠[2]

He said that he worked for Barry Diller for four years and that Diller taught him the entertainment business. He described their discussions as robust debate with a lot of heat: “he’s right 99% of the time. But 1% of the time I’m actually right.” He was then newly married, with a child and a mortgage, and needed to keep his job, but he understood that the arguing was Diller’s method and was not personal, and that anyone who backed down was finished. He said that he has stayed friendly with Barry Diller ever since and has lunch with him a couple of times a year.⁠[2]

He recalled a weekly Monday “president’s meeting” of Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller and the division heads, at which he was 10 to 15 years younger than the next-youngest person and argued more than anyone; a woman colleague who ran television said that he was like the inflatable clown doll children punch, which goes over and bounces back up. He said that he is not argumentative by nature and is much more collaborative.⁠[2]

What he learned from Rupert Murdoch, he said, came at a different moment: during his tenure the company was over-leveraged, with a debt facility that involved about 150 banks and cross-default provisions, and Murdoch was at risk of losing the whole business; he accompanied Murdoch on a couple of visits of the bank roadshow and found him cool throughout, focused only on reaching the conclusion.⁠[2]

He said that he read How to Win Friends and Influence People while he was at Fox. Until then, by his description, he was insecure and anxious all the time, concerned with how he came across, and he nearly failed at Fox as a result; the book turned his life “upside down,” and he shifted to asking how he could be of service to others.⁠[2]

After a couple of years at Fox, he said, he saw that the underlying economics of the film business were poor: in his telling, after the 1955 consent decree separated distribution from production, the business went from a “studio system,” in which creative talent was on the payroll, to a “boutique system,” in which talent auctions its services project by project, so that talent takes much of the value of a success while the studio bears the whole cost of a flop. He said that he had read in ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry magazine an aphorism of Warren BuffettWarren BuffettWarren Buffett is an American investor who took control of Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 and served as its chairman and chief executive from 1970; he handed the chief executive role to Greg Abel on January 1, 2026 and became chairman emeritus, while remaining a director, on September 18, 2026.Open the full entry’s to the effect that when a management with a reputation for brilliance meets a business with a reputation for being bad, it is the reputation of the business that stays intact.⁠[2]

He concluded that his ambition to run a movie studio should have been pursued in 1927, and that the equivalent of the motion picture business of the 1920s was the video game business. He said that he was not a pioneer in video games and that this was a very unpopular view in Hollywood at the time: in 1982 a game company owned by Warner Communications had made a game based on a hit film in five weeks and manufactured more cartridges than there were consoles, a disaster for which, as he remembered it, Warner Communications took a write-down of $400 million.⁠[2]

He said that he went to Rupert Murdoch, argued that the next big business was video games and proposed that Fox enter it; Murdoch agreed to provide the capital for him to start a game company alongside his day job. When he asked for a piece of the venture, as an entrepreneurial undertaking, Murdoch refused at once. Rupert Murdoch, he explained, does not have partners in his businesses other than his public shareholders.⁠[2]

After leaving Fox he became President and Chief Executive Officer of Crystal Dynamics, which his official biography describes as a producer and distributor of interactive game software. Music Business Worldwide gives the dates of this post as 1993 to 1995, and in its interview he said that he had persuaded Silicon Valley to fund the start-up; The New York Times wrote in 2007 that he stayed at the video game start-up a little over a year.⁠[4][10][11]

He recalled that soon after Rupert Murdoch’s refusal a recruiter called about a pre-revenue start-up in Silicon Valley that was making the most advanced video games. “I took a 95% pay cut,” he said, and he moved his family from their house in West Los Angeles to a rental house that was about to be torn down for a golf course. He wanted to build something and wanted equity, he said, but what chiefly motivated him was being at the cutting edge of media and entertainment, an edge driven by technology.⁠[2]

The company, he said, had been set up with backing from Kleiner Perkins for two women with backgrounds at a game company, who wanted a chief executive from the entertainment business and hired him; he secured distribution deals for it and raised a great deal of capital. He judged Crystal Dynamics “very successful. Not hugely successful, but it still exists today.”⁠[2]

He said that he was not really ready to be an entrepreneur at the time: he did not have much money and had a young family. In his view there are two stages of life suited to starting a business, before one has anything or any obligations and after one has some protection, and he was right in the middle, with responsibilities and no protection, which he found emotionally very challenging.⁠[2]

His official Take-Two Interactive biography states that he was President and Chief Executive Officer of BMG’s North American business unit from 1994 to 1998, and The New York Times also dates his arrival at BMG to 1994. Music Business Worldwide writes that he was recruited by Michael Dornemann in 1995 as President and Chief Executive Officer of BMG North America, while the same article quotes him as saying that he arrived in late 1994. Advertising Age wrote in 2004 that he became president of a major music company at 37.⁠[4][11][10][12]

He said that he was recruited to turn around a huge record company; he had never worked in music, and one of the terms on which he took the job was BMG’s agreement, before he arrived, that he could start a video game division inside the company.⁠[2]

Music Business Worldwide’s 2019 interview article says that when he took over, BMG was second to last in United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry market share and its North American division was losing money; he kept Arista and BMG Direct, shut or sold non-core divisions, reduced fixed overhead and rebuilt RCA with Bob Jamieson and Jack Rovner. The article says that RCA focused on Dave Matthews and later attracted The Verve Pipe and other acts; he said that he built up BMG Direct by bringing in Warner and Sony products, taking it quickly from second to first place in direct marketing. He said that BMG rose from fifth of six companies to second of five in United States market share and had record profits, market share and Grammys in five of his six years.⁠[10]

The New York Times wrote in 2004 that he moved BMG’s music division from fifth to second among the five largest music companies; that after taking operational control of its troubled record club he doubled the club’s profits in a year by managing costs closely; and that BMG’s share of album sales rose from 14 percent when he took over in 1994 to 20 percent in 2000.⁠[6]

In a 2018 podcast interview he said that he learned German when he worked at a German company, but has not learned Italian.⁠[13]

In 1998 he became global head of BMG. His official Take-Two Interactive biography describes BMG Entertainment, of which he was President and Chief Executive Officer, as a music and entertainment company with $4.7 billion in revenue, more than 200 record labels and operations in 54 countries.⁠[10][4]

The Music Business Worldwide interview article has him naming the biggest artists of the time as Whitney Houston, country acts and Notorious B.I.G., and calling Arista under Clive Davis BMG’s “crown jewel”; he counted retaining and motivating talent as the main achievement of the period, crediting Jack Rovner, Bob Jamieson, Clive Davis, L.A. Reid, Babyface, Clive Calder of Jive, Joe Galante and Tim DuBois. The interviewer’s question mentions that Doug Morris was quoted as praising the “terrific job” he had done up to that point.⁠[10]

He expressed regret over the way he handled Clive Davis’s exit. The article says that Bertelsmann had a mandatory retirement age, which Davis had reached, and that he was asked to carry out the succession plan, which played out badly in the press; what he learned, he said, was that “age has no place in the discussion, whatsoever.”⁠[10]

On digital distribution, he said that when he arrived in late 1994 the record industry had real problems with conditional-access software (DRM); BMG publicly embraced digital distribution, but the industry failed to launch legitimate alternatives, and piracy grew with Napster and other services: “We as an industry lost sight of the fact that we were leaving the consumer behind.” He said that the damage from piracy fell on BMG mostly after he had left, and that the industry’s failure over digital was his own failure too.⁠[10]

Music Business Worldwide wrote in November 2018 that he and his colleague J Moses convinced BMG’s owners to launch the video game division BMG Interactive. In the David Senra interview he said that he hired J Moses to build the business on a model of deals with external developers, with the games distributed through BMG’s worldwide network of local offices for selling records, without added overhead; BMG’s revenue was then about $5 billion a year, he said, and about $40 million was devoted to the project, a tiny “skunk works” effort alongside his main job of running the record company. He said that J Moses is now on the board of Take-Two Interactive, and the company’s website lists J Moses among its directors.⁠[14][2][15]

He described the video game business of the time as lying somewhere between toys and recorded music: it was “a top 10 business,” most sales came in the fourth quarter, and cartridges had not yet given way entirely to discs, with all the inventory problems that implied; he knew then that the business was moving to discs, he said, but could not predict what would come after them.⁠[2]

