Business
Marshall Rose, Who Helped Revive Two New York Institutions, Dies at 88
Marshall Rose, a real estate developer who was instrumental in reviving the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and transforming the adjacent Bryant Park from a mecca for drug dealers into a verdant Midtown oasis, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his stepdaughter, Chloe Malle, said.
As chairman of the library’s board of trustees from 1990 to 1995, Mr. Rose, along with his predecessor, Andrew Heiskell, and Vartan Gregorian, the library’s longtime president, engineered the resurgence of the Beaux-Arts landmark on Fifth Avenue and the derelict greensward just to its west.
Mr. Rose returned as chairman in 1997 for another two years after Elizabeth F. Rohatyn resigned to join her husband, Felix G. Rohatyn, the newly appointed ambassador to France, in Paris.
Mr. Rose played pivotal roles in the creation of the Science, Industry and Business Library in the former B. Altman emporium on Madison Avenue (it closed in 2016, after two decades, and was folded into a more high-tech incarnation of the Mid-Manhattan Library) and in the decision to construct vital new stacks for books, instead of a disruptive parking garage, under Bryant Park.
During his tenure as chairman, the library effected the dazzling renovation of the Deborah, Jonathan F.P., Samuel Priest and Adam R. Rose Main Reading Room in the research library on Fifth Avenue. The project was financed with a gift in honor of their children from Frederick P. Rose, who oversaw the renovation, and his wife, Sandra Priest Rose, members of a venerable New York real estate family unrelated to Marshall Rose.
After presiding over the Arlen Realty and Development Corporation and its E.J. Korvette discount-chain subsidiary in the early 1970s, Mr. Rose in 1978 founded the Georgetown Company, which in 1999 developed the Easton Town Center mall in Columbus, Ohio, with Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire retailer.
Mr. Rose’s company built and managed shopping centers, apartments and commercial properties in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Washington; renovated Madison Square Garden when it was owned by Gulf and Western Industries in the early 1990s; and oversaw the development of the architect Frank Gehry’s beehive-like headquarters of Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActive Corporation in the West Chelsea section of Manhattan, completed in 2007.
As a philanthropist, Mr. Rose helped establish three charter high schools funded by the Robin Hood Foundation, one in the South Bronx and two in Brooklyn.
Many websites that published Mr. Rose’s obituary referred to him in their headlines as the husband of the actress Candice Bergen, whom he married in 2000. But he was better known in New York as a civic leader.
He could be demanding; he could also be relentlessly loyal to friends. His advice on real estate and finance was highly valued.
When Donald J. Trump offered to complete the stalled renovation of Wollman Rink in Central Park in 1986, the Trump Organization consulted Richard Ravitch’s HRH Construction on Mr. Rose’s recommendation. Mr. Rose also advised Central Synagogue on the lucrative sale of the air rights over its temple on Lexington Avenue to a nearby development site in 2017.
“He was a model of civic virtue and commitment,” Gordon J. Davis, a former parks commissioner and president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and a life trustee of the library, said in an interview. “Marshall was a central and indispensable figure in what happened with the New York Public Library from 1981 until today.” (His commitment endured even in death; the family encouraged contributions in his memory to the library.)
“Vartan Gregorian, Andrew Heiskell and Marshall Rose,” Mr. Davis added, “not only restored Bryant Park, they were the driving force that rescued the New York Public Library and made it into the extraordinary institution of learning and diversity for all New Yorkers that it is today.”
Daniel Biederman, the founding president of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, said that Mr. Rose’s “real estate know-how was critical.”
Marshall Rose was born on Jan. 2, 1937, in Brooklyn, to Jack Rose, an English-born furrier who also worked in real estate, and Jean (Klein) Rose.
Raised in the Brighton Beach section of the borough, he attended Lincoln High School in Brooklyn and then earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from City College.
After graduating from New York University School of Law, he briefly practiced law and for a short time worked on real estate matters for the investment bank Lazard Freres, before deciding that he wanted to develop property.
