Playboy Enterprises executives are considering putting the company on the market for a price around $500 million, a report revealed Thursday.
The company founded by Hugh Hefner in 1953 and made famous for its nude pinup photos of bombshell “Playboy bunnies” and "Playmates" may be on the selling block soon, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Hefner’s famous five-acre Playboy Mansion near Los Angeles itself went up for sale in January with an asking price of $200 million. The magazine recently stopped publishing any naked pictures of women.
After four decades, Playboy Mansion as we know it is closing its doors before going on the market for $200 million within the next month. There's just one catch: The buyer will have to give magazine publisher Hugh Hefner a life estate, which entitles the octogenarian to live in the mansion until his death. In this photo, Hugh Hefner and two Playboy Bunnies pose together at the Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills, California, circa 1995.
Representatives for Playboy reached by the Daily News Thursday said they would respond shortly to a request for comment. A spokeswoman forMoelis & Company, an investment bank reportedly advising the company on a potential auction, declined a request for comment.
Playboy, which has a footprint in 180 countries, publishes the magazine, sells merchandise with its famous bunny logo and creates videos and other content for TV networks, websites, apps and radio stations. The company went private in a 2011 deal that priced it at $207 million.
Playboy in 2015 grossed $38 million from media content and $55 million from licensing its brand to other firms, according to documents obtained by WSJ. Hefner, 89, owns one third of Playboy alongsideprivate equity firm Rizvi Traverse Management.
Its flagship magazine boasted a circulation of 5.6 million in 1975 but its print reach has dropped to 800,000, Alliance for Audited Media figures show. Executives at Larry Flynt's competitor company Hustler told the Daily News in January they're interested in buying the Playboy Mansion but not for $200 million.
“We are not going to offer half that much,” said Hustler Club operating company head Harry Mohney. “I don't know where he got that figure from. Certainly it would require an appraisal of the value.”
Marilyn Monroe graced Playboy's first cover, starting a tradition that has included Farrah Fawcett, Sharon Stone and Madonna. The magazine featured Pamela Anderson in its January/February final nude edition.
Hefner's 24-year-old son Cooper publicly lashed out in February at the decision to get rid of the naked pics.
Playboy magazine with Marilyn Monroe.
“I’ve taken a step back with Playboy just due to the fact that I do not agree with the decisions and direction that the company is actually going in,” Cooper Hefner said. "I didn’t agree with the decision because I felt as though millennials and Gen-Y didn’t view nudity as the issue.The issue was the way in which nudity and the girls were portrayed."
Yet the nudie mag has also commanded respect for its articles. Authors John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Kurt Vonnegut have contributed work, and the magazine has interviewed Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon and Steve Jobs.
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