By his account, when the team had created a group of properties, some of them finished and ready for distribution, Thomas Middelhoff, the new chief executive of Bertelsmann, decided that video games were a terrible business and instructed him to divest the whole division. He asked to distribute the completed titles first and decide afterward, and was instructed simply to sell to the highest bidder. Music Business Worldwide writes that in March 1998 BMG, on Bertelsmann’s instruction, agreed to sell BMG Interactive to Take-Two Interactive, in a deal that included its staff and all rights to the Grand Theft Auto franchise, and quotes him: “I couldn’t have protested more but, at the end of the day, I had a boss.”⁠[2][14]

Accounts of the price differ. Music Business Worldwide quotes Sam Houser as putting the total consideration at $9 million, and quotes Zelnick himself: “we sold BMG Interactive for a penny, essentially.” In the David Senra interview his account was that the buyer, a small public company with a market value of roughly $100 million, paid with 20 percent of its own stock, about $20 million; he proposed to Thomas Middelhoff that BMG hold the stock, and the shares were then sold on the open market for $14 million.⁠[14][2]

A month later, he said, the buyer launched the first property that the BMG team had completed: the company was Take-Two Interactive and the release was Grand Theft Auto. The Music Business Worldwide article, for its part, says that Grand Theft Auto, BMG Interactive’s first release, had come out in late 1997.⁠[2][14]

Asked whether he was angry at the time, he said that he does not anger easily: he did not own the company, he was on the payroll, and his boss was entitled to make strategic decisions of this kind, though he knew that the decision was a foolish one.⁠[2]

The New York Times wrote in 2004 that he stepped down at the end of 2000, halfway through fiscal 2001, a year in which BMG’s music division lost $300 million, and that he had clashed with Thomas Middelhoff over BMG’s alliance with Napster, which he did not think could become a significant business. “I didn’t like what Thomas was doing with Napster, but it’s not why I left,” he said; he was ready to go into business for himself. The newspaper put his age on leaving the ranks of the moguls at 43.⁠[6]

Other accounts place the emphasis differently. The Daily News wrote in June 2001 that he had left the previous year after tussling with his former boss Thomas Middelhoff; The New York Times wrote in 2007 that he left partly over a disagreement with BMG’s parent about a Napster deal; Music Business Worldwide’s 2018 article says that the music business may remember him for a public falling-out involving Clive Davis at BMG and that he left BMG in 2000, and its 2019 article that press accounts treated his difficult relationship with Thomas Middelhoff as a crucial factor.⁠[16][11][14][10]

Advertising Age wrote in 2004 that his six years at BMG were his longest stay in any media job and that when he left he was “ready to try other things.” In the David Senra interview he linked his departure to the forced sale of BMG Interactive: seeing his boss make a decision of that kind, he realized that it was time to go, and by then he had a vision of what he wanted to build and enough savings from his years as a professional executive that his family would not go hungry.⁠[12][2]

The history on ZMC’s website states that the firm was founded in 2001 under the name ZelnickMedia Corporation, and his official Take-Two Interactive biography calls him a founder of and partner in the media-focused private equity firm. The New York Times wrote in 2004 that he formed ZelnickMedia, based in New York, in 2001 with four partners: Jim Friedlich, who had held senior sales and marketing posts at Dow Jones & Company; Ben Feder, founder of MessageClick Inc. and a former News Corporation executive; Scott Siegler, who had worked at NBCNBCNBC (National Broadcasting Company) is an American national commercial broadcast television network. It was founded by RCA in 1926, began as a radio network and later developed television. With ABC and CBS it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it passed to General Electric with RCA in 1986, merged with Universal to form NBCUniversal in 2004, has been controlled by Comcast since 2011, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry, CBSCBSCBS is an American commercial broadcast television network. It was founded in 1927 as United Independent Broadcasters, renamed the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928, and grew from a radio network into a television network under William S. Paley. With ABC and NBC it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it has been owned in turn by Westinghouse, Viacom, ViacomCBS and Paramount Global, has been owned by Paramount Skydance Corporation since 2025, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry, Columbia Pictures Television and Warner Bros. Television; and Karl Slatoff, a former new media executive at BMG Entertainment. A 2007 article in the same newspaper speaks of three partners. Advertising Age in 2004 gives the year of founding as 2000; Music Business Worldwide wrote in 2019 that he left BMG in 2000, shortly before founding ZMC.⁠[17][4][6][11][12][10]

He said that the original idea of ZelnickMedia was not the private equity fund it is today but an entity that would hold a portfolio of media and entertainment properties “supercharged” by technology; in 2001, he thought, it was obvious that technology would transform media, though the entertainment business did not see it that way. The rule he set was not to buy legacy businesses under pressure, such as film or deficit-financed network television production. He had no appetite for going back into video games when he started the firm, he said: he had been in that business twice, and it was still cyclical, with poor inventory characteristics. The firm’s first deals were direct marketing and market research companies that were becoming digital, often very troubled ones.⁠[2]

The firm, he said, began with no capital: he put in $300,000 of his own money, persuaded colleagues to work without pay, and operated from borrowed offices that had one chair fewer than people and a restroom that regularly flooded, with water sheeting down the walls. For about six months the providers of capital asked him first to show them a company to buy, while the companies he approached asked him first to show them the capital. He described telling his colleagues, after a meeting at a prominent private equity firm, that once they had left the firm would say the same thing to the cleaner — bring us an interesting company and we will finance it — and realizing that these were empty words from people who wanted free options.⁠[2]

Advertising Age quoted him in 2004: “I essentially traded a salary for equity in what I do.” In 2018 he said that starting his own business had been an incredibly risky thing to do.⁠[12][13]

He said that at the founding he imagined a company worth about $20 billion, at a time when his efforts to raise capital and find deals were going nowhere and people called the idea crazy; he thought it possible, and reasoned that even if he fell short he would get closer than if he did not try. He also said that, given his reputation in the business, many people wanted to help him, but that he concluded no one could: finding the deals, seeing the investors, hiring the team and paying it out of his own pocket were all things he had to do himself. In its first years, he said, the firm often used a line attributed to Henry Ford, to the effect that whether you think you can or you cannot, you are right.⁠[2]

The New York Times in 2004 summed up ZelnickMedia’s model as investing in companies and sometimes taking significant equity in exchange for expertise and management. Scott Peters of the media investment bank Jordan Edmiston Group commented that this way of gaining equity with little investment carried low risk, and that he was well networked and highly regarded in global media.⁠[6]

The Japan TimesThe Japan TimesThe Japan Times is an English-language newspaper published in Tokyo. Founded in 1897, it is the oldest English-language newspaper still published in Japan; since 2017 it has been owned by News2u Holdings and led by Minako Suematsu.Open the full entry wrote in December 2001 that Ripplewood, after buying the bulk of Hitachi’s stake in Nippon Columbia that May, named the former BMG Entertainment chief executive chairman of the label; he worked from New York, while Jack Matsumura, who became president and chief executive on October 2 of that year, ran day-to-day operations in Tokyo. The Daily News wrote on June 15, 2001 that he had recently been named chairman of the Japanese entertainment company, that an unnamed source described him as scouting for small, established independent record labels, and that the trade website Hitsdailydouble.com had pegged him as plotting a return to the music business; he declined to comment.⁠[18][16]

In the David Senra interview he said that this was ZelnickMedia’s first deal. By his account, a partner at Ripplewood called three times to ask him to take it on: the Japanese record company had a market share of 0.5 percent, far too much debt and no hits at all. He and his partner Ben Feder spent a weekend reading the listed company’s public documents, and he twice declined and advised Ripplewood to stay away; on the third call he was asked, “Just how busy are you?” He laughed, conceded the point and took the deal, with Ripplewood putting up the capital.⁠[2]

He called it the hardest deal he has ever done and said that it took nine years. Remembering the focus he had seen in Rupert Murdoch, he reasoned that if someone gave him $300 million to take over a company and he failed, it would be his last deal; the company was turned around, he said, with an internal rate of return of about 22 percent, and the income allowed ZelnickMedia to begin building a team and buying more companies.⁠[2]

The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry wrote on September 14, 2002 that the former BMG chief executive had the previous year taken control of a Japanese music company with the backing of the private equity firm Ripplewood Holdings and was looking for acquisitions in the United States or Europe; he called it “a terrific time to invest,” said that music was “still a $36 billion world-wide market,” and expected that piracy would eventually be tamed and that sales would rebound when big new stars appeared.⁠[19]

The company was later known as Columbia Music Entertainment; the speaker biography published by the University of Utah in 2025 states that he served as its Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. In his 2019 interview with Music Business Worldwide he said that the company had been losing money for 20 years before the deal, which he thought was the highest-returning recorded-music deal of 2000 to 2010, and that the firm exited in 2009 and has had no exposure to recorded music since.⁠[6][20][10]

