Laurence Tisch

Laurence Alan Tisch (March 5, 1923 – November 15, 2003) was an American billionaire businessman and investor. He was the CEO of CBS television network from 1986 to 1995. With his brother Bob Tisch, he was part owner of Loews Corporation.

Early life Tisch was born March 5, 1923, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Sadye (née Brenner) and Al Tisch. His father's parents had emigrated from Ukraine and his mother's parents from Poland. His father, a former All-American basketball player at the City University of New York, owned a garment factory as well as two summer camps which his wife helped him run. In 1946, he made his first investment, purchasing a 300-room winter resort in Lakewood, New Jersey with $125,000 in seed money (roughly equivalent to $1.5 million at 2012 prices) from his parents and additional funds from a friend. The hotel, Laurel-in-the-Pines, (The third major hotel built in Lakewood was Nathan Straus' Lakewood Hotel, which he built because the first two refused to serve Jews;

CBS In 1986, CBS Inc. was the target of several hostile takeover attempts by the likes of Ted Turner, Marvin Davis, and Ivan Boesky. Tisch was invited by CBS to invest in the company so as to help stop the hostile advances.

Although Tisch's decade long tenure at CBS was marked by a 15% annual increase in the value of its stock, CBS remained in third place out of the big three national networks. Tisch was criticized for not understanding the broadcast business, not diversifying the business after selling its non-broadcast assets, and poor performance of CBS relative to its peers. The network's low occurred on Tisch's watch in 1993, when the network refused to counter the upstart Fox's billion dollar bid for the rights to the NFL's NFC package it held since 1956, resulting in the network losing its NFL rights until picking up the AFC rights in 1998, and a number of affiliates to depart the network for Fox, leaving it to rebuild throughout the rest of the decade.

John Gutfreund, CEO of Salomon Brothers compared him with Bill Paley, the founder of CBS: "Bill had a vision for the industry, for Larry, it is a business."

The professorship for history and economics in Harvard University is named after him in recognition of his philanthropy to the school. The current Laurence A. Tisch professor is Niall Ferguson, a Scottish economic historian.

Family Tisch married Wilma "Billie" Stein in 1948. They had four sons: He is also the father of David Tisch. James S. Tisch – Father of New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. Thomas Jonah Tisch – Works as a partner at FLF Associates, a private investment group in New York City. In 1985, he married Helen Vivian Scovell.

All four boys went to Suffield Academy in Suffield, Connecticut.

Death Laurence Tisch died of gastroesophageal cancer, aged 80, in 2003. He was interred at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.