“I asked him if he ever attended a school reunion,” his friend Elihu Rose (Frederick Rose’s brother) recalled in the eulogy he delivered on Wednesday at Central Synagogue. “He said no, because he thought that most of his classmates would have been in jail. And from that social start, he ended up by being an intimate friend of Brooke Astor, the undisputed grande dame of New York’s social life.”
In 1965, Mr. Rose married Jill Kupin, who became president of the International Center of Photography in 1989. She died in 1996. In 2000, he married Ms. Bergen, best known as the star of the hit CBS-TV comedy “Murphy Brown” from 1988 to 1998 and 2018 to 2019. (In her 2015 memoir, “A Fine Romance,” Ms. Bergen said Mr. Rose was clueless about popular culture: “He’d never seen ‘Seinfeld,’ for example, and had barely heard of ‘Murphy Brown.’”)
In addition to Ms. Malle and Ms. Bergen, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, Wendi and Andrew Rose; and six grandchildren.
The Roses lived on Fifth Avenue and had a home on Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton.
At the library, Mr. Rose helped guide the renovation of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. He served briefly as the chairman of the Lincoln Center Constituent Development Corporation, but quit in 2001 after the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera and other institutions squabbled over a master plan for renovations.
In 2019, the library dedicated a new plaza and entrance on West 40th Street in Mr. Rose’s honor.
“He was an unstoppable force of nature when it came to protecting and building what the public needed from its library,” said Anthony Marx, who in 2011 succeeded Paul LeClerc as the library’s president.
Mr. Biederman recalled that Mr. Rose’s predecessor as board chairman, Mr. Heiskell, once acknowledged that Mr. Rose had not been a major donor to the library, but said that he had contributed significantly with his mind, which placed him ahead of some other supposed benefactors.
“About 1 percent of the people who give, give anonymously,” Mr. Rose told The New York Times in 1997. “It sometimes seems that all the people who don’t give claim to be in that 1 percent.”
Walt Disney Co.’s ABC has filed renewal applications with the Federal Communications Commission “under protest” after an order mandating a years-early review of the network’s eight television station licenses.
The criticism was part of the network’s applications for the FCC review, which were filed ahead of a deadline Thursday. In an objection to the early renewal, Disney’s New York station WABC called the FCC order “unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional” and said it was “legally indefensible.”
“The Commission had not demanded early renewal in over five decades,” the station wrote in its filing. “And it has never before demanded simultaneous license renewal applications from a group of stations commonly owned with a network as it has here. The order has no legitimate purpose.”
The licenses for the eight ABC-owned TV stations, including KABC in Los Angeles, were originally scheduled for renewal between 2028 and 2031.
The FCC order came shortly after ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about First Lady Melania Trump looking like an “expectant widow” days before a gunman tried to breach the White House Correspondents’ Assn. gala last month that President Trump attended.
Trump has frequently threatened to have TV station licenses pulled when he is unhappy with their coverage, but the order is the first time the government has acted on his wishes, sparking anger from free speech advocates. The FCC has said the order is part of an investigation into whether Disney’s diversity and inclusion policies violate federal law and the agency’s rules against “unlawful discrimination.”
In its response, WABC said the “only plausible reason” to issue the order was to “punish the station for speech the government does not like.”
“The ultimate injury here is not to the station or its parent company. It is to the public,” WABC wrote. “When a broadcaster must weigh regulatory retaliation before making editorial decisions, the public loses access to journalism that is free from government influence.”
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a statement Thursday that Disney filed its applications to renew its broadcast licenses only after the company was told its previous answers were “disingenuous, deficient and improper.”
“Contrary to Disney’s claim that the FCC called in their broadcast licenses for early renewal for no reason, the record shows something very different,” Carr said. “Broadcast licensees have a unique obligation to operate in the public interest. The FCC will follow the facts and law wherever they may lead.”
FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, the panel’s only Democrat who has backed Disney in its fight, cheered the Burbank media and entertainment company’s filing, saying in a post on X that she was “glad to see them expose the FCC’s actions as nothing more than naked political retribution and an unlawful assault on free speech and a free press.”
Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.
Andrew here. Warning: If you bet on prediction markets about things you could know about from your work, it may be insider trading. That’s the lesson from new charges against an employee of Google.
Also, Jamie Dimon is thinking about spending $20 billion on acquisitions; we go through some possible targets. And take our quiz about the U.F.C. fight scheduled to take place at the White House.
Gaming prediction markets
In the public’s view, prediction markets are a way to bet on the N.B.A. playoffs, the Texas Senate race or what Costco executives will say on their next earnings call.
They’re also often seen as a hive of insider trading, a view reinforced by charges filed on Wednesday against a Google employee who made more than $1 million on Polymarket. The case raises more questions about how these platforms are policed — and who should do the policing.
What happened: The Google employee, Michele Spagnuolo (who used the handle AlphaRaccoon), was accused of betting on what people were searching for on Google — wagers he was sure to win because he had access to internal search data.
“Spagnuolo correctly predicted virtually all of the outcomes on these positions,” the Commodity Futures Trading Commission wrote in its complaint.
A Google representative said in a statement that using confidential information for making these kinds of bets was “a serious breach of our policies.”
Spagnuolo isn’t the only person charged with insider trading on Polymarket. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan last month accused Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a U.S. Special Forces soldier, of betting on the capture of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, an operation he participated in.
Insider trading is an increasing problem for prediction markets. Polymarket has faced significant scrutiny because its unregulated offshore platform has long made it easy to bet anonymously. (Kalshi, which is regulated in the U.S., has also suffered from insider trading.)
Polymarket has started clamping down on that practice, according to The Information — though some longtime users have chafed at those efforts. “Polymarket will go down the drain if they make KYC mandatory,” one user wrote on the company’s Discord discussion forum, referring to “know your customer” practices.
What are policymakers doing? Critics have accused the C.F.T.C., the primary American regulator of prediction markets, of failing to adequately police the industry. (Mike Selig, the commission’s chairman, told ABC News that his agency actively patrolled for wrongdoing.)
Some lawmakers are seeking to crack down on insider trading, including Representative James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who leads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and several bipartisan groups of senators.
Why it matters: Prediction markets have become big businesses. (Kalshi was most recently valued at $22 billion.) But a growing perception that they’re rife with cheating could threaten their popularity.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to fund U.S. drone companies. Shares in Unusual Machines, a drone start-up in which Donald Trump Jr. is an investor and advisory board member, are soaring in premarket trading after The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, reported on the potential investments. (The Times hasn’t independently confirmed the report.) The deals, aimed at bolstering domestic production, are still in the negotiation stage — equity stakes are a possibility — as the Pentagon vets the companies, The Journal adds.
Investors brace for Thursday’s inflation data. The Personal Consumption Expenditures report for April, which will be closely watched by the Fed, is expected to show on Thursday that headline inflation hit a three-year high of 3.9 percent. The wartime energy spike is a big culprit, and that’s likely to tie the Fed’s hands on interest rates. Lisa Cook, a Fed governor whom President Trump has tried to fire, is the latest policymaker to say that there’s even a rate increase in the cards.
Jensen Huang reportedly agrees to join the board of a Chinese university. Huang, the Nvidia C.E.O., is expected to be the latest U.S. business leader to join the advisory board of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, The Financial Times reports. Tim Cook, Apple’s departing C.E.O., is the chairman, and Michael Dell and Elon Musk are members. (Nvidia is trying to jump-start business in China as the Washington-Beijing trade war continues.) Laura Loomer, a right-wing agitator, quickly seized on the Huang news, calling it “a massive scandal!!!!” on social media, and a national security risk.
