Brad Greenspan
Brad Greenspan is an American entrepreneur best known for founding MySpace and eUniverse, significant early players in the social media landscape. Born in Los Angeles in 1976, he demonstrated entrepreneurial skills from a young age and established his first company, a merchant bank, while still in college at UCLA, where he graduated in 1997. MySpace, launched in 2003 under his leadership, quickly gained popularity, particularly among teenagers, for its user-friendly interface and emphasis on music. Greenspan’s decision to make the platform free to use contributed to its rise, allowing it to outpace competitors like Friendster.
However, Greenspan's tenure with MySpace ended amid an accounting scandal and regulatory investigations, leading to his resignation as CEO before the company was sold to News Corp for $580 million. Despite his departure, he retained a significant stake in the company and later contested its valuation in court. Following MySpace, Greenspan explored various ventures, including LiveUniverse and Broadwebasia, and maintained an active role in business and philanthropy. His estimated net worth is around $20 million, reflecting his ongoing influence in the tech and social media sectors.
Subject Terms
Brad Greenspan
Cofounder of Myspace
- Born: 1976
- Place of Birth: Los Angeles, California
Primary Company/Organization: MySpace
Introduction
Considered a “boy wonder” among Internet entrepreneurs, Brad Greenspan started both eUniverse and MySpace. MySpace especially became an exceptional success, but by the time of its $580 million sale to News Corp., Greenspan had left the business after an accounting scandal.
Early Life
Brad Greenspan was born in Los Angeles in 1976. When he was thirteen, he orchestrated his first big deal: collecting money and buying fireworks for his syndicate of friends. He managed to cajole his mother, Judith Guilfoyle, into signing for the package of fireworks; unfortunately, his mother's opposition to bottle-rocket battles in the backyard meant the deal would not be repeated. He attended the Menlo School, an independent college preparatory school in Atherton, California. After graduation, Greenspan enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), graduating in 1997 with a double major in political science and business.
In 1996, Greenspan founded his first company, a merchant bank called Palisades Capital, Inc., from his dormitory room. Within three years, he had raised more than $55 million for three publicly traded companies. Using his profits from Palisades, he began the work on what would become eUniverse, an Internet marketing company, in 1998. His intent was to create a public Internet company. Greenspan took the company public in 1999 and managed to survive the burst of the dot-com bubble.
Life's Work
In 2002, eUniverse acquired a marketing company called ResponseBase, and its two partners, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, joined Greenspan's staff. In time, after discussing the social network Friendster and Anderson's dissatisfaction with some aspects of it, they persuaded Greenspan to start a social network using eUniverse's servers. It launched ten days later, in August 2003, using Adobe's ColdFusion web development platform. Some of the ideas for the site, especially its focus on music, came from DeWolfe; he also came up with the name. DeWolfe had bought a domain name in 2002 that he had intended to use for an online data storage site like his former employer XDrive, but that plan was never realized, because he and Anderson had taken their start-up in a different direction. It struck him that the name would be suitable for a social network, at the same time saving some money by using a domain he already owned. Myspace was born.
Greenspan held contests to see who could sign up the most users to MySpace to build the user base quickly. The first users were his employees at eUniverse; the next wave came from eUniverse's large body of users and subscribers; from there, it spread by word of mouth as the partners' friends signed up. Greenspan hired Toan Nguyen as an architect for the site; he built a website that, as the user base increased, would scale better than the initial architecture would allow.
It was Greenspan's idea to offer MySpace free of charge. The others came to him with the notion that if MySpace improved on Friendster and charged money for its service, they might do very good business. Greenspan, however, believed the site needed to be free to use for it to gain in popularity and prosper. MySpace's rise to fame essentially ensured that subsequent social networks have needed to be free as well.
MySpace greatly eclipsed Friendster and popularized the notion of social media. Teenagers in particular were drawn to the ability to create and manipulate an identity online: MySpace (unlike Friendster or Facebook and Google+ later) did not require the use of a real name. Users were also attracted by the presence of many bands, both famous and unsigned, on the site, with free music for streaming and download. Revenue came through advertising and marketing. As MySpace became popular, large media corporations realized that it might be better to buy it than to create their own social networks to compete with it, and Rupert Murdoch's company News Corp. (owner of such businesses as HarperCollins and The Wall Street Journal) won a bidding war for Intermix Media (as eUniverse was now known), which included MySpace, for $580 million. News Corp. subsequently expanded MySpace to numerous other countries.
Greenspan had left the company by that point. At the end of 2003, accounting problems had halted the trade of eUniverse stock and prompted an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Greenspan then stepped down as chief executive officer. He was also named in a case brought by New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer, alleging that eUniverse had disseminated spyware. Greenspan retained much of his stake in the company, though, and owned 10 percent of it when the News Corp. sale (which he opposed) was made. Shortly after, he attempted a takeover bid of The Wall Street Journal, but his bid failed in 2007.
Greenspan continued to oppose News Corp. after the sale, publishing reports on a website that alleged that MySpace had been undervalued ($327 million of the $580 million sale represented the supposed value of MySpace). He stipulated that because MySpace should have been valued at $20 billion, Intermix shareholders, of whom he was one, had been defrauded. The lawsuit he filed was dismissed.
Greenspan later founded the social network company LiveUniverse, the Asian Internet company Broadwebasia, and the Borba line of health products. An attempt to buy Answers Corp., the owner of Answers.com, was unsuccessful. His business endeavors also include Big Fish Games (gaming), Fluid Music (music), and Draths (clean technology).
Personal Life
Greenspan is active in politics and charitable work. His net worth is approximately $20 million.
Bibliography
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Angwin, Julia. Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America. New York: Random House, 2009. Print.
Ascott, Emma. "MySpace Founder Shares His Insights On Social Media in the Future of Work, Plus Elon Musk's Twitter Acquisition Debacle." AllWork, 14 July 2022, allwork.space/2022/07/myspace-founder-shares-his-insights-on-social-media-in-the-future-of-work-plus-elon-musks-twitter-acquisition-debacle/. Accessed 5 Mar. 2024.
Flyness. From Myspace to My Place: The Men's Guide to Snagging Women Online. New York: Flyness, 2008. Print.
Kendall, Peggy. Rewired: Youth Ministry in an Age of IM and Myspace. Valley Forge: Judson, 2007. Print.
Winograd, Morley, and Michael D. Hais. Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2008. Print.