fascinating biography in LATimes, Who is Patrick Soon-Shiong? An L.A. billionaire with big ideas — and mixed achievements, and not all positive, so it is obvious reporters not ascared yet of the new boss.   Overall theme: another zany idiosyncratic billionaire. Already owns the Chicago Tribune.

An immigrant but not from where you might presume! (Shame on us who think we know something from someone's name.)

Born and raised in South Africa-dad was a "herbalist"-- became a doctor there, but not easily

He interned at Johannesburg's General Hospital, which had never admitted a Chinese student before, Soon-Shiong has said. The chairman of the department stipulated that his application would not be accepted unless he finished better than fourth in his class, which he did. He worked in the cancer wing, where he remembers an Afrikaner patient who refused to be treated by a "Chinaman."

residency in Canada, met aspiring Canadian TV actress, married her, clear he accepted job at UCLA so they would be near "Hollywood," 1983.  She got roles on "Danger Bay" and "MacGyver."

Article explains the cancer thing quite well, why it is controversial.

And yes, signs of the times indeed:

Last July, he announced that his Culver City company NantWorks would take control of the operations of six California hospitals, including St. Vincent Medical Center near downtown Los Angeles and St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood.

and

In 2009, he began to put into motion a plan to streamline the nation's healthcare system by uniting doctors, hospitals and insurers through high-speed fiber optic networks, supercomputers and what he called a "wisdom database."

 What I don't get is what these big medical guys are thinking about going with consolidation of all medical services into the biggest entities they can pull together. Even if there's not single payer ever, real long term democratic governments don't favor monopoly type organizations making lots of money, they will crack down and keep them from doing that. Same goes for Amazon too. In the past, like Boeing even Ross Perot. I guess it is a desire to be seen in the history books as having made an historic change, in being seen as seeing something no one else did, and getting rich off stock value in their lifetime. It's not about becoming a robber baron dynasty....