What might Dimon buy?
Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, is sitting on a pile of cash and says he’s open to a deal. He even put a number on it: up to $20 billion.
While that’s not a big sum relative to the bank’s assets, it got us thinking: Where could JPMorgan, whose last major acquisition was First Republic during the 2023 regional-banking crisis, go fishing for a company to buy? Brian O’Keefe asked Mike Mayo, a banking analyst at Wells Fargo.
Here are three possibilities:
Wealth management. Driven by solid margins and lucrative high-net-worth customers, this area of finance has experienced an M.&A. boom in recent years. (The First Republic deal already bolstered JPMorgan’s wealth-advisory ranks.) Such a move would tick a lot of boxes, Mayo said, adding, “It could be a high-end private bank, it could be kind of a mass-affluent brokerage firm, it could be wealth advisory.”
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Mary Erdoes, who runs JPMorgan’s wealth management division, told analysts in February that her unit had reviewed 25 potential deals last year and passed on all of them.
Payments. JPMorgan has invested heavily in new payment platforms, including in JPM Coin, a digital token it has tested with Coinbase and Mastercard. The bank handles between $5 trillion and $10 trillion in transactions daily, Mayo said. “There could be more opportunities to enhance the efficiency, the effectiveness, the timeliness or the geographic reach in the payments area,” he added.
Digital banking. Dimon recently singled out Revolut, the British banking app that is plotting expansion into the U.S., as an emerging competitive threat. “To the extent that an acquisition could help JPMorgan become the next Revolut outside the United States, that would seem to be attractive,” Mayo noted.
There are some big asterisks to consider. Because of its size, JPMorgan would most likely be barred from buying another U.S. lender on antitrust grounds. For that reason, Mayo thinks that a deal, if there is one, would probably happen abroad.
Dimon himself is being coy. The bank may have amassed ample capital for acquisitions, but “it’s not burning a hole in our pocket at all,” Dimon said on Wednesday at an investor conference. “If it sits there for a while, no problem,” he added.
Dimon did not suggest any potential targets on Wednesday.
Here are some guesses:
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Aberdeen Group, Invesco or Julius Baer in wealth management?
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Revolut is too big, but how about Wise or Toast in payments?
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Or what about Monzo or Bunq, fintech banks that have grown rapidly in Europe?
Meta will charge for its chatbot
Meta will begin charging customers for access to its A.I.-powered chatbot, a big change for a company best known for its free products — and the latest sign that even deep-pocketed companies are wrestling with the enormous cost of artificial intelligence.
On Wednesday, we looked at how companies were reining in the costs of consuming A.I., including by switching to cheaper models. Meta’s move shows that the companies supplying A.I. models are also reckoning with ballooning costs, and seeking revenue to make up for those losses.
Meta is spending a fortune on A.I. Last month the company increased its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to as high as $145 billion, and Meta’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, said it would spend at least $600 billion on A.I. infrastructure in the next few years.
Some investors have looked skeptically on that plan. The company’s stock is down 2.3 percent this year.
Meta will use paid subscriptions to offset some of its A.I. investment. The basic tier of the chatbot, Meta One Plus, will be $7.99 per month. A premium version, Meta One Premium, will cost $19.99. From Bloomberg, which reported the subscription news earlier:
Meta has long argued that its A.I. investments are already paying off in the form of highly targeted and efficient advertising, which is improved thanks to A.I. models. But the company is also looking for other ways to recoup its A.I. spending, and consumer chatbot subscriptions have become popular with several other A.I. competitors, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and OpenAI. Both rivals offer similarly priced subscription tiers.
The company has sought to expand its subscription business, testing plans for WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. It has also tried to cut costs in other corners of its business. This month, Meta laid off 10 percent of its employee base, about 8,000 workers.
Investors, eager to see revenue gains from A.I., cheered Meta’s subscription-chatbot plan. The company’s stock price was up 3.7 percent at the market close on Wednesday.
