K. Rupert Murdoch AC

Age: 77

Board Afflilations: The DIRECTV Group, Incorporated (DTV), China Netcom Group Corporation Limited Hong Kong (CN), British Sky Broadcasting Group plc (BSY), Gemstar-TV Guide International, Inc. (GMST)

WHAT HE DOES
Rupert Murdoch leaves his mark on every media market he enters—and makes lots of money doing it. The founder, chairman, chief executive, and largest shareholder of News Corp., Murdoch is the überboss of such properties as Fox Broadcasting Co., 20th Century Fox, MySpace, HarperCollins Publishers, and the New York Post. He is known for his willingness to invest beyond his means, accept temporary losses, and back bold and controversial projects.

WHERE HE COMES FROM
The Australian billionaire, born Keith Rupert Murdoch, launched his media empire from a relatively humble newspaper in the small coastal city of Adelaide. Twenty-one and fresh out of Oxford University, he inherited the foundering paper in 1952, when his father died. Over the next two decades, he started and acquired additional papers around the country (more than 100 Australian publications are now under his control). Early successes allowed him to expand internationally, first in the U.K., where in 1969 he purchased News of the World and the Sun, and later the Times. He also began buying media properties in the United States, becoming a citizen in 1985 to comply with a law restricting foreign ownership of broadcast stations. News Corp. moved its headquarters to New York City in 2004.

WHAT HE GOT RIGHT
In the mid-1980s Murdoch acquired several U.S. television stations, aligned them with 20th Century Fox film studio, and put Paramount studio chief Barry Diller in charge. The resulting Fox Broadcasting emerged as the nation’s fourth network and spawned a number of lasting hits, from America’s Most Wanted to The Simpsons.

Asian broadcasting company Star Group lost money for years after Murdoch purchased it for $500 million in the early 1990s. But Star eventually made a turnaround, becoming profitable in 2003, thanks to a cable boom in India as well as smart programming, which includes the country’s top-rated soap opera and an Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Murdoch created Fox News in 1996; five years later it had surpassed CNN to become the nation’s leading cable news channel. (Though the “fair and balanced” network is known for featuring conservative personalities like Bill O’Reilly, Murdoch’s politics are more difficult to parse. He and his newspapers supported the invasion of Iraq, and the New York Post has a history of promoting Republican candidates, but in July 2006, Murdoch hosted a fundraising event for Democratic senator Hillary Clinton.)

WHAT HE GOT WRONG
Murdoch is regularly accused of peddling trash. His British tabloid newspaper the Sun features weekly photos of topless women, and HarperCollins recently came under fire for its plan to publish O.J. Simpson’s book, If I Did It, though Murdoch apologized and canceled the project last November.

In 2000, Murdoch brokered a deal that gave News Corp. a more than 40 percent stake in Gemstar, the publisher of TV Guide. But Gemstar-TV Guide International’s C.E.O. was subsequently accused of overstating earnings and forced to resign. The net result was a nearly $6 billion write-down in 2002. The magazine has struggled to stay relevant in the digital era, and it remains to be seen whether Gemstar’s recent efforts to take TV Guide digital will pay off.

In 2005, Murdoch forked over $580 million for Intermix Media, owner of the social-networking site MySpace. Though the site’s user base has grown from 20 million to 150 million (as of early 2007), its long-term profitability is still in question. Last fall, Murdoch missed out on acquiring the video site YouTube. Insiders said News Corp. wouldn’t—or couldn’t—compete with Google’s $1.65 billion offer.

WHAT'S NEXT
The succession plan is a favorite topic of conversation among Murdoch watchers. He has six children, and three from a previous marriage—Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James—hold or have held management positions in the company. And in 1999, after Murdoch married Wendi Deng, 38 years his junior, the empire’s future leadership was muddied further. The couple has two children, and there is speculation that Deng, who was born in China, will take a leadership role in expanding MySpace’s operation there. —Mary Bridges