David Geffen

David Lawrence Geffen (born February 21, 1943) is an American billionaire record executive, music manager, film producer, and philanthropist. Born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents, Geffen dropped out of the University of Texas at Austin after one semester and began his career in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency in 1964, eventually rising to agent and manager. He co-founded Asylum Records in 1971, which he sold to Warner Communications, and established Geffen Records in 1980, signing and promoting artists including Joni Mitchell, the Eagles, Aerosmith, Guns N' Roses, and Nirvana through its imprint DGC Records. In 1994, Geffen co-founded the DreamWorks SKG film studio with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, which produced successful films and was later sold. Geffen sold Geffen Records to MCA in 1990 for over $500 million in value and has derived ongoing wealth from media investments, art collection, and real estate, achieving a net worth of $9 billion as of October 2025. As a philanthropist, he has given substantial sums to medical, educational, and arts institutions, including $200 million to UCLA's medical school in 2002—the largest such donation at the time—and $150 million to Yale's School of Drama in 2021.

David Lawrence Geffen was born on February 21, 1943, in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents Abraham Geffen, a pattern maker, and Batya Volovskaya Geffen, who owned and operated a clothing store. Abraham had emigrated from Vilna, Russia (now Vilnius, Lithuania), as a three-year-old child around 1906 amid anti-Jewish pogroms, while Batya, born in 1909 in a small Ukrainian village, hailed from a family where her father was a prosperous Jewish landowner and her mother managed a pharmacy and cosmetology business. The couple raised their family in Brooklyn's working-class Russian-Jewish community after immigrating to the United States.