Variety wrote on June 19, 2002 that he had taken a minority stake in Threshold Sports, a producer of bicycle races. A ZelnickMedia spokesman said that the firm invested in sports for their potential as media and entertainment and that the goal was “to create in effect the Tour de France of the U.S.”; Zelnick himself said, “Sponsorship of cycling events is an excellent and underutilized opportunity.” The article lists ZelnickMedia’s other investments at the time as Nippon Columbia, the jazz label Savoy Records, which owns the catalogs of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, and the internet gaming company Arkadium.⁠[21]

A press release dated March 6, 2007 on ZMC’s website recalls that ZelnickMedia and Ripplewood formed Direct Holdings Worldwide in the summer of 2003, together with their acquisition of the catalog company Lillian Vernon Corporation, and acquired the rights to the Time Life brand from Time Warner in late 2003; Ripplewood was the majority owner of Direct Holdings Worldwide, and ZelnickMedia managed it from 2003.⁠[22]

On January 12, 2004 The New York Times published a profile of him by David Carr; he was then 46. It says that Lillian Vernon lost $9.1 million in fiscal 2002 and that after ZelnickMedia bought it the previous spring its web sales rose from 17 percent to 35 percent of the total; that Time Life was bought the week before the article appeared, with the backing of Ripplewood Holdings, after it had lost more than $50 million in the first nine months of 2003 under its previous owner, Time Inc., that it sold music through cable television commercials and that ZelnickMedia planned to revive its book business with lower-cost genre books in series; and that OTX, an online market research firm, was bought together with a media investment firm headed by Robert W. Pittman, the former chief executive of AOLAOLAOL is an American internet brand offering a news portal, email, and membership services. Its history dates to an online-services company founded in 1985.Open the full entry.⁠[6]

The profile quotes Richard D. Parsons, the chairman of Time Warner, as saying that the two had breakfast three or four times a year and that Zelnick had asked him to call if Time Warner sold an asset that suited his plans; it was Parsons who called him about Time Life. “Direct marketing is a science, not an art, and I have a lot of direct marketing in my background,” Zelnick says in the article. He valued the fact that direct marketing can be tested before a large investment is made, he said, unlike films, whose success is known only after the opening weekend. He also said that many successful people buy mundane businesses cheaply and use that value to take bigger risks, and that anyone unwilling to go to trade shows and network should not be in the business; he called those occasions “the fun part.”⁠[6]

The profile credits him with approving blockbusters such as “Speed” and with deals involving Whitney Houston and “Home Alone,” and lists ZelnickMedia’s interests at the time in National Lampoon and in a professional bicycle racing circuit. It also records doubts: Chip Block of USAPubs thought that the businesses had little in common beyond back-end operations. His partner Jim Friedlich said that the firm planned to combine the back-office functions of Lillian Vernon and Time Life and to move marketing online.⁠[6]

The speaker biography published by the University of Utah states that he also served as chairman of OTX and of ITN Networks.⁠[20]

On March 5, 2004 Advertising Age published an article by Diane Mermigas that describes ZelnickMedia as a private holding company based in New York which had reached $1 billion in revenue within three years, a figure he hoped to quadruple over the following three years without a large partner. The article puts the firm’s overall capital needs at an estimated $500 million, of which private equity firms including Ripplewood Holdings had contributed about $100 million and the rest came from banks and institutional lenders, raised deal by deal; unnamed sources said that it had earned between $50 million and $100 million on nearly $1 billion of revenue the previous year, about half of the revenue coming from its international operations.⁠[12]

The article says that the firm’s companies had about 6,500 employees and that its core management consisted of seven professionals and five staff in offices in New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo; the companies it owned outright or controlled were Columbia Music Entertainment, listed in Japan, Direct Holdings, which comprised the Time Life and Lillian Vernon direct marketing businesses, and the consumer market research firm OTX, and it held minority stakes in Arkadium, National Lampoon, the Pro Cycling Tour and WFX Rights Group. The acquisition of Time Life earlier that year had nearly doubled its revenue base.⁠[12]

“We don’t like sexy deals,” he says in the article, and: “We’d like to own our customers and sell them a lot of things in a lot of different ways.” It notes that he had worked for Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller and that his peers regarded him as an uncommon and welcome “free spirit” in the industry; sources said that offers from major media companies to return to corporate work kept coming. “Being autonomous and entrepreneurial is its own reward,” he said, calling the venture “the pursuit of a dream.” He named his supportive partners, his wife, his health and his brain power as the things that sustained him.⁠[12]

The article gives the firm’s areas of focus as direct marketing, marketing services, music, television and radio, and publishing, and says that it was actively looking for investments in wireless, telecommunications and content. “The strategy is to have a direct relationship with customers,” he said, and: “Not too many people want to take the risk to build their own thing.” The author describes him as modest; sources said that he enjoyed needling much bigger players and that his businesses were almost always profitable.⁠[12]

On March 31, 2005 Reed Elsevier announced his appointment as a non-executive director of Reed Elsevier PLC, Reed Elsevier NV and Reed Elsevier Group plc, subject to shareholder approval at the annual general meetings of April 27 and 28. The announcement gives his age as 47, describes him as the founder of the New York-based ZelnickMedia Corporation, notes that he holds an MBA and a law degree from Harvard University, and records that he sat on the board of Carver Bancorp Inc.⁠[23]

An article by Jill Goldsmith in Daily Variety of April 1, 2005 says that he was to join Reed Elsevier’s 14-member board in succession to John Brock, the outgoing director, who was chief executive of the brewing group InterbrewAmBev; Morris Tabaksblat, the chairman of Reed Elsevier, said that he would bring “an unparalleled breadth of experience.” Zelnick himself said, “Reed Elsevier is a worldwide company with extraordinary assets.” The article describes him as founder and chairman of the four-year-old Zelnick Media.⁠[24]

On December 7, 2007 Reed Elsevier announced his retirement from its boards with immediate effect; the announcement states that he had been a non-executive director of Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier Group plc and a member of the supervisory board of Reed Elsevier NV since 2005, and its chairman, Jan Hommen, said that his increasing business commitments in the United States would prevent him from devoting the appropriate time to the role.⁠[25]

On March 2, 2007 The Reader’s Digest Association completed its acquisition of Direct Holdings U.S. Corporation, the holder of exclusive worldwide marketing rights to the Time Life brand: Ripplewood Holdings, which led the investor group that acquired Reader’s Digest, exchanged its interest for shares of RDA Holding Co., the new parent of Reader’s Digest, and ZelnickMedia sold its minority interest for cash, at a price the press release does not disclose. Lillian Vernon had been sold in May 2006 to an entity controlled by Sun Capital. “We are very pleased with the transaction and the terrific success Time Life has achieved over the past few years,” he says in the release. Take-Two Interactive’s proxy statement records that he was Executive Chairman of Direct Holdings Worldwide until that day.⁠[22][26]

The New York Times wrote in April 2007 that ZelnickMedia had bought the marketing rights to Time Life in 2003 at a “very low” price and had sold a profitable Time Life to Reader’s Digest the previous month for $91.8 million, while Lillian Vernon was still losing money when the firm sold it the year before.⁠[11]

In the David Senra interview he said that by 2007 ZelnickMedia had done six deals but was still a “fundless sponsor” with a very small balance sheet. He had deliberately built a relationship with Carl IcahnCarl IcahnCarl Icahn is an American investor known for activist investing and hostile takeovers; in the 1980s his battles for control of companies such as TWA earned him a reputation as a “corporate raider.” He controls the diversified holding company Icahn Enterprises, his main investment vehicle, and has led shareholder campaigns at public companies including Apple, Herbalife, Xerox and Illumina.Open the full entry, visiting him and bringing him investment ideas for nothing; Icahn made clear in advance that he would not pay for them. The first idea he brought, he said, was Reader’s Digest, which he thought underpriced: Carl Icahn bought about $50 million of stock, sold it three months later at his suggestion and made about $50 million.⁠[2]

He recounted that Carl Icahn afterward offered, by way of thanks, to take him and his wife to dinner, and that during the meal his wife, Wendy, leaned over and said, “Honey, he doesn’t know your name.” After that Carl Icahn often asked his team to research investment ideas of his own; his partner Karl Slatoff objected to doing unpaid research for the richest man on Wall Street, and he replied that he could not say why but felt good about it.⁠[2]

