“He’s constantly focusing on ‘Where am I going with this? What’s the next move?’” says Peter Chernin, chief operating officer of News Corp., who’s been on both sides of the negotiating table with Saban. “When he has something he’s trying to build, Haim is like a dog with a bone.”

A classic Hollywood story involves Gene Simmons of Kiss. In the late ’90s, as co-owner of the Fox Family Channel, Saban was developing shows for children. Simmons, the fire-breathing, blood-spitting frontman of a rock band in costumes and face paint, pitched Saban an idea for a new Saturday-morning cartoon: Kiss meets X-Men, the Marvel comics superhero team. Saban liked the concept well enough to convene a meeting with Avi Arad, then C.E.O. of Marvel’s toy division.

At the appointed time, Saban, Arad, and Simmons sat down. The meeting was going well, and the three began to haggle over numbers. Then Saban turned to Arad and, referring to Simmons, confided in Hebrew, “Now we gut him like a fish.” Without missing a beat, Simmons—who, unbeknownst to Saban, was born Chaim Witz in Haifa, Israel—replied in Hebrew, “You ass­hole. I’m one of you.”

When asked about this story, Simmons laughs and says he “vaguely” remembers “something along those lines.”
Saban says he has no memory of the conversation but acknowledges it “may have” taken place. “People I deal with, for the most part, are very smart people,” he adds. “I mean, sometimes I gut them like a fish, and sometimes they gut me like a fish, you know?”

In business as well as in politics, Saban plays the mensch, but his charm fails to hide an all-consuming drive to succeed. He is generous but also ruthless; aggressive yet patient enough to wait for the best moment to strike; poker-faced but at times utterly transparent; analytical and strategic with moments of startling self-contradiction.

Saban’s memories of growing up poor in Alexandria, Egypt, have prompted him to make huge gifts to Los Angeles-area educational institutions, hospitals, and free clinics, particularly those that serve children. In that way, indisputably, Saban and his wife are champions of the underprivileged.

Yet when rules designed to protect the public’s access to the Pacific Ocean interfered with his privacy at his stucco-and-stone Malibu beach house, he was quick to join his neighbors on so-called Billionaire’s Beach to seek—and win—an exemption to keep outsiders off that stretch. Philanthropist Eli Broad took the lead, Saban says, in asking the California Coastal Commission to allow them to buy an 80-foot section of beach a mile away and turn it into a public park.

Saban’s stance on social issues is liberal. He’s pro-choice, pro-nationalized health care, even pro-taxes. “Higher taxes for people like me to help others who are less fortunate—that’s okay by me,” he’ll say. But just last year, he settled with the Internal Revenue Service after admitting to using offshore tax shelters in 2001 to avoid paying at least $300 million on the $1.5 billion he pocketed when Disney bought his share of Fox Family Worldwide. In his testimony, he told Senate investigators that he had received bad advice: “You have before you a very disappointed person, who feels misled, lied to, cheated.”

Saban’s family fled Egypt for Tel Aviv during the Suez Crisis in 1956. He was 12, old enough to understand the shame his father, a toy salesman, endured as he struggled, selling pencils and erasers door-to-door. For years, Saban says, he lived with his grandmother, parents, and younger brother in one room and shared a bathroom with prostitutes and their pimp. At 15 or 16, around the time he started playing bass—“badly,” he says—in a Beatles cover band called the Lions, Saban would lie in bed and imagine being rich.

“Before I went to sleep, I’d close my eyes and think about it,” he recalls, “which for me meant I would own a car—the biggest car! American! I wanted to own a Chevrolet Impala.”

He would own that Impala, but not until after the 1973 Yom Kippur War wiped out a business he’d started that promoted concerts and managed bands. In 1975, he moved to Paris, where he got the chance to record one of his clients singing the theme song for a cartoon called Goldorak. He was miffed when he had to foot the $2,000 bill for the recording session, but later, he’d be grateful. Because he’d paid to produce it, he owned the master, so when Goldorak became a huge hit and its theme song started selling, Saban made a gigantic profit. He realized he’d found his niche.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1983. Around that time, he discovered that the music accompanying cartoons was the mother lode.