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Boston Globe
6 days ago
- Business
- Boston Globe
Leonard Tow, cable TV magnate and a major philanthropist, dies at 97
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Besides the Lincoln Center theater, Tow, once a member of the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, funded a performing arts center at Brooklyn College (where he and his wife, both raised poor, had met); journalism programs at Columbia University and City University of New York; the Tow Center for Developmental Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan; and the Tow Youth Justice Institute in West Haven, Connecticut. Advertisement After an early career teaching economics at Hunter and Brooklyn colleges, Tow concluded that universities had 'too many people fighting over anthills,' and he jumped to the private sector. In 1964, he landed a job at the TelePrompTer Corp., a pioneer in the cable industry, where he was credited with expanding subscribers to 1 million from 50,000. Advertisement In 1973, he and his wife, who had been an elementary-school teacher, started their own cable business, Century Communications Corp. It was launched from their dining room table on a line of credit. The timing was perfect: The federal government had just deregulated the industry, and homes with cable subscriptions began to grow exponentially. New-Canaan-based Century became one of the country's largest cable providers, with some 2,300 employees and 1.6 million subscribers. In 1999, Tow, the chief executive, sold the company for $5.2 billion, in a mostly stock deal, to Adelphia Communications. He became Adelphia's largest shareholder after the founders, the Rigas family of Pennsylvania. Three years later, Adelphia filed for bankruptcy amid a corruption scandal that eventually sent John Rigas, the founder, and his son Timothy, the company's former chief financial officer, to prison. Tow's shares had declined by 70 percent. He had also jumped into the telephone business, buying a stake in 1989 in Citizens Utilities Co. of Stamford, Connecticut, a network of small phone companies that is now known as Frontier Communications. The New York Times called Tow, who as Citizens' chief executive grew the company, 'an aggressive acquisitor and deal maker.' But when it was disclosed that he was paid $21.6 million in 1992, more than any other utility executive in the country, shareholders, including the California Public Employees' Retirement Fund, sued. The lawsuits were eventually settled. Tow retired from business in 2004 to focus on philanthropy through the Tow Foundation. Advertisement In 2012, he and his wife signed the Giving Pledge led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to have the world's richest people promise to contribute at least 50 percent of their wealth to nonprofits. The Tows committed to give away nearly 100 percent of their assets. The Tow Foundation reported $321 million in assets in 2024, a sum that will grow considerably with the addition of bequests from Tow following his death, according to his family. Leonard Tow was born on May 30, 1928, in Brooklyn to Louis and Estelle (Weiss) Tow, Jewish immigrants from Russia whose family name derived from the Hebrew word for 'good.' Leonard and a brother grew up in a one-room apartment behind Tow's Discount House, a store his parents owned in the Bensonhurst neighborhood. He received a bachelor's degree in 1950 from Brooklyn College, where he met Claire Schneider, a member of the class of 1952. He belonged to the Longfellows Club, a group for male students over 6 feet in height, and she was in the Hi Hites, an equivalent group for tall female students. They married in 1952. Tow earned a master's in 1952 and a doctorate in economic geography in 1960, both from Columbia University. Survivors include his sons Andrew and Frank; a daughter, Emily; eight grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter. The Tows funded the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia and the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at City University of New York. The two journalism ventures aim to find ways for journalism to survive in the internet age and combat misinformation. 'I'm really worried about the print-journalism side of the business,' Tow told the Times in announcing the first grants of $8 million to the journalism programs in 2008. 'There's so much contraction of employment going on; every day you pick up the paper and this chain or that chain has laid off another 10 percent, and we're watching advertising support slowly disintegrate.' Advertisement In 2016, the Tow Foundation donated $25 million to Barnard College to help build a new teaching center. Tow received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2019. Criminal justice is also a focus of the foundation: It donated six-figure sums in 2023 to the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, PEN America's Prison and Justice Writing program, and the Yale Prison Education Initiative. And as part of an overhaul of Damrosch Park on the Lincoln Center campus, which was announced in May, the Tow Foundation pledged $20 million toward an outdoor community stage. This year, the foundation underwrote the salaries of 14 resident playwrights at nonprofit theaters who received their first New York productions. 'My father was at the theater three weeks ago,' Emily Tow said. 'He was interested in everything, it didn't matter how avant-garde. Some weeks he'd see three or four plays, from a basement in the Lower East Side to the fanciest Broadway production.' This article originally appeared in
