Byron Allen likes to buy things.
After buying — and then selling — his local television stations, acquiring a sizable stake in BuzzFeed and installing himself as chief executive and leasing two late night time slots on the broadcast network CBS, the comedian-turned-media mogul has made his latest big purchase: A $91 million mansion in Aspen.
Property records obtained and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal showed the 13,000-square foot property in the Colorado ski town wasn’t officially listed for sale, but Allen managed to get his hands on it, anyway.
Allen paid nearly ten times more than what the property was acquired for in 2007, according to property records. Andrew Lessman, a salesman behind a popular line of wellness supplements, purchased the home for around $10.5 million in 2007.
After amassing a sizable amount of debt acquiring numerous local broadcast TV stations and the cable news outlet The Weather Channel, Allen continued to make unsolicited offers for broadcast operations over the past few years, bidding on properties like Paramount Global’s BET Media, the Walt Disney Company’s ABC and local TV station owner TEGNA.
Financial analysts expressed concerns over Allen’s ability to fund any of those acquisitions, and none of them ultimately came to fruition. In recent months, Allen has pursued the premium movie network Starz with the same ambitious goal of growing his media empire while simultaneous addressing his company’s large debt load by selling off assets. Last month, Gray Media acquired several of Allen’s local TV stations, and Allen continues to solicit offers for his other stations.
In a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Allen didn’t shy away from the fact that his businesses have faced financial pressures over the past few years, but he said the economic situation afflicting his media operation is effectively the same as what other, larger enterprises have faced.
To that effect, Allen touted his ability to scale his operations by going on a hiring spreed before the two-year coronavirus pandemic, only to issue pink slips to some of those workers in the post-pandemic era.
“That’s just rightsizing, I’m no different than any media company that’s going through a transition,” Allen said. “If we have declines in linear spending, then we rightsize it.”
Allen claimed the layoffs at his company were done in a “thoughtful, humane way,” though some highly-publicized job losses — notably, his plan to lay off local TV meteorologists and outsource regional weather forecasting to the Weather Channel in Atlanta — drew scrutiny from viewers and advertisers that was too hard to ignore.
Still, Allen said he wasn’t overly concerned by the layoffs, noting that there were “plenty of jobs out there” for the people who were let go from his company.
And the money saved not providing those workers with a steady paycheck and benefits? Well, Allen now has a mortgage in Aspen to cover.
