What is Isaac Larian's Net Worth?
Isaac Larian is an Iranian-born American billionaire businessman who has a net worth of $1.1 billion. Isaac Larian earned his fortune as the founder of MGA Entertainment, the world's largest privately owned manufacturer of children's toys and entertainment. The company's products include such popular doll lines as Bratz, Rainbow High, and Lalaloopsy, as well as their various media franchises. Among his other endeavors, Larian made a failed attempt to acquire the retailer Toys "R" Us before its bankruptcy in 2018.
Early Life and Education
Isaac Larian was born on March 28, 1954 in Kashan, Iran into a Jewish family. When he was four, he moved with his family to Tehran, where they lived in the Narmak neighborhood. There, Larian worked in his father's small textile store beginning from the age of nine. When he was 17, he moved to Los Angeles, California in the United States looking for opportunities. Unable to speak English, with no place to live, and only $750, he found work as a dishwasher. Larian was eventually promoted to bus boy and then waiter. After working for a year, he enrolled at Los Angeles Southwest College. Larian then transferred to California State University, Los Angeles, from which he graduated with his Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering in 1978.
Career Beginnings
Although Larian had planned to return to Iran after college, he was unable to do so due to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Instead, he launched the mail-order company Surprise Gift Wagon, which sold decorative brass products coming from South Korea. The company was ultimately unsuccessful, prompting Larian to partner with his brother Fred on a company that imported consumer electronics.
MGA Entertainment
In 1996, a struggling inventor presented Larian and his brother with a design for a talking doll. The doll ended up becoming the Singing Bouncy Baby, which became Larian's first toy to hit it big with consumers. After that, he began focusing his career on the children's toy business, and in 1998 changed the name of his company to MGA Entertainment. Larian and MGA went on to launch their flagship doll line, Bratz, in 2001. Created by former Mattel employee Carter Bryant, the teenage fashion dolls are characterized by their big heads and eyes, plump lips, and various trendy styles of clothing. Bratz was a runaway success, outselling its main competitor Barbie. In 2005 alone, the doll line totaled $800 million in sales, nearly twice as much as Barbie. The success of the Bratz dolls resulted in a major media franchise, consisting of television shows, video games, music albums, and a live-action film.
In late 2006, MGA acquired Little Tikes, another manufacturer of children's toys. MGA continued introducing numerous new doll lines after that, including Moxie Girlz, Lalaloopsy, and L.O.L. Dolls! The Lalaloopsy brand consists of plastic rag dolls that come with their own personalities and pets. After peaking in popularity around 2013, the brand was revamped in 2017 with the Netflix animated series "We're Lalaloopsy." Another big success for MGA was L.O.L. Dolls!, which won a number of toy industry awards and spawned some movies and video games. MGA had further success with the launch of the Rainbow High doll line in 2020. It was soon complemented by a web series of animated shorts, and in 2022 it spawned the spinoff brand Shadow High.
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Other Ventures
Among his other ventures, Larian has been a prolific stock trader. Between 2005 and 2019, he traded hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of his stock in Mattel, making a net profit of $28 million. During that time, Larian also traded in shares of rival toy company Hasbro.
In early 2018, Larian started a GoFundMe campaign to acquire the retailer Toys "R" Us, which was about to declare bankruptcy. With a goal of $1 billion, he used $200 million of his own money to get things started. However, the campaign failed, and Toys "R" Us filed for bankruptcy and closed all of its remaining stores in the US.
Personal Life & Real Estate
With his wife and three children.
In the 1990s Isaac and his wife Angela custom-built an 11,000 square-foot mansion in the ultra-exclusive Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. In 2017 Isaac and Angela paid $24 million for a Frank Gehry-designed oceanfront home in Malibu. In September 2020, Isaac's daughter and her real estate developer husband paid $29 million for a nearby mansion. In March 2021 Isaac paid $18.25 million for the house across the street from his original 1990s-era mansion.
