Sean and Alexandra Parker Save The World

Tech-world billionaire Sean Parker and his wife, Alexandra, want to change the model for funding medical research. Their goal? Ending cancer as we know it.

For the record, the wedding of Sean and Alexandra Parker—the $4.5 million affair that was essentially an immersive-theater experience inside an ancient Big Sur forest—was not a theme wedding. Yes, there were custom-built ponds and stone walls, a gated cottage, and fur-covered chairs at every table. There was a nine-foot wedding cake and a petting zoo of baby rabbits. Lord of the Rings costume designer Ngila Dickson was hired to make custom outfits for all 364 guests. (There also wound up being a $2.5 million settlement paid to the California Coastal Commission after complaints were raised that the wedding had disturbed the land; the Parkers have maintained that no damage was done.)

But as the billionaire tech entrepreneur has said repeatedly and emphatically in the press, it was not a medieval thing. Not a Renaissance fair. There was no theme.

Three years have passed since the wedding, but it remains the signature event of Sean and Alexandra’s relationship, at least in the public imagination. And they’re still explaining themselves.

“It was our own sort of visual and aesthetic language,” Sean says.

“It was our world,” says Alexandra.

“It was the world we wished we live in,” says Sean. “And, by the way, the rabbits were not an important part of the wedding.”

“Well, I may have made a suggestion about the rabbits,” Alexandra says. “I was just thinking having baby animals around was so sweet and beautiful. Springtime. It was so great.”

“Not to make it too Lord of the Rings–y,” Sean says, “because that wasn’t the theme, but you know there’s Lothlórien, the tree-oriented kingdom in Middle-Earth. And there’s Galadriel, the elf ruler who could communicate telepathically with all the animals.”

“My dress might have been a bit Galadriel-inspired,” Alexandra admits. (Photos from the event confirm this; in her ivory-and-gold Elie Saab gown and cascading platinum hair she is like an ethereal woods sprite, a pint-size-but-all-powerful Lady of Light.)

“And so obviously we’re getting married,” Sean continues, “we have this special energy and it allows us to summon all the animals of the forest to our stead. And that’s what we did! We didn’t hire anyone, we just summoned them to our stead! . . . I’m joking. That’s a joke.”

You could make the argument that Sean Parker, a founding father of social media and former hacker who was investigated by the FBI at fifteen, is at least partially responsible for the state of the world as we now find it—that is to say the world of unconstrained posting and sharing, the world in which information, for better or worse, has exploded in quantity and hive minds are crowding out independent thought. At nineteen he helped create Napster, the audio file–sharing service that forever changed the way people buy and listen to music (partly by taking out the “buy” part, which eventually led the courts to shut it down). Then, in his early 20s, he became instrumental in setting Facebook on its path from college experiment to global domination. (He was the guy played by Justin Timberlake in the movie The Social Network, the one who lets Mark Zuckerberg know that a million dollars isn’t cool—a billion dollars is cool.) Later Parker invested in the Swedish music-streaming service Spotify, partnered it with Facebook, and brought all of us even closer together by allowing users to know what songs their friends are listening to. Barely 37, he has an estimated net worth of just under $2.5 billion.

Now he’s ready to save the world—or at least many of the millions of people in it who die of cancer every year. A little under a year ago, under the aegis of their philanthropy platform, the Parker Foundation, Sean and Alexandra launched the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI). A consortium of six major American cancer centers—UCLA, UC San Francisco, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, and MD Anderson in Houston—the project is stunningly ambitious. Starting with $250 million of their own money, the Parkers have united those centers and their top researchers and are hoping to fast-track progress on immunotherapy, an approach to cancer treatment that was once considered fringe—a last resort at best—but is now gaining mainstream traction.

The first time I meet Sean, he’s seated in a giant conference room surrounded by 60 or so scientists and doctors from the PICI institutions and other research centers. They’re listening to Carl June, M.D., a renowned immunologist from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, talk about things like TCR-engineered T-cells and CRISPR genome-editing technology. This is PICI’s biannual retreat, held at an exclusive resort in Virginia horse country (previous retreats were in Napa Valley and Kona, Hawaii). It’s an opportunity for the scientists to give progress reports to the boss, and the idiom is so technical, the details so granular, that you’d think anyone without multiple degrees in genetics would be merely nodding along. But Parker, a self-described “immunology hobbyist” whose interest in this branch of medicine stems from coping with lifelong anaphylactic allergies, says he understands just about all of it.

