Leo Kirch, 1926–2011

The man who built and lost a media empire

Leo Kirch took out a modest loan from his wife to lay the foundation for Germany’s second-biggest media empire. He used her money in 1956 to drive to Italy, where he met a young director named Federico Fellini and bought the German rights to his debut film, La Strada. When the film became a hit in German cinemas, Kirch easily paid his wife back. But in the 1990s he was unable to pay the hundreds of millions of dollars he owed to creditors. Those debts led, in 2002, to postwar Germany’s biggest bankruptcy and the dissolution of Kirch’s media group.

Born in northern Bavaria as the son of a winemaker, Kirch studied and later taught economics at the University of Munich. But as soon as his Fellini gamble paid off, he quit academia and started snapping up movie rights. By the end of the century, said Bloomberg.com, he owned “the rights to 63,000 movies and television shows.”

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