One day, he said, Carl Icahn called to ask whether he was familiar with Take-Two Interactive. As he described it, the company was then in very bad shape: it was badly managed, its chairman had been indicted, it had not filed its financial statements, and it was under investigation by four bodies, the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities and Exchange CommissionU.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionThe U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is the federal securities regulator of the United States. Created during the Great Depression by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and led by five commissioners, it has a three-part mission of protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation.Open the full entry, the New York district attorney’s office and the Federal Trade Commission; it had revenue of about $700 million, heavy losses, no debt, about $50 million in cash and a market value of about $700 million. His team wrote a memorandum that predicted bankruptcy within six months and advised staying away; a month later, at Carl Icahn’s request, it refreshed the memorandum for a friend of Icahn’s, with the same conclusion.⁠[2]

Later, he said, Carl Icahn called again, asked whether he had read the company’s bylaws, and hung up. Ben Feder read them and found that the company had a plain, unamended DelawareDelawareDelaware is a U.S. state in the Mid-Atlantic region on the East Coast, with its capital at Dover and Wilmington as its largest city. On December 7, 1787, it became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, entering the Union as the 1st state, and it had a population of 989,948 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry charter under which holders of 50.1 percent of the shares could remove the board by written consent; because of its troubles, its stock had collapsed into the hands of about 20 hedge funds. ZelnickMedia, he said, had no money to buy stock and could not afford the roughly $3 million that a proxy fight then cost; but Securities and Exchange Commission rules allowed up to 10 shareholders to be solicited without triggering a filing requirement, and about 70 percent of the stock was held by 10 shareholders. The team prepared a presentation on how it would fix the company, met the 10 and obtained commitments for 48 percent.⁠[2]

The remaining gap, he said, was closed by another provision that Ben Feder found in the bylaws: a shareholder could call for a vote at the annual meeting without having put the item on the agenda in advance, and if a majority of the shares at the meeting voted for his slate, the company could be taken over on the spot, though the votes had to be cast in person. They formed a group with the 10 shareholders, disclosed it, and notified the company weeks before the meeting. They then found that the hedge funds had lent their shares to short sellers and that lent shares could not be voted, which left them with 22 percent.⁠[2]

He recalled that the annual meeting was held in a hotel, with television cameras outside, and that the company’s chief executive did not attend; to protect themselves they had hired the two leading proxy solicitors. Before the meeting a man waved to him across the room, an acquaintance from law school, and the two talked for five minutes; the solicitors informed him that the man represented Fidelity InvestmentsFidelity InvestmentsFidelity Investments is a privately held financial services group headquartered in Boston, United States, with FMR LLC as its parent company. Founded in 1946 by Edward Johnson 2d, it operates in mutual fund and ETF asset management, brokerage and wealth management, workplace retirement plans and digital assets. Controlled by the Johnson family for three generations, it had $7.1 trillion in managed assets and $18 trillion in assets under administration at the end of 2025.Open the full entry, a larger shareholder that had declined to join their group and that usually supports management, and he said to them at once, “We just won.” The company’s general counsel then came to say that the provisional count gave them 88 percent and to ask whether he would accept it; he accepted. The meeting was on a Thursday, he said, and on the Friday morning he walked into the corner office as chairman; he called the episode a “hostile takeover with no money.”⁠[2]

The New York Times wrote on April 11, 2007 that Take-Two’s share price had fallen below $10 the previous summer as inquiries into its business practices multiplied; ZelnickMedia first considered taking the company private, judged that too complicated, and he instead approached the largest shareholders one by one to back his plan to take over the board. The annual meeting, the article says, had been held in New York about two weeks earlier; all but two of the directors were removed, and two hours afterward the new board named him chairman while his partner Benjamin Feder was filling the chief executive’s role. He planned to obtain business plans from all the division heads, hold town hall meetings with the staff and, within 100 days, name a permanent chief executive and present a cost-cutting plan to investors. The article adds that Take-Two’s shares rose through much of March once the shareholder revolt became known, reaching a peak of $23.79, and closed at $20.38 on the day before the article appeared.⁠[11]

The same article says that the week before it appeared the Securities and Exchange Commission had upgraded its inquiry into the backdating of stock options at Take-Two to a formal investigation, that the Manhattan district attorney and the Internal Revenue Service were conducting investigations of their own, and that the chief financial officer, Karl H. Winters, had resigned on the Monday before it appeared. “We hit the ground running,” Zelnick says in it, adding of the new atmosphere that “There’s no consequence for saying what’s on your mind, negative or positive,” and, of the company’s finances, “On the other hand, Take-Two has no debt.” Drawing on figures from Janco Partners, the article says that Grand Theft Auto had at times made up more than half of the company’s sales, and 57 percent of its $502 million of sales in the three months after the 2004 release; Mike Hickey, an analyst at that firm, said, “They have arguably the best video game in the industry.”⁠[11]

The history on ZMC’s website says that in 2007 its affiliates entered into a management agreement with the board of the publicly traded Take-Two Interactive to manage the company, and that managing Take-Two remains a separate line of ZMC’s business. The preliminary proxy statement that Take-Two filed in 2011 states that the management agreement with ZelnickMedia was dated March 30, 2007 and was amended on July 27, 2007 and February 14, 2008, and that in 2007 ZelnickMedia received stock options on 2,009,075 shares at $14.74 a share. The proxy statement that Take-Two issued in 2014 says that in March 2007 shareholders holding about 46 percent of the company’s shares negotiated the agreement on the company’s behalf.⁠[17][27][28]

Of his intentions on taking over, he said that the company then had only one good property, the new Grand Theft Auto, which was in development and was later delayed; the NBANBAThe National Basketball Association (NBA) is a North American professional basketball league with 30 teams.Open the full entry franchise was tiny and made a little money, and everything else lost money. The company made around $100 million in a year when a Grand Theft Auto was released, but one came out only every four years and it lost money the rest of the time. His plan was to cut costs meaningfully, run the company rationally, be friendly to creative talent and diversify the product pipeline. The team cut about $40 million of costs, he said, beginning not with layoffs or new expense policies but with a survey of the ten largest vendors, each of which was called and negotiated down; three to six months later, once it understood the business, it right-sized the overhead, which in most cases meant some reduction in headcount. At the beginning, he said, the team made few mistakes: “when you’re on the floor, there’s nowhere to fall.”⁠[2][2]

An interview article dated January 28, 2008 and reprinted on ZMC’s website says that in seven years ZelnickMedia had built a portfolio of growth companies in interactive media estimated at $2.5 billion, that its first controlled institutional fund was said to have been launched that year, and that sources expected the fund to provide “several hundred million” at first for new acquisitions; he declined to discuss the fund. “We have been waiting for this because we are value investors,” he says in the article, and: “We have been sort of allergic to trophy assets.” People usually overpay for such assets, he explained, and he preferred smaller businesses of about $100 million with digital components; the article calls Time Life and Take-Two “trophy assets” that were special opportunities, has him saying that he had improved the profitability of every company in his portfolio, notes that assets such as Time Life had been sold for many times their purchase price, and expects Take-Two to become profitable less than two years after he took it over.⁠[29]

The history on ZMC’s website says that in the seven years after 2001 the team invested $200 million of equity with partners in seven investments, and that in 2008 its first fund, ZMC I, L.P., closed with approximately $150 million of committed capital. In the David Senra interview he said that the firm began raising its own capital in 2007 and 2008.⁠[17][2]

On February 15, 2008 Take-Two Interactive announced that its board had made him Executive Chairman, in place of his position as Non-Executive Chairman, and that the management agreement with ZelnickMedia had been amended; under that agreement, the announcement says, ZelnickMedia provided Take-Two with the services of several executives, among them Karl Slatoff, who became Executive Vice President with responsibility for general management, administration and corporate development. The 2011 preliminary proxy statement records that in 2008 ZelnickMedia received 600,000 shares of time-based restricted stock and 900,000 shares of performance-based restricted stock; the latter required total shareholder return at the 75th percentile of the NASDAQ Industrial Index over four years, and the statement calls its vesting “highly unlikely.”⁠[30][27]

On February 24, 2008 Take-Two’s board announced that it had rejected an unsolicited proposal from Electronic Arts to buy the company for $26.00 a share in cash, which it said undervalued the company and sought to take advantage of the forthcoming release of Grand Theft Auto IV. As Executive Chairman he stated: “Electronic Arts’ proposal provides insufficient value to our shareholders and comes at absolutely the wrong time.” The board offered to begin discussions with Electronic Arts on April 30, 2008.⁠[31]