PICI, which launched with a celebrity-choked megafund-raiser at the Parkers’ home, actually has its roots in, of all places, Sting and Trudie Styler’s backyard in Tuscany. It was there, during an ideas retreat in 2009, that Sean met the Hollywood film producer Laura Ziskin, a breast cancer patient then in remission, who had cofounded her own fund-raising initiative, Stand Up to Cancer.

The two hit it off immediately. Parker was taken by Ziskin’s energy and commitment—“There wasn’t a shred of resignation in her,” he says, “and she really understood the science”—and Ziskin was open to his ideas about changing the nature of cancer research so that advancements weren’t made only in certain types of cancer but in the disease as a whole.

“I said that you need to bet not just on individual people,” Parker says. “You need to beat not just one disease at a time, meaning breast cancer versus pancreatic versus prostate—you need a technology platform that has the potential to transform many cancers. You need the skeleton key: one relatively small idea that has huge impact.”

When Ziskin’s cancer relapsed, Parker bankrolled an experimental immunotherapy treatment targeted just for her. “I was like ‘You need a laser cell sorter to pull out patient-specific T cells? OK, great! Where do I write the check?’ ” Parker admits that he got the cancer center that was treating Ziskin “into some trouble” because he actually just wrote the check without doing any paperwork. “I remember on the memo line I put ‘for laser cell sorter’ and sent it to the scientists and said, ‘Just buy it!’ ”

The basic premise of immunotherapy is that it uses a body’s immune system to recognize cancer cells and kill them—not just temporarily, as happens with many conventional therapies, but forever. Sadly, the treatment didn’t work for Ziskin, who died in 2011. But that same year the FDA approved a groundbreaking immunotherapy drug called ipilimumab, which had been first developed ten years earlier by James Allison, Ph.D., an MD Anderson immunologist. When administered to a woman with stage IV cancer in the hope that she could survive another month to see her son graduate from high school, miraculously the drug wiped out her cancer altogether.

The FDA approval kicked the door open for a whole new era of treatment and research. But along with the excitement came obstacles. As with any new therapy, there were side effects, sometimes serious and wholly unanticipated. Because immunotherapy tinkers with the body’s own immune-response system, some patients find their bodies effectively attacking themselves, leading to a cascade of problems from a sudden onset of diabetes to organ failure. But most experts take these effects as part of the cost of medical progress. Not to mention there’s the fact that controllable diabetes is a worthwhile trade-off for terminal cancer.

“We’re in a learning phase,” the oncologist and author Siddhartha Mukherjee tells me. “In that phase it’s important to be thoughtful and unbiased. There was never any doubt in the medical world that these therapies might have side effects that were potentially serious.”

Mukherjee, whose book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer won a Pulitzer Prize, emphasized that the learning curve is precisely the reason that projects like PICI are so necessary.

“The transformative potential of these therapies is becoming clear, but it’s not a done deal,” he said. “It is very clear that we’re in an important exploratory phase, which is exactly why this gift from Sean and Alexandra comes at such a crucial time.”

Sean likens PICI to a “giant sandbox” that immunology researchers can play in—an organizing principle not unlike social media. The scientists, for their part, seem delighted by the idea. Carl June, who admits he had some initial concerns about PICI’s staying power—“Sometimes these funding initiatives can be a ‘one and done’ kind of thing,” he says—has nothing but praise for the sophistication of the project and the Parkers’ level of engagement.

“Sean’s scientific knowledge is right at the state of the art,” June says. “That is quite unusual in a philanthropic donor. Bill Gates is very unusual in that way, too, in terms of what he’s done for malaria and health in the developing world. But he has not delved into the depths scientifically the way Sean has.”

Outside observers are no less impressed. Elon Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla founder who is a friend of the Parkers’ and a fellow big-idea tech billionaire, envisions a future where cancer is no longer even close to the terrifying proposition it has always been.

“Not that long from now, maybe ten years, it might become quite unusual to have cancer,” says Musk. “Or at least unusual to die from it. Thanks in part to what Sean and Alexandra are doing, we’re seeing radical changes in treatment. It could be a whole different world in a relatively short time.”

