La Times Owner Maneuvers Into Trump’s Orbit With Middle East Meeting

The billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times has gotten closer – literally – to President Donald Trump after steadily shifting his newspaper to the right.

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotech entrepreneur who acquired his city’s ailing broadsheet in 2018, was spotted in conversation Tuesday with Trump as the president held court with major U.S. business executives during a visit to Saudi Arabia.

Soon-Shiong is a prominent figure in a deep-blue U.S. city but he posted a video of his encounter with Trump on social media and said he was honored to meet the president along with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia.

The doctor said he and bin Salman share a “common goal to cure cancer” and he praised the “wonderful” conference in which the kingdom corralled a cross-section of business leaders for the first major overseas trip of the second Trump administration.

At the event, Soon-Shiong stood in a private audience with the president and bin Salman, speaking animatedly to two of the most powerful men in the world.

The White House said Trump is “delivering on his promise to Make America Great Again by catalyzing investment” with the Saudi trip in a statement that made no mention of Soon-Shiong, who drew scorn in Los Angeles for directing the editorial board to stop making presidential endorsements ahead of the November election.

The entrepreneur was one of about a dozen wealthy American executives who attended the lunch in Riyadh, including Open AI chief executive Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

Soon-Shiong’s appearance with Trump on the first day of the president’s week-long trip to the Middle East highlights the sharp turn by the owner of one of the country’s largest newspaperswhose family had served as major donors to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

Since then, Soon-Shiong has moved ever closer to Trump, unsuccessfully angling for a place in his first administration, appearing in conservative media, and accusing his own newspaper of editorial bias and becoming an “echo chamber” for progressive politics.

That transition came to a public head last fall when Soon-Shiong stunned the Los Angeles Times editorial board after overruling its decision to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. Several members of the board and newspaper staff have since departed.

“I said, ‘This is unacceptable.’ And as you can see, because it’s a left lean, they wrote terrible stories about President [Donald] Trump,” Soon-Shiong told Tucker Carlsonin a March interview. “So my statement to them was, ‘You may have an opinion, but all of us should have opinions based on facts.’”

“I took a lot of heat because the editorial board resigned,” he said. “I can just say they were not happy.”

Soon-Shiong’s appearance came as he tried to attract more conservative readers to his newspaper. He also announced plans for an AI-powered “bias meter” to gauge the fairness of opinion articles.

Former employees, including Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Molly O’Toole, called Soon-Shiong’s audience with Trump and Saudi leaders “shameful,” noting that the paper had previously published stories on “modern slavery” in the country and the assasination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which the CIA concluded had been directed by bin Salman.

The L.A. Times had no immediate comment on the visit.