Anupreeta Das of Reuters MediaFile wrote that on the evening of November 2, 2009 he hosted a dinner at his home in Manhattan attended by about 70 people, the third gathering of its kind after two held that February and July; the co-hosts were Sam Lessin, founder of drop.io, Ben Lerer of Thrillist, Jeremy Philips of News Corp and Stuart Ellman of RRE Ventures. The guests were new-media founders, established media executives and investors, among them, as the article names them, Quincy Smith, David Rosenblatt, Ron Conway, Andy WeissmanAndy WeissmanAndy Weissman is a New York venture capitalist who has been a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV) since 2011 and earlier co-founded the technology company and investment platform betaworks; when USV announced its new funds in October 2026, he moved to continuing support of the firm and its portfolio companies and is no longer listed on the core investment team.Open the full entry, Fred WilsonFred WilsonFred Wilson is an American venture capitalist, co-founder and partner of the New York venture firm Union Square Ventures (USV), and earlier co-founder, with Jerry Colonna, of the internet investment firm Flatiron Partners. He has written the blog AVC since 2003, chaired Etsy’s board for many years, and is a director of Coinbase.Open the full entry, Gordon Crovitz, Tom Glocer, Kenneth Lerer, Malcolm Gladwell and David Remnick; Malcolm Gladwell spoke over dessert, and the evening ran until nearly midnight.⁠[32]

The organizers, the article says, aimed at about 100 invitations and hoped to make the gathering a recurring exchange of ideas, capital and expertise. He said that the dinners came from “a desire… to meet the next generation of leaders in the media business,” adding: “we collectively know almost everybody doing the most interesting things in new media in New York.” The article notes that he had known Sam Lessin and Ben Lerer since they were teenagers and that both regularly sought his advice on their ventures; Lessin said that Zelnick had helped him understand the media landscape and would say so when his ideas were weak.⁠[32]

On June 24, 2010 ZelnickMedia and Alloy, Inc. announced that an investor group led by ZelnickMedia would acquire Alloy for $9.80 a share in cash, a total of about $126.5 million and a premium of about 27 percent to the average closing price over the 30 days to June 23; the co-investors were Natixis Caspian Private Equity, Rosemont Solebury Co-Investment Fund and GenSpring Family Offices, Alloy’s senior management was to invest alongside them, and closing was expected in the fourth quarter of 2010. The announcement lists Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries and Pretty Little Liars among Alloy’s properties, all produced in association with Warner Brothers. “We intend to grow Alloy into a leading brand for this generation,” he says in the announcement. The speaker biography published by the University of Utah records that he served on the board of Alloy, Inc.⁠[33][20]

On October 29, 2010 Take-Two Interactive announced that its chief executive, Ben Feder, would step down on January 1, 2011 to spend an extended period traveling in Asia with his family, while remaining a partner in ZelnickMedia, and that from the same date Strauss Zelnick, the Executive Chairman, would also be Chief Executive Officer. Karl Slatoff took the newly created post of Chief Operating Officer, effective October 25, 2010.⁠[34][4]

The preliminary proxy statement that Take-Two filed in 2011 states that the company and ZelnickMedia entered into a new management agreement on May 20, 2011, running through May 31, 2015 and effective only if stockholders approved it at the annual meeting. As described there, it provided for him to serve as Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and Karl Slatoff as Chief Operating Officer; a management fee of $2.5 million for fiscal 2012, rising by 3 percent a year; an annual bonus tied to EBITDA or another financial measure, with a target of $1.75 million and a maximum of $3.5 million; and equity consisting of 1.1 million shares of time-based restricted stock and up to 1.65 million shares of performance-based stock tied to total shareholder return relative to the NASDAQ Composite Index. The statement notes that the existing management agreement was due to expire in October 2012 and cites a peer comparison in which the company’s three-year total shareholder return stood at the 39th percentile while ZelnickMedia’s realizable compensation, $14.1 million, stood at the 11th; the new agreement had double-trigger change-in-control provisions, no tax gross-ups, a requirement to hold stock worth four times the annual management fee and a clawback policy. The statement gives his age as 54 and lists him, outside Take-Two, as chairman of ITN Networks and a director of Alloy, Inc., Naylor LLC and Starwood Property Trust.⁠[27]

An interview published by The Hollywood Reporter in June 2011 describes him as 53, a married father of three living in New York. In it he says, “We own basically all of our IP,” and, “We are the only growth area in the entertainment business.” He added that he did not understand how the big diversified media companies could fail to be exposed to interactive entertainment, predicted that video games would “look like live-action,” and said that the company was “platform-agnostic” in distribution.⁠[35]

The proxy statement that Take-Two issued on July 28, 2014 records that the company and ZelnickMedia entered into the 2014 Management Agreement on March 10, 2014, effective April 1, 2014, under which ZelnickMedia was to provide services through March 31, 2019, and which superseded the earlier 2011 Management Agreement; in 2011, the statement recalls, “a new and amended agreement was put in place,” which had been expected to govern through May 31, 2015. As described there, the 2014 agreement set a management fee of $247,500 a month ($2,970,000 a year), fixed for the five-year term, and an annual bonus ranging from nothing to $4,752,000 depending on Non-GAAP EBITDA; no more than 60 percent of ZelnickMedia’s compensation could go to him and no more than 40 percent to Karl Slatoff, the split being otherwise at ZelnickMedia’s sole discretion. The statement gives his age as 57.⁠[28]

His official Take-Two Interactive biography states that from July 2014 to July 2017 he was chairman of the Entertainment Software Association, the trade body of the video game industry.⁠[4][36]

On July 1, 2015 Fortune published an article observing that the chairman and chief executive of Take-Two does not play video games himself and stays out of the creative side. “I’m not a creative type; I’m primarily a business type,” he said. The article has him saying that he had sold stock only for tax purposes, that he believed he was by then the company’s largest single shareholder, and that he had no plans to leave: “Here it is 2015 and I feel like it’s just the beginning.” It recalls that at the time of the 2007 takeover analysts expected him to fix the company and then sell it, and cites analysts’ estimates that Take-Two had generated $806 million of operating profit since he took over; in the year before he arrived, it recalls, the company had lost $184.9 million, restated eight years of financial results and seen a former chief executive plead guilty to falsifying records. Of the virtual reality demonstrations he had tried, he said: “The demos I had were all basically linear, but it was amazing.”⁠[37]

On November 11, 2015 he gave a talk and question-and-answer session at Wesleyan University’s career center under the title “Successful Leadership: A Crash Course for Wes Students,” for which the event notice assigned Give and Take and How to Win Friends and Influence People as advance reading. The history on ZMC’s website says that its second fund, ZMC II L.P., closed in 2015 with $415 million of committed capital.⁠[3][17]

The proxy statement that Take-Two issued on July 26, 2018 records that the company and ZelnickMedia entered into the 2017 Management Agreement on November 17, 2017; it took effect on January 1, 2018, superseded the 2014 Management Agreement and ran through March 31, 2024. The annual bonus, paid entirely in cash, depended on Adjusted EBITDA relative to target: $3,720,000 at target and $7,440,000 at 150 percent of target or above; the limits on his share and Karl Slatoff’s remained 60 percent and 40 percent respectively. The statement gives his age as 61.⁠[38]

His official Take-Two Interactive biography states that from September 2018 to December 2019 he was a director of the public company ViacomCBS Inc. (formerly CBS Corporation), serving on its compensation committee and its nominating and governance committee, and that from October 2018 to December 2019 he was non-executive interim chairman of its board. Music Business Worldwide notes that CBS Corporation generated more than $14.5 billion of revenue in fiscal 2018. The Hollywood Reporter wrote in 2018 that he became chairman in succession to Richard Parsons, who had stepped down.⁠[4][10][39]

On August 28, 2019 Music Business Worldwide published an interview with him by Tim Ingham. Of his approach at BMG, he said that he “didn’t pretend to have any more knowledge than [he] had.” Music, he said, was a growth business again, though piracy remained a burden; publishing was still solid, streaming was changing the business, and breaking new artists had become harder. “The vulnerability is, if a business can’t afford to invest in new talent, it’s burning the furniture,” he said.⁠[10]

The article puts the assets under ZMC’s control at nearly $20 billion; the same publication’s article of November 2018 gave the figure as more than $14 billion, put Take-Two’s market value at about $13 billion and said that he became the company’s largest shareholder after Zelnick Media Capital led its acquisition in 2007.⁠[10][14]

A press release issued by ZMC on November 21, 2019 says that the firm had announced the previous day the final closing of its third fund (ZMC III, L.P. and ZMC III Parallel, L.P.) at $775 million, above its $650 million target and at its hard cap, after seven months of fundraising without a placement agent; the investors were public and private pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, foundations, financial institutions and family offices. The fund was to invest in technology-enabled media and communications companies. As Founder and Managing Partner he stated: “We are pleased to have received such a high level of interest for Fund III.”⁠[40]

