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Hugh Hefner’s son wants to purchase Playboy (PLBY+7.14%) for $100 million in an effort to return the iconic brand to his family.
Cooper Hefner, 33, made the $100 million offer along with other investors on Monday to buy the Playboy brand back from the Playboy Group, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“It’s a great American company and a great American brand, outside of my personal connection to it,” Hefner told the Journal. He said it currently exists in a “state of potentially nonexistence.”
“You could have all the money in the world and it would be difficult to build the type of brand recognition that Playboy has,” said Hefner, who worked at the company until 2019.
Hefner wants to run the publication through his investment firm, Hefner Capital. Playboy Group also has subsidiaries that make sexual wellness products, lingerie, and grooming and beauty products. Hefner told the Journal that under his proposal, those parts of the company would continue to operate under a different name.
Playboy stock shot up 21.25% by noon Monday following news of the deal. It is currently trading at a mere $0.88 a share.
His father, the late Hugh Hefner, died in 2017. The magazine stopped regularly publishing in 2020 and Cooper and other family members sold their stakes.
The company went public in 1971 and had a market cap of $671 million in 1999, according to the Journal. But by 2011 it struggled with declining revenue and went private in a deal that valued it at $207 million. In 2021, it went public again via SPAC and quickly gained a market value of more than $2 billion that by Friday had plummeted to just $53 million.