Forbes
11-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The GOP Wants To Stop A Major Accounting Regulatory Body
Audit Envelope Are You Prepared on white paper an yellow envelope holding by human hands The Trump administration and congressional Republicans seem intent on peeling back some basic regulatory framework introduced by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002. They argue that the burden on companies is too heavy and, by removing the regulations, corporations would be free to invest, expand, and grow the economy. The arguments are understandable but ultimately unconvincing. For large corporations, the amounts they devote to compliance are proportionately trifling, and some of the biggest coherent additions to the regulatory framework happened at the start of what would become share increases in corporate profits. You may have never heard of the PCAOB, or Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. It was part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a whiplash response to the dot-com implosion and the massive financial fraud by such companies as Enron, Adelphia, and WorldCom, that part of it. To give a sense of how bad it was, in 2003, I wrote about the challenges replacement CEOs at such companies faced in trying to stabilize the businesses. One example was Bill Schleyer, an experienced executive and venture capitalist with an MBA from Harvard, who became chair and CEO of Adelphia Communications. He told me about his experience listening to the head of accounting talk about the previous management bookkeeping. 'I thought he was joking,' Schleyer remembered. 'I didn't think that anyone could be that Machiavellian to dream up those accounting practices.' Sarbanes-Oxley was unusual among many regulatory packages as it focused on financial reporting accuracy and executive accountability, according to That includes chief executive officers and chief financial officers signing off on the accuracy of financial statements. (There were many complaints from corporations at the time about the sign-off requirements. It's impossible to read people's minds, but perhaps an aversion of top executives to personal guarantees of produced information might have had something to do with it.) It's not the first time people have tried to eliminate the PCAOB. The first Trump administration had undertaken a 'virtual gutting,' as Forbes contributor Robert G. Eccles wrote in 2021. AccountingInsights notes that the PCAOB has had a positive impact by creating a 'shift towards a more rigorous and structured approach to auditing.' The body has emphasized corporate internal controls and risk factors, 'requiring auditors to adopt a more analytical and skeptical mindset.' The quality of audits is of particular import for the public markets. They help ensure better information and transparency that investors, large and small, use to better their portfolios and strategies. The PCAOB announced in March 2025 the results of inspections in 2024. The aggregate deficiency rate of corporations audited by the six U.S. Global Network Firms dropped eight percentage points, from 34% in 2023 to 26% in 2024. The aggregate rate for the firms audited by the four largest firms dropped six percentage points from 26% in 2023 to 20%. Those Big Four firms audit about 80% of the market capitalization of public companies listed on exchanges. Companies may complain about regulation, but contrary to their criticisms, regulations seem to help improve profits. Below is a graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It shows pre-tax profitability of U.S. corporations at different times. U.S. corporate pre-tax profits The gray bars are periods of recession. Notice how post-recession growth more or less continued a longer pre-recession trend until after the 2001 recession. As the country exited that period, growth in corporate profits shot upward at a quick pace. That started around when the U.S. passed Sarbanes-Oxley into law. Another example is how the country came out of the Global Financial Crisis. The Dodd-Frank Act, which was the regulatory reaction to the excesses and risky behavior that had just passed, was signed into law in 2010. At the same time, there was another sharp boost in corporate profits. There is no way to show that Sarbanes-Oxley or Dodd-Frank was the cause of the profit growth spike after each, but it is clear that, at least, neither seemed to inhibit business. Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the famous physician and humanitarian, was also a musical scholar and organist. In his two-volume biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, he discussed the difference between what he called objective art and subjective art. In music, he said that musicians who redefined forms and rules were subjective artists. By that, he meant they changed things around them to create. Bach, however, was, in Schweitzer's eyes, an objective artist. He followed strict rules that pushed him into himself where he worked around the restrictions to create things that had never been heard before. Perhaps financial regulation is similar. Corporate executives and boards want flexibility to do what they wish, but that doesn't focus innovation and strategy the way needed regulations did. Wiping away what has been successful is a mistake, no matter how many businesspeople want to eradicate constraints on themselves.
