Cox Enterprises

Cox Enterprises, Inc. is an American privately held global conglomerate headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, with approximately 55,000 employees and $21 billion in total revenue. Its major operating subsidiaries are Cox Media Group, Cox Communications, and Cox Automotive. The company's major national brands include AutoTrader, Kelley Blue Book, Manheim Auctions and more.

Through Cox Automotive, the company's international operations stretch across Asia, Australia, Europe and Latin America. Cox Enterprises is currently led by Alexander C. Taylor, a fourth-generation Cox family member and great-grandson of founder James M. Cox. James M. Cox's grandson, James C. Kennedy, and other members of the Cox family are on the company's board of directors.

On March 2, 2020, the sale of Cox Media Group's Ohio newspapers was finalized back to Cox Enterprises, and subsequently formed Cox First Media. This move was to ensure the publications would remain daily newspapers serving the southwest Ohio region.

The company was founded in Dayton, Ohio, by James M. Cox, who purchased the Dayton Daily News in 1898.] Cox became a member of Ohio's delegation to the United States House of Representatives and then the governor of Ohio. He was the Democratic Party candidate for president of the United States in the presidential election of 1920, running unsuccessfully on a ticket that included Franklin D. Roosevelt as the vice presidential candidate.

In 1935, at the urging of Governor Cox's son James M. Cox Jr., Cox entered the radio business starting with WHIO in Dayton. Governor Cox purchased The Atlanta Journal in 1939 as well as radio station WSB. On September 29, 1948, Cox's WSB-TV, later referred to as the "Eyes of the South", aired the first television broadcast in Atlanta. WHIO-TV in Ohio's Miami Valley soon followed, airing its first broadcasts on February 23, 1949.

In 1950, Governor Cox purchased The Atlanta Constitution, and in 1962 his son purchased three cable television systems in central Pennsylvania with a total of 11,800 subscribers. The two combined their broadcasting and cable businesses into the publicly traded Cox Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 1964, though the newspaper business remained independent as Cox Enterprises.

In 1966, Cox expanded its holdings to purchase television syndicator Walter Schwimmer, followed in 1967, by the purchase of television production company Bing Crosby Productions. Cox subsequently sold off its syndication unit to a new production company Telecom Productions in 1970. Cox would reenter the television syndication business, when Cox's subsidiary TeleRep, established Television Program Enterprises in the late 1970s, before merging with Rysher Entertainment in 1993.

As the cable business expanded, it was eventually consolidated and spun off into the new privately owned Cox Cable Communications (CCC) in 1968, which quickly became the second-largest cable TV company. Upon Jim Cox Jr.'s death in 1974, he left his two sisters, Anne Cox Chambers and Barbara Cox, in control of 95% of the privately owned company.