Bette Nesmith Graham for USD $47.5 million in 1979. At the time, her company employed 200 people and made 25 million bottles of Liquid Paper per year. Bette Nesmith died on May 12, 1980, at the age of 56, in Richardson, Texas. From the start, Graham ran her company with a unique combination of spirituality, egalitarianism, and pragmatism. Raised a Methodist, Graham converted to Christian Science in 1942, and this faith inspired the development of her corporate "Statement of Policy". Part-code of ethics, part-business philosophy, it covered everything from her belief in a "Supreme Being" to a focus on decentralized decision making and
Michael Nesmith which helped spur Nesmith's creation of a television program called "PopClips" for the Nickelodeon cable network. In 1980, "PopClips" was sold to the Time Warner/Amex consortium. Time Warner/Amex developed "PopClips" into the MTV network. Nesmith won the first-ever Grammy Award given for (Long-form) Music-Video in 1982, for his hour-long "Elephant Parts" and also had a short-lived series on NBC inspired by the video called "Michael Nesmith in Television Parts". "Television Parts" included many other artists who were unknown at the time but went on to become major stars in their own right. Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, Garry Shandling, Whoopi Goldberg,