Alan Patricof

Patricof grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the son of a stockbroker; his parents had emigrated from Russia to the United States. He has recalled playing stickball in the streets and selling The Saturday Evening Post in the subway as a boy. He is of Jewish descent.

He graduated from Horace Mann School for Boys in 1952, and received the school's Distinguished Achievement Award in 2003. He completed a bachelor's degree in business administration at Ohio State University in three years, graduating in 1955, and earned an M.B.A. from Columbia University in 1957 while working full-time as an analyst at an investment firm.

Early career and New York magazine

Patricof found his first full-time job by calling at offices along Wall Street and asking whether there were any openings; he was hired by the investment counseling firm Naess & Thomas, where he stayed about two years. He left in 1958 to serve six months of active duty in the United States Army at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and on returning to New York joined Lambert & Company, where he worked on development capital. He then joined Central National Corporation, a private firm that managed the Gottesman family's pulp and paper fortune, where he was assistant vice president and later vice president from 1960 to 1968.

Patricof found the investors who financed the launch of New York magazine, which Clay Felker and Milton Glaser founded in 1968, and later became chairman of the board of its parent, the New York Magazine Company. He also took part in the founding of the Datascope Corporation and LIN Broadcasting Corporation. In 1969 New York magazine was merged with Tarrytown House, a Westchester conference center, under a newly formed holding company called Aeneid Equities, of which Patricof was president; the offering was announced in May and completed that September, when 200,000 Class A shares were sold to the public at $10 each.

The company acquired The Village Voice in 1974 and launched New West in Los Angeles in 1976. In January 1977 Rupert Murdoch moved to take control of the company by buying the stake held by Carter Burden; Felker sued to block the purchase, and the parties settled on January 7, with Felker resigning as president and editor. Patricof, then chairman of the board, sided with Murdoch. After the magazine's staff stopped work in support of Felker, Patricof, Murdoch and several other directors produced the next issue themselves, pasting up proofs and working through the night at the typesetters to meet the printer's deadline.

In 1958 Patricof married Bette Hollander; they had one child, Mark F. Patricof, born in 1964, who married Martha Shelburne Jones, a daughter of Bishop Edward Witker Jones of the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis. The marriage ended in divorce.

In 1970 he married Susan Hatkoff, a sister of Craig Hatkoff. They had two sons, Jon Patricof, born in 1973, and Jamie Patricof, born in 1976. Susan Patricof, who led the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem for more than forty years as its president and board chair, died on January 18, 2021; the Susan Patricof Head Start Center in East Harlem, opened in 2005, is named for her. On December 10, 2023, Patricof married the art dealer Barbara Guggenheim in New York City.

He keeps homes in Manhattan and East Hampton Village.

A former supporter of Ronald Reagan, Patricof became involved in Democratic politics in the early 1990s after meeting Bill Clinton through a mutual acquaintance in East Hampton. He chaired Entrepreneurs for Clinton during the 1992 campaign, a role he described at the time as recruiting business figures to endorse Clinton publicly rather than raising money; he said then that he was not a large contributor himself. He later served as finance chairman of Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign in New York and bundled contributions for her presidential campaigns.

During the 2004 Democratic primaries Patricof was among the leading fundraisers for Wesley Clark. He was also a contributor to Americans for Jobs, Health Care and a Progressive Future, a group that ran advertisements attacking Howard Dean in the weeks before the Iowa caucuses and which did not disclose its donors until after the vote. After John Kerry secured the nomination, Patricof hosted a fundraiser for him at his East Hampton home in August 2004.

In the 2008 primaries Patricof supported Clinton against Obama. He was one of twenty major Democratic donors who signed a March 2008 letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi objecting to her position that superdelegates should follow the pledged-delegate count, a letter widely read as a warning that the signatories' support for House Democrats was conditional. Pelosi did not alter her position.

Patricof returned to active fundraising in 2014, hosting a Democratic National Committee event with President Obama at his home at which twenty-six donors each contributed $32,500; he described the gathering to contributors as a way of strengthening the party ahead of a possible second Clinton candidacy. He publicly defended the Clintons against criticism of the speaking fees they received from financial firms. He and his wife bundled at least $100,000 for Clinton's 2016 campaign, and he was among roughly eighty top bundlers who met with her in Washington in June 2016.

Following the 2016 election Patricof became an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, saying he would do whatever he legally could to help elect a Democratic Congress. In 2018 he was among the financiers behind the House Victory Project, a joint fundraising committee supporting Democratic candidates in competitive House districts; he contributed $54,000, and the committee transferred approximately $2.2 million to campaigns in a single quarter of that cycle. In September 2019 he became one of the first major venture capital donors to endorse Biden for president, and he stayed with the campaign through its early primary losses the following February.

In June 2010 the FBI arrested ten people as part of the Illegals Program, a Russian intelligence operation. The criminal complaint said that one of the accused, who used the name Cynthia Murphy, had been assigned the account of an unnamed New York financier described as prominent in politics and a friend of a Cabinet official, and that her handlers in Moscow had directed her to develop the relationship beyond professional matters. Politico identified the financier as Patricof, and Patricof, who was not accused of any wrongdoing, told The Washington Post that he believed he was the financier in question. He said the only conversations he had with Ms. Murphy never touched on government or politics, but the more mundane matters of bills and taxes. "It's just staggering," he told The Post. "It's off the charts."