John Textor

The performance earned Textor's studio the Titanium Award at the 59th annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

John Textor (born September 30, 1965) is an American businessman.

He is the former Executive Chairman of streaming television service FuboTV.

He has been recognized for his work in the fields of digital media and entertainment with the nickname "Hollywood's Virtual Reality Guru".

Textor is the majority owner and chairman of Eagle Football Holdings Limited, the leading shareholder of professional football clubs Botafogo, Crystal Palace, Olympique Lyonnais, Olympique Lyonnais Féminin, OL Reign, and RWD Molenbeek.

John Textor was born as a member of the extended du Pont family in 1965.

Textor claims to have grown up in a middle-class family in the Palm Beach area in Florida whilst spending his summers working for freight delivery companies.

Textor competed in freestyle skateboarding competitions around Florida as part of the Sims Skateboards team.

According to Craig Snyder's A Secret History of the Ollie, [ page 464 ] Textor was said to have been "one of the few who surpassed [multiple world champion] Rodney Mullen in freestyle competition during" the late 1970s". Textor left competitive skateboarding in the early 1980s to focus on other interests after sustaining a severe head injury in competition. Textor claimed this accident was the reason he turned toward his education and to technology interests at a young age.

Having acquired Sims Snowboards in 1996, Textor served as chairman of the board and the principal owner.

During his tenure, and utilizing the trademarks owned by his partner and snowboard pioneer Tom Sims, he created the World Snowboarding Championship at Whistler, British Columbia.

Textor's holding company, Wyndcrest Partners, funded the struggling company in 1996.

Wyndcrest guided ATG through an IPO in 1999 resulting in a liquid valuation of $10 billion.

According to The Palm Beach Post, Textor's Jester Digital created an internet-based 3-D multi-user virtual world, referred to as the "metaverse" in 1999.

Jester Digital's new technology was the first digital distribution platform to be endorsed by Metallica and was also supported by joint-ventures with leading digital rights management companies, such as IBM, and strategic relationships with leading music artists and action sports companies.

Jester Digital Corporation was among the earliest to create internet-based multi-user virtual reality and game-like environments which paved the way for the convergence of music and the internet, massive multi-player games, and the digital distribution of entertainment content.

Textor was a founding director of Virtual Bank in the year 2000, an Internet banking startup.

Virtual Bank was a multi-billion dollar diversified financial services company and included a private wealth business known as Lydian Trust Company.

In the early 2000s, Textor took control of BabyUniverse, a struggling online retailer.

He took the company public in 2005 selling 2 million shares of common stock, equivalent to approximately $16.5 million.

Using proceeds from the IPO, Textor purchased other online retailers and a marketing company to help build the brand.

In May 2006, Textor as one of the principals of Wyncrest Holdings, acquired Digital Domain.

Other principals included film director Michael Bay and former NFL player, Dan Marino.

According to Variety an inside source claimed that the buyers purchased the company for an estimated $35 million.

BabyUniverse saw an increase in revenues from $1 million to $40 million, resulting in the October 2007 sale of BabyUniverse into a reverse merger and change of control transaction with eToys.com, a well-known e-commerce company, controlled by D.E. Shaw.

Textor resigned as CEO at the time of the merger, with BabyUniverse stock trading at its all-time high of $12.00 per share, having nearly tripled from its low in February of that same year.

He later became Chairman of eToys.

Digital Domain won an Academy Award in 2009 for Achievement in Visual Effects for creating a believable digital human actor in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

This achievement, known as the ‘Holy Grail of "Visual Effects" by The Hollywood Reporter.

In 2011, Digital Domain Media Group entered into the film production business with a major investment into the feature film Ender's Game.

Textor is credited as Producer and Executive Producer on the film.

Textor's team of around 20 artists organized the 2012 appearance of Virtual Tupac Shakur at the Coachella Valley Music Festival.

Digital Domain went bankrupt in 2012 and a short time later, Textor was sued by the state of Florida for $80M.

The Supreme Court of New York and the Inspector General of the State of Florida cleared Textor of any financial wrongdoing, and The Athletic reported that he had received a settlement from the hedge fund that caused the collapse.

The settlement awarded Textor $8.5 million in financial damages and assigned all technology assets of Digital Domain's Florida studio.

SEC filings demonstrate that Textor used the award of these technology assets to launch the business that would ultimately become fuboTV.

Textor went on to launch Facebank in 2013.

In late 2013, Textor organized a group of former Digital Domain employees to create Pulse Evolution Corporation.

Pulse Evolution Corporation is a globally recognized pioneer in the development of hyper-realistic digital humans for live shows, virtual reality, augmented reality, holographic, 3D stereoscopic, web, mobile, interactive and artificial intelligence applications.

"a technology-driven intellectual property company engaged in the development and promotion of human likeness technologies" not to be confused with FACEBANK International Corp a Puerto Rico Intl commercial bank, and, in 2020, he bought sports streaming platform fuboTV, merging the two businesses before floating them on the New York Stock Exchange as FuboTV Inc.