Sidney Harman, the businessman and philanthropist who bought a struggling Newsweek when he was 92, has died at the young age of almost 93, according to a
statement from his family.
He died in Washington, DC from complications from acute myeloid leukemia, which he learned about a month ago, they said.
Harman surprised the media world last year when, after a long career that spanned starting his own audio equipment company to serving as a government official to moonlighting as a college president, he stepped in to buy Newsweek for $1, plus the assumption of liabilities.
He shortly afterward approved its merger with Tina Brown and Barry Dillers young web property The Daily Beast, installing Brown as the editor of the merged enterprise.
"He was a magical man, full of intellectual curiosity and a desire to see Newsweek reflect the pursuit of ideas," Brown told
Jonathan Alter. "We very quickly formed both a great editorial relationship and a warm personal friendship. I shall miss him tremendously. The family's commitment to the magazine he loved so much is solidly continuing, in partnership with Barry Diller and IAC."
Harman made his fortune by inventing the hi-fi with his business partner in Harman Kardon, the company they founded in 1953.
But his interests were remarkably varied, spanning the arts, academics and social causes. In Washington, where he and his wife, former Congresswoman Jane Harman, cut the figure of the ultimate power couple, he supported the Folger Shakespeare Library with the new Harman Center for the Arts. He also supported the Aspen Institute and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Late in life, he began teaching college courses at the Academy for Polymathic Study at the University of Southern California, which he founded.
The audio equipment mogul, who was 27 years older than his wife, often joked about his age.
"When we first married, someone said to him, 'Have you no sense of mortality?'" Jane Harman told the
Los Angeles Times last year. His response: "If Janie can't make it, she can't make it."
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