Life
He is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Business School. His father, Perry Richardson Bass (died 2006), built an oil fortune with uncle, Sid Richardson (died 1959). Bass took control of the business in 1968. His investments include oil and gas. Along with his father and two of his brothers, he was the largest shareholder in the The Walt Disney Company, from 1984 until after the stock market crash in 2001. Bass was forced to sell his Disney holdings as a result of a margin call. Much of the Bass holdings in Disney were acquired by the Griffith Family, who also own large equity holdings in Time-Warner, MGM-UA, and investment powerhouse KKR. Bass remains a board member of the Griffith Group although personally owning no shares in Disney himself.
In 1990 Bass donated $20 million to Yale University for the study of humanities. In 2006 he made a record gift of $25 million to the Metropolitan Opera, in New York.
Bass divorced his first wife, née Anne Hendricks, and married socialite Mercedes Bass (the former Mercedes Kellogg, née Mercedes Tavacoli). The wooing of Bass by Mercedes Kellogg in 1986, while she was still married to Ambassador Francis Kellogg, was a major social scandal. It is said to have crushed Ambassador Kellogg as well as Anne Bass and their two daughters. Mercedes and Ambassador Kellogg had no children. Daughter Hyatt Bass is a writer. On October 6, 2011, it was reported that Mercedes and Sid Bass, anchors of the city's business and philanthropic world, announced their divorce, ending 23 years of marriage. The divorce proceedings sparked fears that the Metropolitan Opera would lose one of its leading donors; Mercedes Bass had given $25 million to her passion, to which Sid appeared indifferent.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“It is a conquest when we can lift ourselves above the annoyances of circumstances over which we have no control; but it is a greater victory when we can make those circumstances our helpers,—when we can appreciate the good there is in them. It has often seemed to me as if Life stood beside me, looking me in the face, and saying, “Child, you must learn to like me in the form in which you see me, before I can offer myself to you in any other aspect.””
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)
“The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organize into a basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested learning as other are from over-fulness of meat and drink.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea’s foot and marveling at a midge’s humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)