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Elsewhere, shares in the software maker Snowflake are soaring in premarket trading on Thursday after it reported strong quarterly results that suggested that A.I. agents weren’t clobbering its core subscription business. Salesforce’s analyst call on Wednesday, however, renewed fears that this sector was still vulnerable to A.I. disruption.
Quiz: U.F.C. on the South Lawn
This question comes from a recent Times article. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.)
President Trump is getting ready to celebrate his 80th birthday — and America’s 250th — with an evening of mixed martial arts. Preparations are underway to host Ultimate Fighting Championship matches in an octagon on the White House’s South Lawn on June 14. Construction of the temporary arena, along with a 90-foot-tall arch known as “The Claw,” featuring LED lights and audio equipment, began this week.
U.F.C. plans to spend around $60 million on the event, said Mark Shapiro, the president and chief operating officer of TKO Group Holdings, U.F.C.’s parent company, on a recent earnings call. (He added that U.F.C. would lose about $30 million on the event but that it would be “an investment for the long term.”)
The expenses include about $700,000 to repair the lawn after the fight, Dana White, the U.F.C. president and chief executive, told Sports Business Journal.
How many people will the temporary arena hold for the U.F.C. event at the White House?
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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“SpaceX-Tesla Merger Is ‘Only a Matter of When,’ Early Investor Says” (Bloomberg)
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Shares in the European food-delivery company Delivery Hero are down sharply on Thursday after Uber, which is pursuing a takeover bid for the company, raised its stake to nearly 37 percent. (WSJ)
Politics, policy and regulation
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The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey subpoenaed FIFA over soaring World Cup ticket prices. (WSJ)
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Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said he would impose a 100 percent tax on payouts to state residents from the $1.8 billion fund tied to the Justice Department’s settlement with President Trump. (Politico)
Best of the rest
We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.
Waymo is rolling out a new driverless taxi to help the company expand into more cities and tackle tougher driving conditions, including snowy roads, the company announced Wednesday.
The new vehicle, dubbed the Ojai, will begin serving select customers in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix in the coming weeks. Rides will be free of charge as the company gathers feedback.
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The Ojai has sliding doors and offers riders more legroom, three screens and accessibility features such as Braille. The minivan-like taxi can carry four passengers and also has more cargo space than its current vehicles.
Waymo is launching around 100 Ojai vehicles and plans to ramp up production to supplement its fleet of Jaguar I-Pace taxis, which shuttle customers around in more than 10 cities.
The company plans to eventually have tens of thousands of driverless taxis made per year, starting with the Ojai, then scaling using retrofitted Hyundai IONIQ 5s.
The Ojai is manufactured for Waymo by Zeekr, a Chinese automobile company.
Though it appears bulkier than the I-Pace, the Ojai is only 1% larger, the company said.
Waymo’s new autonomous vehicle, called the Ojai. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The Ojai could pave the way for Waymo to expand more rapidly at a lower price, as it costs less to manufacture and outfit than the I-Pace. The company says the new robotaxis have better batteries and are easier to clean and maintain than their predecessors.
The new vehicle also uses self-driving technology more efficiently, the company said, relying on 13 cameras, five lidars and six radar sensors. The I-Pace taxis have 29 cameras.
Waymo’s sixth-generation “Waymo Driver” system will debut in the Ojai, designed to better handle snowy conditions and other driving situations.
Last week, Waymo suspended its service on U.S. freeways due to safety concerns, particularly regarding flooded roads and construction zones. The company recalled more than 3,000 vehicles in April after several vehicles drove into standing water. The sixth-generation driver aims to fix those bugs.
Waymo is a privately held company owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company. It is leading the race to put more driverless taxis on the road, pulling ahead of Amazon’s Zoox, Elon Musk’s Tesla and a handful of efforts from Uber.
Waymo taxis have completed more than 20 million fully autonomous trips in cities including Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami and Nashville.
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