Media giant Gustavo Cisneros dies at 78. ‘He had this ability to see the future’

Gustavo Cisneros, the billionaire businessman who grew the family business Grupo Cisneros that once owned Univision into one of the biggest media conglomerates in the world, died at 78 on Friday, his family said.

Cisneros, who was considered by many a pivotal figure in Venezuela’s global market, was in New York, where he had a home. He died after a brief struggle with pneumonia, his daughter Adriana Cisneros, the Cisneros Group’s chief executive officer since 2013, told the Miami Herald.

Her father, Gustavo Cisneros Rendiles, the Caracas-born fourth son of Cisneros founder Diego Cisneros, ended his career as chairman of the Cisneros board of directors.

“What always amazed me until the very end was how ahead of his time he always was,” said Adriana, the third-generation leader of the Cisneros Spanish-language group. “There would be so many ideas that he would mention to us and we would say, ‘What are you talking about?’ And then we would see, years later, he was absolutely right because he sort of had this ability to see the future in a way that most people can’t.”

Grupo Cisneros was founded in Venezuela by Cuban transportation industry businessman Diego Cisneros in 1929 and ran, among other businesses, the Pepsi bottling operation for five decades until 1996 when Coca-Cola signed a bottling deal with the Cisneros company.

Gustavo Cisneros, born in Caracas on June 1, 1945, assumed leadership of the family firm in Caracas in 1970 after graduating from Babson College in Massachusetts with a degree in business administration. That same year he married Patricia Phelps de Cisneros at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the couple had two daughters and a son.

Within hours of his death, members of Cisneros’ family, including his wife of 53 years, planned to meet Saturday afternoon inside St. Patrick’s to share prayers for their patriarch. “It’s sort of full circle for them,” Adriana said of her parents.

End of an era

“I think it’s an end of an era — the end of an era of that kind of Venezuelan entrepreneur who left Venezuela and obviously are not coming back,” said developer Armando Codina in a phone conversation Saturday with the Miami Herald from Lisbon.

“Think of the brain drain that occurred in Venezuela. Look at what Venezuela was when Gustavo was there and look at what it is now. Very similar to Cuba, by the way. I think of those entrepreneurs that really created tremendous businesses in Venezuela — businesses that have a lot of connective tissue to the USA. Gustavo had the ear of every president that I know of. He was the guy to talk to about Venezuela with Clinton and the Bushes. He was a guy that was connected worldwide,” said Codina, chairman and CEO of Codina Partners in Coral Gables.

Cisneros called major figures like Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state for U.S. presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford who died at 100 in November, philanthropist Leonard Lauder, an heir to the Estée Lauder Companies cosmetics fortune, and Michael Eisner, the former CEO of The Walt Disney Company, his personal friends.

“Gustavo was a true media star, a star on the international scene, and a helpful guiding light to me. Not only was Gustavo a friend, a wonderful husband and father; his family visionary, he was a force on at least three continents,” Eisner, a 2012 inductee in the Television Academy Hall of Fame, told the Miami Herald on Saturday in an email interview.

Television and satellite companies

“He was a major force. He’s owned TV stations throughout the hemisphere and has been a major force in Venezuela and in politics and business throughout the Americas. Really quite a guy,” added former Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald publisher Alberto Ibargüen, who led the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for 18 years as its president. He retires from the Knight Foundation in January.

The Cisneros conglomerate, based atop the Two MiamiCentral building in downtown Miami since 2016, owns or holds interests in more than 30 companies in 90 countries, including Venevisión, one of the largest TV networks in Venezuela.

“The word visionary gets thrown around a lot, but I really think that he was visionary and a very authentic and revolutionary thinker,” Adriana Cisneros said.

The Cisneros Media division produces film and TV Spanish-language programming globally.

Among its holdings: the Cisneros AST & Science SpaceMobile group is developing “the first and only space-based cellular broadband network to be accessible by standard smartphones,” the company said on its website. There’s also its real estate development division that built the luxury resort Tropicalia in the Dominican Republic, and an interactive digital division that acquires and develops digital advertising startups in Latin America.

“Gustavo re-imagined an important Venezuelan company into a major, international media conglomerate. But I think nothing pleased him more than to see his daughter succeed him and begin her watch by taking the company into outer space, becoming a satellite communications company,” Ibargüen said.

