Feared dealmaker plots his next move
Michael Rubin discovered a talent for wheeling and dealing as a teenager and now sits on a $31bn sports merchandising empire. He has his eye on new opportunities. Jane Lewis reports
Billionaire Michael Rubin is best known outside the business world for hosting an annual July Fourth party at his $50m estate in the Hamptons, with a celebrity guest list that has made it the hottest event of the summer. Last year, Vanity Fair dubbed him “this generation’s Gatsby”.
Much of the mystique surrounding the fictional Jay
Gatsby relates to the unknown origins of his fortune – author
F. Scott Fitzgerald hinted it came from illegal activities such as bootlegging during Prohibition. No such mystery surrounds Rubin, 51, whose privately held sports merchandising empire, Fanatics, is now valued at roughly $31bn, says Bloomberg Businessweek. Nonetheless, this “aggressive entrepreneur” has been dubbed “the most feared dealmaker of his generation”.
With good reason. Rubin’s path to huge wealth has been studded with “hijacked” contracts, “scuttled” public offerings and “stealth acquisitions”. Thwarted opponents include Michael Eisner, the former Disney boss who was himself considered “one of the most feared executives ever to enter a boardroom”. Given Rubin’s reputation, it’s little wonder rappers such as Drake, Meek and Lil Baby consider him their “favourite billionaire”, says Vanity Fair.
In the years since they met, Rubin has come to see former jailbird Lil Baby as a brother. “I always say if I grew up how he grew up, I would have been the biggest drug dealer on the planet.”
His own background was rather more cushioned. Born in 1972 and raised in
Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania, young Mike “took to making money at an early age”, noted Forbes in 2006. As an enterprising 13-year-old with a love of skiing, he “transformed his parents’ home into a shop for tuning skis” and was soon selling gear out of the basement on a consignment basis for retailers looking to offload merchandise.
Rubin swiftly graduated to opening his own ski shop. By the age of 16, he was some $120,000 in debt but, thanks to some clever wheeler-dealing, grew the business into five shops by the time most kids were going to college. When the 1990s internet boom struck, he was “ready with a business model”. His venture, GSI Commerce, ran online stores for bricks-and-mortar retailers so successfully that, in 1999, he raised $175m from backers including Softbank, QVC and Comcast, later floating the company, worth $470m in 2006, on Nasdaq. “Heavyweight” clients included Adidas, Radio Shack and Toys R Us.
Power plays
In 2011, Rubin bought Fanatics, a Florida sports retailer, and merged it with GSI. Within months, he sold the whole caboodle to eBay for $2.4bn. The latter was only interested in the fulfilment side, enabling Rubin to buy back GSI’s consumer businesses, including Fanatics, at a fire-sale price. The stage for his new empire was set. Rubin expanded Fanatics into “a merch behemoth”, signing long-running agreements with the biggest leagues in US sport, including the NFL, baseball and basketball, and sportswear giants such as Nike, says Bloomberg.
Restless, predatory, with a constant eye for new opportunities, he gatecrashed the pandemic boom in the “hot new asset class” of sports collectables such as trading cards – muscling in on valuable contracts owned by competitors such as Eisner’s Topps (consequently forced to abandon its IPO) and the Italian sports memorabilia empire, Panini.
When the enraged Italians filed an antitrust suit, Rubin counter sued. His plan now is to build Fanatics, whose privateequity investors include Blackstone, Silver Lake and Fidelity, into a threestranded empire, straddling merchandise, collectables and sports betting. “Nothing but power plays. Chess moves,” says the rapper Quavo. “He straight like a game of chess, man. He do ’em right.”
“If I grew up how he grew up, I would have been the biggest drug dealer on the planet”