Strauss Zelnick, the Take-Two Chief Who Learned to Wait for GTA VI

Strauss Zelnick

Photo: Christopher Michel / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 26, 1957 Boston
Occupation	Chief Executive Officer

When Rockstar Games told Strauss Zelnick that Grand Theft Auto VI would slip a second time, his first answer, according to a Bloomberg account published this month, was “Please tell me you’re kidding.” Then he accepted it. Disbelief first, deference to the studio second: that is the Zelnick method in miniature, and the chairman and chief executive of Take-Two Interactive is about to learn what it is worth. A former Hollywood studio president and music-company chief, he has spent close to two decades arguing that a publisher’s job is to fund its creators, shield them and keep out of their way. In a few weeks the most expensive test of that argument goes on sale.

The argument has an unusual author. Zelnick is a lawyer and a dealmaker who came to video games through film and records, and he talks about Rockstar the way a studio boss of an older era talked about a director he could not afford to lose. He runs a company of labels, Rockstar and Zynga among them, and describes his own job as attracting, keeping and motivating the people who make the hits. The labels, he has said, exercise enormous creative freedom. Head office supplies money, marketing and distribution.

Harry Strauss Zelnick is a Boston native whose childhood broke early: his mother, Susan, died when he was ten, and he and his siblings were raised by their aunt Elsa and her husband, Allan Zelnick, in South Orange, New Jersey. He studied psychology and English at Wesleyan University, then enrolled at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School at the same time, collecting an MBA in 1982 and a law degree a year later. The double enrolment summarises what came next: he wanted to make the deal and write the contract.

Hollywood came first. He sold television abroad for Columbia Pictures, moved to Vestron, the home-video company whose film arm produced Dirty Dancing, and was running it by 1988. A year later, in his early thirties, he became president and chief operating officer of 20th Century Fox, overseeing worldwide production and distribution for four years. He left in 1993 for Crystal Dynamics, a young game developer, which makes his first stint in games more than thirty years old. Then came music: Zelnick spent the second half of the 1990s as president and chief executive of BMG Entertainment, Bertelsmann’s $4.7 billion music and entertainment business. In 2001 he founded ZelnickMedia, now ZMC, a New York private equity firm built to buy and run media companies.

Take-Two was a rescue job. In March 2007 a group of shareholders led by OppenheimerFunds, holding about 46 percent of the stock, threw out the board and the chief executive, Paul Eibeler, after years of scandal that ran from the hidden Hot Coffee sex scene in a Grand Theft Auto game to a stock-options backdating investigation. The new board made Zelnick chairman under a management contract with his firm. Within a year Electronic Arts launched a hostile bid of $26 a share; Take-Two’s board called it the wrong price at the wrong time, and EA let its offer lapse. Zelnick added the chief executive title in 2011, and the independence he defended then is the company that exists today.

The payoff is easy to count. Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2013, has sold more than 230 million units across three console generations, and Red Dead Redemption 2 has passed 87 million. NBA 2K arrives every autumn. In 2022 Zelnick closed the $12.7 billion purchase of Zynga, the maker of FarmVille and Words With Friends, calling it a pivotal step to increase exponentially the company’s mobile bookings. Mobile puzzle games now sit beside Rockstar among Take-Two’s largest earners.

The patience has costs that the label speeches leave out. Zynga closed just as mobile gaming slumped, and in April 2024, weeks after Zelnick said the company had “no current plans” for layoffs, Take-Two disclosed that it was cutting about 5 percent of its workforce and cancelling projects in development. Then there is the way he is paid. Take-Two does not pay Zelnick directly; it pays ZMC under a management agreement that runs to March 2029, and he may receive up to 60 percent of what ZMC is paid. The company says it has reworked those terms in response to shareholder feedback, which tells you the feedback was not applause. An executive who preaches deference to creators has kept a structure in which the company defers to his firm.

He has also been the adult brought in to calm other people’s crises. After Les Moonves left CBS in 2018 and the interim chairman Richard Parsons resigned for health reasons, the board turned to Zelnick, who soon told an audience at a Paley Center event in London that he “unequivocally, absolutely” did not want the chief executive job. He chaired CBS until it merged back into Viacom the following year. He led the Entertainment Software Association’s board from 2014 to 2017, and in 2021 ZMC bought a controlling stake in The Second City, the Chicago comedy theatre. In 2018 he published Becoming Ageless, a fitness book written around the shape he reached in his late fifties.

His public lines this year have been about machines. Generative AI, he said in February, has “zero part” in what Rockstar is building, and in March he called the idea that AI could produce a hit “a laughable notion”, adding: “These tools may help you create assets, but that won’t help you create hits.” Take-Two still hands its staff enterprise AI tools; Zelnick’s position is that the hit stays human. In June an update to WWE 2K26 made him a playable cruiserweight in a blue suit who walks to the ring to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”. Plenty of fans asked why the boss made the roster before wrestlers they had been requesting.

Zelnick married Wendy Belzberg, daughter of the Canadian financier Samuel Belzberg, in 1990. They have two sons and a daughter; their son Lucas Zelnick is a stand-up comedian, which makes the Second City purchase look a little like a family interest.

This week he is in Manhattan as a speaker at the Paley Center for Media’s International Council Summit, and his message to investors has not moved: Take-Two expects $8.0 billion to $8.2 billion in net bookings for the fiscal year, record levels driven by Grand Theft Auto VI, which arrives on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on November 19, thirteen years after its predecessor. Zelnick has bet his tenure on the idea that waiting for Rockstar is a strategy. Within days of the launch, the sales charts start answering.

Tags: business, ceos, business leaders, Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto VI, video games, Take-Two Interactive, Strauss Zelnick