Cisneros grew his personal fortunes into the billions when, in 2007, he and his partners sold the Spanish-language TV network Univision for $12.3 billion to a consortium of investors. Cisneros had acquired Univision in 1992 for $500 million.

Ties to Miami

Cisneros’ primary residence was in La Romana in the Dominican Republic and he had homes in Madrid and New York, but his ties to South Florida traverse business and family. There’s the foothold of the company. Grupo Cisneros shifted its operational headquarters from Venezuela to Coral Gables in 2000, where it remained until moving into the MiamiCentral building’s top two floors about eight years ago. His grandchildren live in the Miami area and there’s his admiration of, and work with, the University of Miami.

“Gustavo Cisneros leaves an impressive legacy of expanding access to information and advancing technological growth to promote education, democratic principles, and individual liberty across the Americas,” said University of Miami President Julio Frenk. “We at UM knew him well and awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2017. We extend our deepest condolences to all of his loved ones, especially his wife Patricia, as well as his daughter and our former trustee, Adriana.”

Then there is Cisneros’ boosting of Miami as a global leader in business.

“I know I sound like a Miami booster. But I am, always,” Cisneros said in an interview with the Miami Herald on the eve of an eMerge Americas conference in 2017.

“It takes a level of sophistication to understand Miami. Miami has arrived. It’s the nexus of the Americas. It’s really the bridge between the United States and the rest of the world,” Cisneros said in the interview. “When you look at the balance sheets of every important U.S. company — PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Procter, the phone companies — most of their good profits are made in Latin America. There’s a growing realization that Latin America is the best market, and the best way for U.S. companies to operate in that market is from Miami. The connections are very good, and now you have quality of life, too — the symphony, the museums, extremely good schools. If you’re searching for a good city, Miami makes more sense than Los Angeles,” Cisneros had said.

READ MORE: Q&A with Gustavo Cisneros: ‘Miami has arrived’

Cisneros led, but he followed others some times, as he joked during his opening remarks during his commencement address at the UM’s School of Business Administration and College of Engineering in May 2017.

“I would like to start with a quote from a great Miami businessman and, in many ways, the poet of our time,” Cisneros opened his address. “’Ask for money ... and get advice. Ask for advice ... get money twice.’ Yes, I wanted to be the first graduation speaker to quote Pitbull,” he told 700 giggling UM graduates in citing the Miami-born rapper and entertainer.

Cisneros had lectured at UM over the years and his advice to students was earthy and accessible.

“When you leave here, armed with a world-class education in business or engineering, you will be asked to build things, create things, disrupt things. To leave the world better than you found it. No one will make it easy for you. As you all know, sometimes you think you see a clear path ahead and then you step in something a duck left behind,” Cisneros said.

“I may not be able to help you avoid the duck droppings, but I hope I can help you navigate the road ahead, by sharing some lessons from my own life.”

Family time

Those examples represent the work side, his daughter Adriana said. There was an exemplary family side, as well, she shared.

“It was kind of beautiful to see what an incredible grandfather he became,” she said.

Cisneros was busy running a global enterprise when his children were born and growing up in Venezuela, but “he was fully present” as a father and planned trips to remote places to disconnect and spend time with his wife and children when he could. He and wife Patricia were a true partnership, their daughter said. “An incredible pair.”

But if the day-to-day of the 1970s into the millennium was competing with business, that changed when the grandchildren were born. “When he had his grandchildren he saw that was this opportunity to be the best grandfather ever. And that’s what he was,” Adriana Cisneros said.

She shares an example. Cisnero’s daughter Carolina had triplets in New York and when they were in the hospital’s incubators, Grandpa Cisneros had realized “they needed a lot more stimulation.”

The media giant formulated a strategy.

“Dad would go every afternoon at 6:30 into the ICU or wherever they put the babies and incubators and would read them The New York Times every day for a month so that the babies could hear my dad’s voice. We always thought that was such a sweet story,” Adriana said.

Survivors, services

Cisneros’ survivors include his wife Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and their children Adriana, Carolina, and Guillermo, and 10 grandchildren.

Services, which may include a celebration of life in New York in the spring and church services in Miami, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, are in the planning stages, his daughter Adriana said.