Who the heck is Giants owner Arthur Kern?

Part 5 in the series

This is the fifth installment in our series on who exactly owns the Giants. So far, we have covered real estate mogul Scott Seligman, private equity guy Phil Halperin, real estate mogul Jed Walentas, and medical technology investor David Schnell. Let’s see the big board!

We’re so close to the end of this series!

Today, we’re going to look at Arthur H. Kern, mostly because that first column was getting pretty high and mighty, and needed to get taken down a peg.

Arthur Kern was born in the late 1940s — one source says August 16, 1946, while another says 1947. He graduated from Yale in 1968, where he lived in the Timothy Dwight residential college. After college, he worked as a media buyer for Grey Advertising (a competitor of Sterling Cooper in Mad Men, according to their Wikipedia page), then sold advertising for the TV station KDKA in Pittsburgh, then moved up with KDKA’s parent company, Westinghouse, managing TV stations in Baltimore and then San Francisco. One of those San Francisco stations was CBS affiliate KPIX, where he mentored Larry Baer, a connection which may be relevant to the San Francisco Giants.

Around that time, in 1980, Kern and a friend also bought a Long Island radio station — WALK 95.7. They built that station into a 20-station network called American Media, which they sold in the mid-’90s for $150 million to Chancellor Media, which eventually created AMFM Radio Chanels, which begat ClearChannel. So if you hate ClearChannel and everything it stands for, well, you partially have Arthur Kern to blame. I mean, not that much. But partially.

After making his millions in radio, Kern became a member of the board of directors of Yahoo in 1996 and stayed 16 years, until being forced out in 2012. In 2008, he got married in what was apparently a very hush-hush affair, so much so that he delayed his testimony in a deposition relating to Microsoft’s failed takeover of Yahoo in order to go on his honeymoon.

That marriage was to a woman named Allison Gray, and they have remained together for 13 years. They currently live in Belvedere, a 2,000 person community connected by a causeway to Tiburon, where, among other interests, they own the local newspaper The Ark, which serves Tiburon, Belvedere, and Strawberry.

Kern, along with our buddy Phil Halperin, bought into the Giants in 2002, paying $500,000 for a part of the team (That article notes that as of 2002, the Giants lost money every year, only five major league franchises made money, and most owners are in it for civic pride instead of money, to which I say: lol). I cannot find any sources where he explains why he because an MLB owner, so maybe he was a fan, or maybe he thought it was a good investment, or maybe it was just a lark. No idea!

Politically, Art Kern seems to be a very ardent Democrat. He donated to an awful lot of House Democratic candidates in 2018 and gave quite a bit to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign after the primaries last year. He also donated more than $100,000 to the Lincoln Project which, uh, thanks for trying, buddy!

Kern also is active with several nonprofits. He is the former vice chair of the Environmental Defense Fund, and is now an advisory trustee. He served two terms on the UCSF board of directors, and currently holds the title of Distinguished Director. And, after surviving prostate cancer in 1996, Kern became a leader in prostate cancer advocacy and a board member of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, and after his time on the board there, he is now part of the Emeritus Board.

So, to sum up Art Kern: he has done a bunch of stuff and I have no idea who he is underneath it all. He has given a lot of his time and money to prostate cancer, but only after personally contracting prostate cancer, so it’s not an entirely selfless cause. I’m not exactly sure what he’s doing now, other than serving as owner and publisher of a very small local newspaper, or what motivates him to be a Giants owner.

He is, basically, just a guy who has done some stuff. At least he doesn’t seem actively evil, is where I’ll leave it at. I wish I had more than that for you.