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.
Read more about this topic: Sid Bass
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To see self-sufficiency as the hallmark of maturity conveys a view of adult life that is at odds with the human condition, a view that cannot sustain the kinds of long-term commitments and involvements with other people that are necessary for raising and educating a child or for citizenship in a democratic society.”
—Carol Gilligan (20th century)
“Glorious bouquets and storms of applause ... are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys. But to move an audience in such a role, to hear in the applause that unmistakable note which breaks through good theatre manners and comes from the heart, is to feel that you have won through to life itself. Such pleasure does not vanish with the fall of the curtain, but becomes part of one’s own life.”
—Dame Alice Markova (b. 1910)