Chambers owns about 16 percent of Cox Enterprises, a media and automotive services conglomerate. The Atlanta-based business is closely held and controls the third-biggest cable operator in the U.S., which serves about 6 million homes and businesses. The group reported combined revenue of $21 billion in 2018.
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Chambers owns 16 percent of Cox Enterprises, a closely held media conglomerate. He received the stake in December 2013 after his mother, Anne Cox Chambers, dissolved a trust that held 49.4 percent of Cox. Ownership is based on court documents and Cox's disclosure to Bloomberg that internal transactions resulted in equal stakes among the two owner families.
Cox Enterprises had revenue of $21 billion in 2018 with debt of $12.2 billion, according to the company and Bloomberg data. It has three units: Cox Communications, Cox Media Group and Cox Automotive.
Cable company Cox Communications is the third-largest cable operator in the U.S., according to the company's website. It had revenue of $11.9 billion in 2018, according to information provided by the company. It's valued using the average enterprise value-to-Ebitda multiple of three publicly traded peer companies: Comcast, Verizon, and Rogers Communications.
Cox Media Group operates six daily newspapers, 14 broadcast television stations and more than 60 radio stations, among other assets, and had revenue of $1.6 billion in 2018, according to its website and information provided by the company. Its valuation is based on the average enterprise value-to-Ebitda multiple of five publicly traded peers: EW Scripps, New York Times, Gannett, McClatchy and Sinclair Broadcast and is discounted by 15 percent.
Cox Automotive is a provider of car sales software technology. It had revenue of $7.5 billion in 2018, according to information provided by the company. Cox Automotive is valued on the average enterprise value-to-Ebitda multiples of KAR Auction Services, CarMax and Penske Automotive.
Chambers' 16.3 percent share of corporate-level debt is included as a liability.
Joanna Coker, a Cox group spokesperson, provided revenue figures in April 2019 without providing further comment on the net worth calculation.
James Cox Chambers is the grandson of James M. Cox, who built a U.S. newspaper chain after buying the Dayton Evening News in 1898. He became a politician, serving first as an Ohio state representative, then as governor. He ran for the U.S. presidency as a Democrat in 1920, losing to fellow newspaper publisher Warren G. Harding. He gave each of his daughters, Anne and Barbara, 49.4 percent of the company. Chambers, born in 1957, is one of Anne's three children. She distributed her stake in the company in 2013.
Today, Cox Enterprises is run by Chambers' cousin, James Kennedy. The company operates dozens of periodicals, television stations and radio stations, as well as one of the largest cable systems in the U.S. and multiple auto sales online marketing and software divisions.
Chambers is an organic farmer in Columbia County, New York, and is an actor, dancer and choreographer, according to his biography with Communities In Schools, a non-profit of which he is a director. He graduated from Bard College in 1981 and is on the board of directors of that Hudson Valley, New York, school.
He has two adult sons, James and Ulysses, and three grandchildren, according to documents filed with a Georgia court in 2013 as part of his mother's petition to distribute her shares in the company.