“There’s nothing that can’t be bought for the right price,” boasts Chen Guangbiao, announcing his plans to “buy” The New York Times. But The New York Times is not actually for sale (yet?) and is worth $1 billion, while Chen Guangbiao is worth just $740 million.
Despite the groups of investors and share-holders Chen Guangbiao is claiming to be meeting soon, the purchase seems a bit unlikely. He will “consider buying lesser media outlets” like CNN and the Wall Street Journal though.
The New York Times’ website is currently blocked by the Great Internet Wall of China, but Chen Guangbiao had once afforded himself a half-page NYT print ad defending China’s claim to Taiwan and other Republics.
Chen Guangbiao is famous for his “eccentric spending habits.” He was one of the three celebrities imagined nude and immortalized in resin by a Xiamen University art student in a “controversial” art show that went viral last year in China, along with China’s Nobel Prize in Literature winner and an actress that did something naked-ish on the internet.
In fact, Chen Guangbiao is frequently “grabbing headlines with wacky stunts.” Last January, during a particularly smoggy week in notoriously, noxiously polluted Beijing, he handed out cans of “fresh air” — available in flavors such as “pristine Tibet” or “post-industrial Taiwan.” Ah, [hot] air and [bull]shit. Classic.
