Ryan Kavanaugh

Ryan Kavanaugh (born December 4, 1974) is an American film financier.

He co-founded and served as CEO of Relativity Media, where he brokered deals between Wall Street investors and major film studios.

He credited his risk-assessment algorithm with Relativity Media's initial success.

After leaving UCLA in the late 1990s, Kavanaugh started a short-lived venture capital firm.

Kavanaugh's uncle connected the family with producer Jon Peters.

Kavanaugh and his father leveraged Peters's Hollywood connections to raise an estimated US$175 million in investment funds for the younger Kavanaugh's company.

Several investors, including Peters, sued Kavanaugh, alleging fraud, and the suits were settled out of court.

Michael Sitrick, an executive and Kavanaugh family friend, also sued, alleging that Kavanaugh violated terms of their agreement and placed most of Sitrick's $6 million investment into a type of Ponzi scheme at a company where Kavanaugh was a board member.

An arbitrator found that Kavanaugh was "clearly negligent", and Sitrick won a $7.7 million arbitration judgment against Kavanaugh.

He never received payment because Kavanaugh successfully argued that he was virtually penniless and his business on the verge of bankruptcy at the time of the judgment.

Kavanaugh attended UC Santa Barbara and UCLA but dropped out in 1996.

In the early 2000s, Wall Street investors were awash in cash and looking for investments outside of the stock market.

Relativity Media brokered "film slate" deals between these investors and studios including Universal Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, and Sony Pictures, earning fees of $500,000 to $1 million per film.

In addition to fees, Kavanaugh also insisted on being credited as an executive producer in each film.

This gave Relativity Media the aura of a film production company and Kavanaugh a reputation as a producer —without having creative involvement—in nearly 100 movies.

At Relativity Media, Kavanaugh created a Monte Carlo-based model that predicted the probability of a given film's commercial success.

Kavanaugh held Albert Einstein as his hero and would write long equations on whiteboards at investor meetings.

Although Kavanaugh frequently cited the model's accuracy rate to be 85%, a source close to Elliott Associates, one of the company's principal (and earliest) lenders, estimated it to be much lower.

Some investment banks and industry executives also cast doubt on the model's efficacy.

Kavanaugh advertised heavily in trade press, where he was praised for Relativity Media's high-value deals.

He garnered a reputation for successfully bridging Wall Street with the risk-prone film production industry.

Kavanaugh co-founded Relativity Media in 2003 or 2004 with entertainment executive Lynwood Spinks, whose relationship with Warner Bros. gave Kavanaugh the opportunity to broker a deal between a hedge fund and Warner Bros.' film studio.

By 2009, three quarters of films produced by Sony and Universal Pictures had used Kavanaugh's financing.

In 2010, Kavanaugh raised investor funds for Relativity Media to launch its own studio, producing movies vetted by Kavanaugh's algorithm.

Although Relativity Media executives privately disagreed with Kavanaugh's estimations, he publicized increasingly grandiose claims about Relativity Media's valuation, combining third-party investment deals and optimistic projections into reported revenue.

By the early 2010s, the algorithm ultimately proved unprofitable, with box-office bombs outnumbering commercial successes.

In May 2011, Elliott Associates attempted to rein in Kavanaugh's management.

Kavanaugh publicly claimed that he would buy out the hedge fund's stake to re-take charge of his company, but Elliott Associates denied that they would sell to him.

Their primary investment in Relativity Media funded a Universal Pictures deal, but Kavanaugh's studio chose to date several of its own films in competition with Universal's. Elliott Associates moved to take direct control of their film deal, eliminating Kavanaugh's executive producer fees, and significantly dropping their stake in Relativity Media.

In November 2011, when Relativity Media was short on funds, investor Ron Burkle arranged a series of loans to Kavanaugh's company in exchange for interest.

Industry speculation surfaced that Burkle would oust Kavanaugh from Relativity Media in favor of his friend Harvey Weinstein, but Burkle and Weinstein both disclaimed the scenario.

In 2012, Kavanaugh threatened The New Yorker with legal action for its reporting on him, including its report that he dropped out of university.

Kavanaugh said he was "an official graduate of UCLA and currently enrolled in a PhD program at USC".

The New Yorker stood by its reporting.

While subsequent sources reported that Kavanaugh finished a degree in 2012, The Wall Street Journal reported that there was no record of him taking classes at USC.

He stepped down as CEO after Relativity Media's second bankruptcy filing and later founded Proxima Media, which held a controlling stake in Triller from 2019 to 2022.

Kavanaugh was born to a Jewish family in Los Angeles, California, where he was raised in the Brentwood neighborhood and attended Brentwood High School.

His mother is a real estate broker and his father is a dentist turned businessman, born in Germany.

His father changed his surname to Kavanaugh before his son's birth.

Kavanaugh began purchasing stock shares when he was six years old.