A toy SpaceX rocket sits on the kitchen counter in the Parkers’ home in Los Angeles, a gift from Musk. The house, built in 1949 by the architect A. Quincy Jones (not to be confused with the music producer: “That’s A. Quincy Jones, not the Quincy Jones,” says Parker), sits adjacent to the Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills and is considered by many to be the finest example of modernist architecture in the city. The Parkers bought it in 2014 from Ellen DeGeneres for $55 million, and immediately set upon a massive restoration project (it was a fixer).

Sprawling and idiosyncratic, the house is best known for its atrium, an enormous wall on which the original owners, art patrons Sidney and Frances Brody, displayed a Henri Matisse mural (since donated to LACMA). The Parkers are steadily building their own art collection, but Sean, who likes to give guests house tours lasting hours, has dedicated the atrium wall to a giant garden of succulent varieties, a kind of living, linear (not to mention drought-tolerant) ode to the forest. Last Halloween, Alexandra re-created the wall in costume form for Sean—a black T-shirt covered with artificial plants, along with a matching hat—and they went trick-or-treating with their four-year-old daughter, Winter, and two-year-old son, Zephyr.

“I guess it’s kind of weird to dress for Halloween as a garden wall,” she says. “But anyone who knows Sean and who’s been over here will get it right away.”

Alexandra is a tiny person whose bright colors (her hair, now a silver-toned bleached blonde, is often blue or purple) offset her husband’s mostly monochromatic palette. She loves big sweaters, which she has a way of retreating into when she talks, though somehow the effect is less that she’s being engulfed by them than that she’s protected against the elements and ready to do battle. On a recent afternoon, she’s curled up on a sofa in her living room talking about her somewhat amorphous but, to all concerned, totally essential role in the Parker Foundation. This includes not just staying closely involved with the cancer research but also developing new projects. She’s particularly interested in finding innovative models to combat the opioid epidemic and substance addiction generally, though she’s not ready to say much about that yet. Mostly, she sees herself translating Sean’s deep-dive conversations into ideas that make sense to everyone.

“Sean is very academic,” says Alexandra, “and something I feel I can bring to the table is taking what he says and putting it in words that make people understand all the great work that’s being done.”

Alexandra has a rich, soothing voice and speaks with a confidence that belies her age (she’s 27). Her day, she explains, is framed around driving Winter to and from preschool, with foundation work fitted in between. Asked if she and Sean have a specific parenting style, she pauses and then says only that their goal is to keep the kids empathetic and loving. The children travel with them just about everywhere, and their presence at the biannual retreats livens up what might otherwise be a dry and geeky atmosphere.

Alexandra was barely 21 when she met Sean, first at a party at his town house in New York (they were dating other people) and again, a year later, when they were both single and ran into each other with friends. “I knew a little bit about him but not much,” she says. “I didn’t really understand what his business was. I just knew he was somebody I recognized on a deep level. Like I already knew him: ‘Oh, hey, it’s you. I know you.’ ”

Around this time, the public was being introduced to a very different version of Sean, the cocky party boy portrayed both unctuously and a little nebbishly by Timberlake in The Social Network. In a bit of less-than-ideal timing, Alexandra’s parents saw the movie after they knew their daughter was dating Sean, but before they actually met him.

“We came out of the theater and said, ‘Well, that was a surprise!’ ” says her mother, Eriette Lenas. “But once we met Sean we saw he was not like that character at all.”

Alexandra and Sean both grew up in suburbia. And while Sean calls his northern Virginia town “one of the most boringly normal, the most whitewashed stereotypical suburban environments you can imagine,” Alexandra speaks fondly of her upbringing in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. Like Sean, she managed to attend high school part time through a work-study program and then skipped college altogether, in her case moving to New York to pursue music. Her father is a real estate developer who also owns a chain of Wendy’s fast-food restaurants.

“I love fast food!” she exclaims. “We’re foodies, my family. We’re 100 percent Greek and we love Greek food, but we love Wendy’s, too. Sean and I went to Wendy’s last night, in fact. We had to drive down to San Diego and we stopped and I had a Baconator and Sean had a Son of Baconator, which is the smaller version.”

Soon after they met, Sean invited Alexandra to join him in Iceland, where he was traveling for business. After some thought—“I was like, I just met this guy and he wants me to go to Iceland. Is that crazy?”—she agreed and they kept traveling, never spending a night apart. Sean proposed six months later, baking the engagement ring into an onion ring. “I had to cut out part of the onion, put the ring inside and stitch it back together,” says Sean. “It was like a surgical process.”

