NEW YORK (AFP) -- Loews Corporation co-chairman and founder Laurence Tisch, a billionaire media mogul, ***Wall Street*** investor and philanthropist who headed the CBS television network from 1986 to 1995, died of cancer Saturday at the age of 80, Loews announced.

Tisch and his brother, Preston, built Loews into one of the largest diversified financial corporations in the United States.

In 1959, they acquired a substantial interest in Loews Theaters, Inc., a predecessor of Loews Corporation, and Laurence Tisch became its president and chief executive officer.

In 1986, Tisch took control of CBS, manipulating and modifying it over the ensuing nine years before selling it to Westinghouse for five billion dollars, pocketing an estimated personal profit of two billion dollars, according to his official biography.

The CBS acquisition, in which Tisch and then CBS chief William Paley rescued the network from a hostile takeover bid by then CNN chief Ted Turner, transformed Tisch from "simply ... another New York City multimillionaire who had made money in tobacco, insurance and hotels ... (into) a media celebrity," said the biography.

As a philanthropist, Tisch managed the investments of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, led fund-raising for the United Jewish Appeal, and provided endowments and buildings for his alma mater, New York University, where he was graduated in 1942.