Meet Your WMG Buyer

KNOW YOUR WMG BIDDER I: With all second-round WMG bids due in yesterday, another potential buyer is a private equity offer by Macandrews and Forbes led by Ronald Perelman, who made his fortune buying distressed corporations and re-selling them later for enormous profits, and is probably best known for being married to the late Claudia Cohen and Ellen Barkin, though not, of course, at the same time. Among his acquisitions was the cosmetics firm Revlon, which he financed with junk bonds from Michael Milken’s Drexel Burnham Lambert. He also bought (and later sold) the Marvel Entertainment Group from New World Entertainment for $82.5 million. Perelman later added the baseball card companies Fleer and SkyBox International, Italian sticker manufacturer Panini Group and comic book publishers Welsh Publishing and Malibu Comics to Marvel's holdings for a combined total of $700 million. Once the richest man in America, he is now the 25th richest American, and 64th richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $12 billion. (4/7p)