Alexandra often characterizes her husband and herself as “misfits,” noting that in high school they floated between different social groups. Though it’s hard to imagine now, Alexandra insists she was kind of a geek back then, or at least a loner who would rather eat lunch alone in the art room and paint. Her mother, too, remembers her daughter as almost relentlessly artistic, so much so that it was relatively easy to be convinced that forgoing college and moving straight to the city was more logical than reckless.

“She was just so committed to whatever she was doing,” Lenas recalls. “Whether it was music, writing, drawing, whatever it was. She didn’t need to take the path everyone else was on.”

Arianna Huffington, who sits on the board of the Parker Foundation, has become a family friend in recent years, bonding with Alexandra over their mutual Greek heritage and helping her develop her nascent projects around addiction and recovery. “Alexandra is an incredibly special person,” she says. “And in a particularly Greek sort of way. Because of her, there is a very traditional Greek feeling to the family. The children are allowed everywhere in the home. We’ll have a foundation meeting at the house and the children will walk in and everything will stop.”

As for Sean, “there’s no small talk with him,” Huffington says. “The first time I met him the conversation went on for four hours and I blew off my schedule for the rest of the afternoon. He goes incredibly deep. With both of them, there’s just this tremendous energy and willingness to let no stone go unturned in whatever they’re doing.”

Another close friend, rather amazingly, is Lars Ulrich, the drummer and cofounder of Metallica, who made an enemy of Sean back in the Napster years over licensing disagreements. They have since made up, and Sean and Alexandra regularly socialize with Ulrich and his wife, the model Jessica Miller.

“They’re always off on some adventure,” says Ulrich. “Their curiosity is so beyond what you see in most people.”

“And Alexandra is like this tiny little fairy,” says Miller. “It’s like there’s this magic dust surrounding her. Yet she speaks so forcefully and with such commitment. They’re unlike anyone I’ve ever met.”

The couples have been known to go to karaoke bars together. “The same energy Sean puts into immunotherapy he also throws into belting out some Journey song from 1979 at three in the morning, literally inches from your face,” Ulrich says.

It’s early evening and Sean is strolling around the property, still giving me his famous house tour, offering now a detailed tutorial on his landscape philosophy. The plant groupings seem to occupy their own little fiefdoms, with some manicured into geometric precision and others latticed with tangled vines and thickets of branches. The children have their own garden, a lush patch of flowers and soft-leaved plants with a table under a mushroom-shaped canopy. Dressed in a princess costume, Winter ambles along the path, constantly stopping to pick flowers, which she presents to her father. Alexandra carries Zephyr, who wears face paint to make him look like a lion.

Could the Parkers really change cancer?

Don’t bet against them. Late last year, Congress passed the 21st Century Cures Act, a bipartisan—if controversial—effort to speed up medical innovation by boosting research funding and loosening regulations that keep drugs off the market. Though some Democrats balked, saying it would line the pockets of pharmaceutical companies, the legislation is a potential boon for initiatives like PICI.

“The progress that we’re going to see over the next decade has the potential, if we don’t mess it up, to be astonishing,” Sean tells me.

“We want to get more people into clinical trials,” Alexandra adds. “Clinical trials shouldn’t be seen as the thing you do when you’re close to giving up. We should celebrate people who enroll in them. You’re joining an army and going to war when you join a clinical trial.”

I can’t help but remember watching Alexandra, a few weeks before, trying her hand at skeet shooting in a green-and-gold pasture during a break session at the PICI retreat in Virginia. Sean had skipped the trip, blaming work, so it was just the two of us on the way to the range, in an SUV that bumped along dirt roads as tree branches scraped against the windows. Alexandra remarked on the unlikely trajectory her life had taken and her plans for making the most of the rare and often overwhelming opportunities handed to her. I asked if she could imagine what she’d be doing if she hadn’t met Sean, and she said she had no idea. “It just seems like this is the work I was meant to do and the person I was meant to do it with.”

At the range, the instructor handed her a shotgun, which I worried would knock her over the first time she fired it. She had never handled one before, she told me, but liked the idea of trying to hit a moving target. The instructor gave her a brief lesson, noting that most people miss the first couple of times, and remotely launched a clay disc high into the air. Wouldn’t you know, she shot it right out of the sky.

Hair: Nikki Providence; Makeup: Kathy Jeung
Produced by Jill Roy for 3 Star Productions