On January 10, 2022 Take-Two Interactive announced its combination with Zynga; the press release states that he would continue as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the combined company and that Take-Two’s management team would continue to lead it. In the release he calls the deal a “transformative transaction” and cites at least $500 million of annual net bookings opportunities over time; the release expects about $100 million of annual cost savings within the first two years after closing. In 2024 he said that before the deal he had spent three years getting to know Frank Gibeau, Zynga’s chief executive.⁠[41][1]

The proxy statement that Take-Two issued in July 2026 records that the company and ZMC entered into the 2022 Management Agreement on May 3, 2022; it took effect on May 23, 2022, runs through March 31, 2029 and superseded the 2017 Management Agreement. Compared with the 2017 agreement, the statement says, at-risk compensation at maximum rose from 71 percent to 80 percent and performance-based equity at target from 55 percent to 67 percent, the performance period was lengthened from two years to three, and time-based equity changed from vesting all at once after two years to vesting ratably over three; the agreement has no automatic annual increase in the management fee. The company’s Form 8-K dated May 3, 2022 states that the agreement would take effect on the closing of the combination with Zynga and that he would continue to serve as Executive Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, with Karl Slatoff continuing as President.⁠[26][42]

On May 3, 2023 the HBS Club of Toronto and a number of Harvard alumni clubs held an online event at which Boris Tsimerinov interviewed him; the event page, whose title calls him a “Media and Entertainment Titan & Health and Wellness Guru,” gives his age as 65, says that he keeps a schedule of two workouts a day, and lists him as chairman of the audit committee of Starwood Property Trust, a director of the privately held Education Networks of America and a trustee emeritus of Wesleyan University.⁠[5]

The history on ZMC’s website says that its fourth fund, ZMC IV L.P., closed in 2024 with approximately $750 million of committed capital.⁠[17]

In the Thirty Minute Mentors interview published on April 10, 2024 he said that the senior team at ZMC had worked together since 2002 and the senior team at Take-Two since 2007; that he had worked in “every entertainment business that exists” but had never personally made a film, a record, a television program or a game and had rarely offered creative input; and that a person cannot have more than four priorities: “Mine are family and friends, work, business and charitable work, and mentoring and coaching.”⁠[1]

The advice he gave in this interview was to define success for oneself instead of adopting other people’s expectations; to work hard and keep a positive attitude; to listen closely and with empathy; to align economic incentives so that rewards are shared; and to build long-tenured teams and keep enough capital to survive failures. He cited Warner Communications as an example, saying that it had the longest-tenured team in all of its businesses and that its head did not take credit for the creative work.⁠[1]

On September 18, 2025 the games program of the University of Utah announced that he would speak at the university’s Kingsbury Hall on September 25 from 11 a.m. to noon, at a free event with seats for the first 1,200 arrivals. The speaker biography attached to the notice says that he represents ZMC on the board of World Choice Investments and previously served on the boards of Cast & Crew Entertainment Services, Alloy, Inc., Education Networks of America, Inc. and Naylor L.L.C. The editors’ note in the October–December 2025 issue of LEADERS magazine, for its part, says that he represents ZMC as a director of Education Networks of America, Inc.⁠[20][7]

His official Take-Two Interactive biography and the company’s 2026 proxy statement state that he sits on the board of the Entertainment Software Association and has again been its chairman since December 2025.⁠[4][26]

On May 17, 2026 David Senra published a long interview with him on his YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel under the title “The Man Behind Grand Theft Auto 6: Strauss Zelnick.” The conversation opens with how ZelnickMedia took control of Take-Two Interactive and then goes back through his career in order: “new media” at Columbia Pictures and his graduate thesis, Vestron, Hollywood’s prejudice against video games after 1982, working with Barry Diller and Rupert Murdoch at 20th Century Fox, the economics of film compared with those of video games, Crystal Dynamics, BMG and the sale of BMG Interactive, the founding of ZelnickMedia and its first deal for a Japanese record company, and his dealings with Carl Icahn and the 2007 shareholder meeting.⁠[2]

The second half turns in order to the turnaround of Take-Two and its cost cuts, the treatment of creative talent and what he calls a “rational organization,” the decision to remake Borderlands, the release date of Grand Theft Auto VI, his privately distributed book and the importance of knowing what one wants, the mentoring of younger colleagues, the idea that a chief executive serves the team and the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, the variety of successful styles, the difference between entertainment and video games, and Take-Two’s use of artificial intelligence and his view of it.⁠[2]

He recounted in the interview that about ten years after founding ZelnickMedia he spoke at MIT, where a student asked how big the company then was; taken all together, he answered, about $1 billion. Asked whether he was deeply disappointed, he replied that it was not yet what he had set out to do but was directionally correct and that he was not stopping. Today, he said, the company taken as a whole, market capitalization included, is about a $40 billion company and has exceeded the goal.⁠[2]

Take-Two Interactive’s proxy statement dated July 27, 2026 was issued for the virtual annual meeting of September 17, at which 10 directors were to be elected. It gives his age as 69, lists him as a director since March 2007 and states that he is not an independent director under NasdaqNasdaqNasdaq is an exchange operator and financial technology company headquartered in New York. It runs The Nasdaq Stock Market and other markets and provides capital markets technology, regulatory technology, and data and index services. Founded in 1971, it combined with OMX AB in 2008, and in March 2026 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved its rules for trading tokenized securities.Open the full entry rules.⁠[26]

The ownership table of the proxy statement shows him as beneficial owner, as of July 15, 2026, of 1,382,568 Take-Two shares, less than 1 percent of those outstanding: 192,314 held by the Zelnick/Belzberg Living Trust, 64,089 held by the Wendy Jay Belzberg 2012 Family Trust, and 1,126,165 restricted stock units held by ZMC and not by him individually. He disclaims beneficial ownership of the securities held by the trusts and by ZMC except to the extent of his pecuniary interest in them.⁠[26]

The proxy statement records that he receives $1 a year in compensation directly from the company; the “all other compensation” attributed to him in the summary compensation table, which covers a club fee, a parking space and personal security, was $403,018 in fiscal 2026 (of which $392,899 was personal security), $106,456 in fiscal 2025 and $274,073 in fiscal 2024.⁠[26]

His services and Karl Slatoff’s are provided by ZMC under the 2022 Management Agreement, and the compensation is paid to ZMC. The figures the proxy statement gives for fiscal 2026 are a management fee of $3.3 million (set in the agreement at $275,000 a month); an annual incentive paid at the maximum of $13.2 million, adjusted EBITDA for the year having been $1,401.6 million, about 152.4 percent of the $919.5 million target; performance-based restricted stock units of $33,713,060; and time-based restricted stock units of $16,604,940, a total of $66,818,000. Under the agreement he may receive no more than 60 percent of ZMC’s compensation and Karl Slatoff no more than 40 percent, the allocation otherwise being determined by ZMC alone; on that basis the proxy statement puts the maximum he could receive at $40,090,800.⁠[26][42]

The statement also lists the unvested restricted stock units held by ZMC as of March 31, 2026 as 726,835 at target and 1,279,802 at maximum, worth $143,549,913 and $252,760,895 respectively at that day’s closing price of $197.50; until March 31, 2029 neither ZMC nor he and Karl Slatoff individually may sell shares if their holdings would fall below six times the annual management fee.⁠[26]

As set out in the proxy statement, the annual bonus depends on adjusted EBITDA relative to target: nothing at 80 percent of target or below, $6.6 million at 100 percent and $13.2 million at 150 percent or more; of the performance-based restricted stock units, 75 percent depend on relative total shareholder return and 25 percent on a measure of recurrent consumer spending, over a performance period from June 1, 2025 to March 31, 2028. For the performance awards that vested in fiscal 2026, the statement says, relative total shareholder return stood at the 78th percentile and both measures paid out at 200 percent of target. On termination by the company without cause or by ZMC for good reason, ZMC is entitled to earned but unpaid fees and bonus plus three times the sum of the annual management fee and the target bonus.⁠[26]

The proxy statement records that in fiscal 2026 there were no related-person transactions other than those with ZMC, which the independent directors reviewed and ratified, and that on June 1, 2026 the company filed a Form S-3 to register the resale of shares issuable to ZMC. The board’s stated view of him is that he provides it with “valuable insight in organization and management.”⁠[26]

As of November 2026 the management pages of Take-Two Interactive’s website list him as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board’s executive committee, and the team page of ZMC’s website lists him as Founder and Managing Partner, alongside Karl Slatoff as Managing Partner and Jordan Turkewitz and Andrew Vogel as Co-Chief Investment Officers and Managing Partners.⁠[4][15][43]

