Michael Ovitz, every mention

34 scenes · ← back to Michael Ovitz

tap a year for its mentions
008215420222023202420252026episodesmentions
02420222023202420252026episodes it came up in
00326420222023202420252026episodesmentions per episode

every year anyone Ben Gilbert 20David Rosenthal 13

Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Michael Ovitz comes up

loading…

Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired Aug 10, 2026 · 8 mentions

  • ▶ 1:19:17 David Rosenthal His close friend and Hollywood super agent Michael Ovitz comes in as, um, Disney president to be Eisner's number two and help him operate the company in, uh, 1995.
  • ▶ 1:19:27 Ben Gilbert Michael, famed past acquired guest.
  • ▶ 1:19:36 Ben Gilbert I mean, Michael Ovitz built CAA into such a force in not only Hollywood, but kind of the whole creative community.
  • ▶ 1:20:12 David Rosenthal Ovitz was an agent.
  • ▶ 1:20:40 Ben Gilbert The job of being an agent is being liked, saying yes, wielding your power, making things happen quick, being involved in 15 projects at once, or in Michael Lovitz's case, 500 projects at once.
  • ▶ 1:21:02 David Rosenthal So Ovitz lasts just over a year at Disney and leaves in December, 1996 with a hundred and forty million dollar severance package.
  • ▶ 1:21:12 Ben Gilbert Cuz neither Ovitz nor Eisner thought there was any chance this was gonna fall apart, and so the Walt Disney Company was willing to put in a contract and say, if you don't make it
  • ▶ 1:22:45 Ben Gilbert Uh, sort of business model, operating model things under one roof, and bringing in Michael Ovitz, what was he supposed to run?

The NFL: How small-town teams became America's most valuable sports empire (Audio) · Acquired Jan 27, 2026 · 1 mention

Coca-Cola: The Complete History & Strategy (Audio) · Acquired Nov 24, 2025 · 10 mentions

TSMC · Acquired Jan 21, 2025 · 2 mentions

Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired Jul 22, 2024 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 12:08 David Rosenthal There's all these spy shots of Bill meeting with John Malone at TCI and Gerald Levin at Time Warner, and Bill starts spending time with Michael Ovitz talking about how Microsoft can get in on the content game too, either through the MSN…

Hermès (Audio) · Acquired Feb 20, 2024 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 1:37:18 Ben Gilbert Pei, famous from a number of things, including previous Acquired episode with Michael Ovitz, designed the CAA building in Los Angeles, designed the Louvre pyramid.

Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired Dec 19, 2022 · 2 mentions

Benchmark Part I · Acquired Sep 28, 2022 · 4 mentions

SONY (75 years of electronics history in 3 hours) · Acquired Mar 7, 2022 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 1:01:52 David Rosenthal They start talking to Sid Sheinberg about this, and Sid's like, you know, Lou and Sid, as we talked about with Michael Ovitz, they are smart cookies, uh, and they were behind aggregating all the power in Hollywood before Ovitz came along,…
  • ▶ 1:06:15 Ben Gilbert I didn't know this when we interviewed Michael through this relationship about developing the VHS format and then offering their content exclusively in VHS that MCA Universal had a preexisting relationship of collaboration with Matsushita.

Taylor Swift (Acquired’s Version) · Acquired Jan 24, 2022 · 3 mentions

  • ▶ 29:58 Ben Gilbert She's the Michael Ovitz of the teen country music industry in Nashville, right?
  • ▶ 2:04:13 Ben Gilbert So Universal Music Group is now a totally separate entity, but at one point was part of MCA Universal, which Michael Ovitz sold to Matsushita.
  • ▶ 2:17:00 unnamed speaker I think she's the Michael Ovitz too.
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, nearly 80 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.