Forbes
10-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The GOP Wants To Stop Major A Major Accounting Regulatory Body
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans seem intent on peeling back some basic regulatory framework introduced by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002. They argue that the burden on companies is too heavy and, by removing the regulations, corporations would be free to invest, expand, and grow the economy. The arguments are understandable but ultimately unconvincing. For large corporations, the amounts they devote to compliance are proportionately trifling, and some of the biggest coherent additions to the regulatory framework happened at the start of what would become share increases in corporate profits. You may have never heard of the PCAOB, or Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. It was part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a whiplash response to the dot-com implosion and the massive financial fraud by such companies as Enron, Adelphia, and WorldCom, that was a part. To give a sense of how bad it was, in 2003, I wrote about the challenges replacement CEOs at such companies faced in trying to stabilize the businesses. One example was Bill Schleyer, an experienced executive and venture capitalist with an MBA from Harvard, who became chair and CEO of Adelphia Communications. He told me about his experience listening to the head of accounting talk about the previous management bookkeeping. 'I thought he was joking,' Schleyer remembered. 'I didn't think that anyone could be that Machiavellian to dream up those accounting practices.' Sarbanes-Oxley was unusual among many regulatory packages as it focused on financial reporting accuracy and executive accountability, according to That includes chief executive officers and chief financial officers signing off on the accuracy of financial statements. (There were many complaints from corporations at the time about the sign-off requirements. It's impossible to read people's minds, but perhaps an aversion of top executives to personal guarantees of produced information might have had something to do with it.) It's not the first time people have tried to eliminate the PCAOB. The first Trump administration had undertaken a 'virtual gutting,' as Forbes contributor Robert G. Eccles wrote in 2021. AccountingInsights notes that the PCAOB has had a positive impact by creating a 'shift towards a more rigorous and structured approach to auditing.' The body has emphasized corporate internal controls and risk factors, 'requiring auditors to adopt a more analytical and skeptical mindset.' The quality of audits is of particular import for the public markets. They help ensure better information and transparency that investors, large and small, use to better their portfolios and strategies. The PCAOB announced in March 2025 the results of inspections in 2024. The aggregate deficiency rate of corporations audited by the six U.S. Global Network Firms dropped eight percentage points, from 34% in 2023 to 26% in 2024. The aggregate rate for the firms audited by the four largest firms dropped six percentage points from 26% in 2023 to 20%. Those Big Four firms audit about 80% of the market capitalization of public companies listed on exchanges. Companies may complain about regulation, but contrary to their criticisms, regulations seem to help improve profits. Below is a graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It shows pre-tax profitability of U.S. corporations at different times. U.S. corporate pre-tax profits Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis The gray bars are periods of recession. Notice how post-recession growth more or less continued a longer pre-recession trend until after the 2001 recession. As the country exited that period, growth in corporate profits hot upward at a quick pace. That started around when the U.S. passed Sarbanes-Oxley into law. Another example is how the country came out of the Global Financial Crisis. The Dodd-Frank Act, which was the regulatory reaction to the excesses and risky behavior that had just passed, was signed into law in 2010. At the same time, there was another sharp boost in corporate profits. There is no way to show that Sarbanes-Oxley or Dodd-Frank was the cause of the profit growth spike after each, but it is clear that, at least, neither seemed to inhibit business. Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the famous physician and humanitarian, was also a musical scholar and organist. In his two-volume biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, he discussed the difference between what he called object art and subjective art. In music, he said that musicians who redefined forms and rules were subjective artists. By that, he meant they changed things around them to create. Bach, however, was, in Schweitzer's eyes, an objective artist. He followed strict rules that pushed him into himself where he worked around the restrictions to create things that had never been heard before. Perhaps financial regulation is similar. Corporate executives and boards want flexibility to do what they wish, but that doesn't focus innovation and strategy the way needed regulations did. Wiping away what has been successful is a mistake, no matter how many businesspeople want to eradicate constraints on themselves.