ZMC’s website describes the firm as “a leading investor in and operator of media, entertainment, communications, and technology businesses,” names transparency, integrity, high performance, teamwork, service and kindness as its culture, and ranks its stakeholders in this order: the customers who buy the products and services first, the employees of portfolio companies second, investors third and ZMC itself last. The speaker biographies published by SALT and the University of Utah say that at ZMC he originates investments, advises executives and guides strategic and operational initiatives across the portfolio companies.⁠[17][8][20]

An article in Wesleyan University’s magazine states that his wife is Wendy Belzberg. In 2024 he said: “I set out to have a happy family, have had the same wife for 34 years, and have three kids I have great relationships with.” In a podcast episode of August 2018 the host introduced him as having been married to his wife for nearly 30 years.⁠[44][1][13]

In 2018 he said that his children were all out of the house; asked about his mistakes, he said that he had made numerous ones and that they all had to do with how he raised his children.⁠[13]

The New York Times wrote in April 2007 that the closest he usually gets to playing video games is watching over the shoulders of his two young sons, and that he concedes his gaming skills are better suited to Pong and Pac-Man than to Grand Theft Auto.⁠[11]

On April 11, 2005 Daily Variety published a question-and-answer piece with him by Stephen Unger under the title “Multi-Tasking as a Method.” In it he says that he double-majored in college and attended two graduate schools at the same time: “even now I have to restrain myself from multi-tasking as a way of life”; of his businesses he says, “The most fun is obviously an area that’s creative.”⁠[45]

In his 2025 interview with LEADERS magazine he named as his mentors the late Dick Parsons, Don Gogel, the chairman of Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, Barry Diller and Michael Dornemann, a director of Take-Two, saying of Barry Diller that he “doesn’t like to be called a mentor, but he is”; he also said that ZMC and Take-Two together are worth about $50 billion today.⁠[7]

In the 2026 David Senra interview he said, “my mom is 90.” She plays bridge online, he said, is good at it and has bridge friends whom she has never met in person; she is mobile but does not get around as she used to, and the online game is a social life for her.⁠[2]

The Music Business Worldwide interview article says that his tendency to like everyone irritates his wife; “I pride myself on being a friend to all – I’ve never intentionally burned a bridge in my career,” he said. In the David Senra interview he described himself as a friendly person who knows everyone in the business and likes everyone: “I don’t think I have an enemy in the business.”⁠[10][2]

He said that sincerely caring about other people is a basic requirement of being human: at StarbucksStarbucksStarbucks is a publicly traded coffee company headquartered in Seattle, founded in 1971 by Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl. Howard Schultz subsequently developed its coffeehouse model and international expansion. It operates company-owned and licensed coffeehouses and sells packaged coffee through partners. Its shares trade on Nasdaq under SBUX.Open the full entry, if the person behind the counter is not busy, he says hello, asks how the day is going and tries to brighten it a little. He retold the story from How to Win Friends and Influence People in which the author compliments a post-office clerk on his hair, and said that it is enough that a small exchange improves the other person’s day and one’s own, without anything being gained from it. Coming on the program, he said, his thought was likewise how he could be of service to the host and the audience.⁠[2]

He said that he has three jobs and works very hard; in 2018 he listed his priorities as his family and friends, his work, his fitness, and his mentoring and charitable activities; and he said that he loves museums but does not have time to visit them as often as he would like.⁠[2][1][13]

He said that he had recently undergone a 360-degree review, which contained criticism that did not surprise him; among its positive findings were that when he sits down with anyone, at any level, he really cares about that person, that he responds to everyone and that he is kind to everyone. Of his weaknesses, he said that he sometimes takes too soft an approach, supports people on the team longer than he should, and has at times put problems off; in 2018, too, he said that his failures had mostly been business situations in which he “kicked the can down the road.”⁠[2][13]

Of his wealth he said that he is far from the most successful person on Earth and not the richest, but “I’m not going to miss a meal,” and that the business he has built is not the biggest but is one he is proud of.⁠[2]

He said that he spends 20 to 25 percent of his time mentoring and coaching people with the tools in his book, some of which are exercises that the person has to carry out; he answers any colleague who sends him an email, a text or a SlackSlackSlack is a team communication and collaboration platform developed from an internal tool at Tiny Speck. It organizes work through channels, direct messages, searchable history and integrations, with features including Huddles, Clips, Canvas and AI assistance. Its paid service launched in February 2014, and Salesforce completed its acquisition in July 2021.Open the full entry message, but about half of the people who come to him never follow up, which he said astonishes him.⁠[2]

In a podcast interview of August 2018 he said, “I’m 61 now.” He had always been thin, he said, and had not been much involved in fitness, running a bit, lifting weights a little and playing squash; the turning point came in graduate school, when a friend remarked, “Strauss, you have a paunch.” He went to his school’s new gym the next day, and his first training program was a 20-minute circuit of one set of 10 or 12 repetitions.⁠[13]

In the same interview he said, “fitness is my avocation. It’s not my vocation.” He takes one rest day a week, a practice that he said he had begun only in the previous four or five years; he decided to stop drinking and chose to be “the guy who’s in the gym at 6 a. m.”; he has cut down on refined carbohydrates and sugar but still eats chocolate and dessert. He named Peter Attia as his doctor, said that he has hereditarily high cholesterol, and said that a genetic test had found him “woefully Inadequate” in the elite genes for fitness, with the one exception of a gene for recovery.⁠[13]

A Hollywood Reporter article of 2018 describes him as 60 years old, 6 feet 1 inch tall and 160 pounds, with 8 percent body fat; it says that he runs with a coach in his “Central Park morning crew” and goes to Barry’s Bootcamp at least once a week, and that lifting weights is what he enjoys most.⁠[39]

The routine he described in 2024 was this: he usually works out at 6:30 or a quarter to seven and has his first meeting at around 8:15; he generally skips breakfast and more or less believes in intermittent fasting; he drinks no alcohol and no sugary or diet drinks; his weight has stayed within about five pounds for 30 years; and he does weight training and high-intensity interval training and cycles when it is warm enough.⁠[1]

The Best Life website carries a first-person article, which closes with a notice of his book, under the title “How I Look 15 Years Younger—And How You Can, Too.” In it he says that he is “officially in my 7th decade” and that people take him to be about a decade younger, and that he works out every morning and some evenings with a group of people in their twenties. For beginners he recommends starting with walks or bodyweight exercises and using a stress ball or a hand-grip strengthener during work. What set him to exercising in earnest, the article says, was a remark his wife made a few years earlier, “Honey, you don’t look so good,” and he says that he lost more than 20 pounds on the plan.⁠[46]

In 2025 he said that he began with cycling, generally by himself, and that the group he came to train with grew into The Program, which has around 220 members in New York and another 20 to 30 in South CarolinaSouth CarolinaSouth Carolina (officially the State of South Carolina) is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Ocean bordering Georgia and North Carolina; its capital is Columbia and its most populous city is Charleston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on May 23, 1788, the eighth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 5,118,425.Open the full entry.⁠[7]

He is the author of Becoming Ageless: The Four Secrets to Looking and Feeling Younger Than Ever. The publisher’s page at Simon & Schuster lists the book as published by Galvanized Media and distributed by Simon & Schuster, with a publication date of September 4, 2018 and 257 pages in the ebook edition; The Hollywood Reporter wrote that he wrote it with Zack Zeigler. In a podcast episode published on August 17, 2018 he explained that he wrote it because people kept asking what his secret was.⁠[5][47][39][13]

On that program he said that his first book, about success in life and in business, was self-published and “not readily available.” The speaker profile published by SALT in 2021 gives its title as “Success: A Concise Guide to Having the Life You Want.”⁠[13][8]

In the 2026 interview David Senra said that he had read this book, which is not for sale and which its author gives away, and read aloud a sentence from its passage on “creative visualization”: “I’m pretty sure it works because the method requires one to concentrate hard, exclusively, and frequently on what one wants.” David Senra added that after Zelnick mentioned the book on another podcast only 50 people asked for it, which Zelnick confirmed.⁠[2]

An article on financial aid in Wesleyan University’s magazine says that he, by then a former trustee, and his wife established at the university the Samuel and Frances Belzberg Endowed University Scholarship, named for her parents, Samuel and Frances Belzberg; the article does not give the amount of the gift and mentions a member of the class of 2007 who received the scholarship. Such scholarships, he says in it, are a strong recruitment tool that draws excellent students who could not otherwise afford the university or might choose another, and they enhance diversity: “We’re able to use that tool to attract the best and the brightest.”⁠[44]

An article of March 2003 in the same magazine calls him a trustee and says that he supported Jonathan Harber and Diego Recalde, both of the class of 1986, when they founded The Wesleyan Entrepreneurs Circle about two years earlier, a group meant to draw on the talents of alumni entrepreneurs and to encourage gifts of stock or cash to the university. Wesleyan University’s 2015 event notice describes him as a co-founder of the Digital Wesleyan alumni network.⁠[48][3]

His official Take-Two Interactive biography states that he is a director of Starwood Property Trust, Inc. and an associate member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and that he has served on the boards of the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.⁠[4][49]

The portfolio page of ZMC’s website lists 26 companies: 9 Story Media Group, Airvana, Alloy, Cannella Response Television, Card Kingdom, Cast & Crew, Columbia Music Entertainment, CommentSold, Direct Holdings Worldwide, L.L.C., Education Networks of America, InProduction, ITN Networks, ITRenew, Logitix, Naylor, OTX, Pure Wafer, Raptive, Resonate, Simeio, Simpler Trading, Take-Two Interactive, Tekelec, The Second City, World Choice Investments and Wpromote.⁠[50]

In the 2026 interview he summed up Take-Two as follows: its mission is to be “the number one entertainment company on Earth,” its strategy is to be the most creative, the most innovative and the most efficient company, and its culture is one of seeking excellence, working as a team and being kind; the company has 14,000 people, he said, and not one of them is unable to recite this. A public company has to explain its plan to investors, he said, and when investors once asked how this plan differed from his plan at Fox, he answered that it did not: it is the entertainment business.⁠[2]

In the entertainment business, he said, the people who matter are those who make the hits: “you can replace people like me.” What he promises creative talent is, first, the creative and financial resources to pursue its passion, without creative interference and with support through thick and thin; and only second a rational business organization, in which no one screams, no one is indicted and the company does not fall out with regulators, together with a solid balance sheet so that it can survive the failures that are inevitable, a promise that he said took a few years to fulfil.⁠[2]

He said that there is no yelling at the company and that anyone who behaves badly has to leave, and that he never uses the phrase about being one big family: “We’re not a big family here. This is an enterprise.” The company does not care, he said, about anyone’s ethnic or religious background, orientation, lifestyle or hair color: “Just do great work, seek excellence, and be kind to others.” He described a creative employee who used to send outlandish and unpleasant emails; he feared that one day he would have no choice but to dismiss the man, and then saw that he did have a choice, which was to delete the emails unread. He put up with it for a long time, he said, and in the end the man had to go.⁠[2][2]

One example he gave: when the company had not yet been turned around and its capital was limited, a game was finished and due for release in two months when the head of the division came into his office to say that the team did not think it good enough, that its art style was wrong and undifferentiated, and that it wanted to remake the game, at a further $50 million of development cost and a year’s delay. He did not answer at once, he said, did his homework and then supported the decision; the game became Borderlands, and he believes that no one else in the business would have done the same.⁠[2]

On Grand Theft Auto VI he said that the release date of November 19 had been announced and was about 18 months behind the original date. The company does not disclose the total revenue of Grand Theft Auto V, he said, and most people believe the franchise to be the most valuable entertainment intellectual property ever created, “But, people could argue about that.” A 2026 Fortune article likewise gives November 19 as the game’s release date and quotes him: “I don’t think being consumer-in-chief really helps a CEO be effective in this business.”⁠[2][51]

He said that turning Take-Two around took a long time and involved some meaningful missteps, and that the company has not created more value than everyone else in the business: there were great executives at Electronic Arts and Activision, he noted, and among pure-play game companies the one who has probably created the most value is Bobby KotickBobby KotickBobby Kotick, formally Robert A. Kotick, is a business executive and director who led Activision and subsequently Activision Blizzard from 1991 to 2023. His tenure encompassed the combination with Vivendi Games, the King acquisition and Microsoft’s takeover. He is also cofounder and cochairman of the Call of Duty Endowment and became an independent Skydance director in October 2026.Open the full entry at Activision.⁠[2]

He said that there is more than one successful style and that his own approach is not for everyone. Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry’s approach to business is “diametrically different” from his, he said, and since Musk is the richest man on Earth and he is not, he has no wish to criticize it; Barry Diller’s Socratic method can be brutal and is not his way, but it works for Barry Diller.⁠[2]

He said that he adapts his style to each individual while remaining true to who he is; a chief executive does not write memoranda or build spreadsheets, and only the problems that cannot be solved below his level and the decisions beyond a subordinate’s authority come to him.⁠[2]

He said that he regards Take-Two as an entertainment company and not only a video game company: a mobile game played for seven minutes and a Grand Theft Auto VI played for hundreds of hours are very different experiences, and to call both video games understates the difference. He agreed that video games are the largest and fastest-growing entertainment business, and said that Take-Two might in time consider other forms of entertainment but would not “diversify backwards into backward-looking legacy declining businesses”; live entertainment, he said, is an interesting space that is growing.⁠[2]

On artificial intelligence, he said that Take-Two has made licensed, paid enterprise versions of ChatGPTChatGPTChatGPT is a generative AI assistant launched by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. Through websites and applications, it provides conversation, writing, coding, search, file analysis, and image and voice interaction. It evolved from a free research preview into personal, enterprise and education plans, gradually adding deep research, Study mode and cross-application task execution. Its use has prompted continuing discussions about factual accuracy, personal privacy, copyright, education and teen safety.Open the full entry and Claude available to all employees and has about 200 projects under way to raise productivity and give people in creative and executive jobs better tools, all reporting to its new chief technology officer; even so, he said, there is criticism inside the company that it is not moving fast enough.⁠[2]

He said that he is entirely open-minded about artificial intelligence but regards it as a combination of big data sets, a great deal of computing power and a large language model, and that data sets are by nature backward-looking while creativity is forward-looking. “AI so far is really great at asset creation, but hit creation is not asset creation,” he said. The company’s shares, he said, once fell by 50 points on the thesis that with artificial intelligence anyone can make a video game, although the technology for making games has long been available to anyone. Thousands of mobile games are released each year, he said, and the number that become hits is “Zero to five”; artificial intelligence would make it quicker to clone a Grand Theft Auto, but “Clones don’t sell.”⁠[2]

Embrace new technology. The chief lesson he drew from studying the history of entertainment, he said, is that new technologies must be embraced and that those who fight them are left behind; most people, he added, are wired to believe that what is going on now will never change, when in fact it always will (at 4:25 of the interview).⁠[2]

Know what you want, and work in its service. Knowing what one wants and making daily choices that serve it guarantees nothing, he said, but makes one much more likely to get it than someone who does not know or does not do the work (at 1:13:09 of the interview).⁠[2]

Create more value than you cost. When a newly hired colleague asked what she should do to succeed at the company, he advised her to arrive on Monday thinking about how to create more value than she costs, and on Friday to ask herself whether she had; and, beyond that, to keep political exchanges out of work, to smile and to say yes (at 1:16:59 and 1:17:32 of the interview).⁠[2]

A leader has to care sincerely about other people. Asked how he deals with difficult creative talents, he said that he loves them, and that no one can lead effectively without sincerely caring about others (at 1:03:16 of the interview).⁠[2]

In a turnaround, start with third-party expenses. He said that he takes on only companies where no earlier team has tried and failed; once in, the first step is to list the ten largest vendors and renegotiate with each, which saves money at once, does not frighten the staff and builds credibility with them (at 57:20 of the interview).⁠[2]

Culture is tested in adversity. Delivering a hit and making money is no test, he said; the test comes when bad news arrives at the worst possible time (at 1:07:42 of the interview).⁠[2]

Do not indulge in wishful thinking. He defined “magical thinking” as the belief that something will happen because one wants it, and said that it is especially hard to avoid in the entertainment business (at 1:06:36 of the interview).⁠[2]

A chief executive serves the team. No work gets done in the chief executive’s office, he said; the job is to agree on the mission, set the strategy, agree on the culture and then drive daily execution through other people (at 1:21:22 of the interview).⁠[2]

Take-Two Interactive: Official website: https://www.take2games.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

ZMC: Official website: https://zmclp.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

Crystal Dynamics: Official website: https://www.crystaldynamics.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[52]

Entertainment Software Association: Official website: https://www.theesa.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[36]

Starwood Property Trust: Official website: https://www.starwoodpropertytrust.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[49]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/strauss-zelnick-7800252 (opens in a new window).⁠[53]

Instagram: Public account: https://www.instagram.com/strausszelnick/ (opens in a new window).⁠[53]