Vanity Fair’s 2007 New Establishment List: The We-Read-It-for-You Guide
by Kara Swisher
Posted on September 14, 2007 at 12:05 AM PT
It’s time for Vanity Fair’s annual ranking of 100 powerful business moguls, the 2007 New Establishment list, which always make me feel a little oily after reading it for reasons I cannot quite grasp.
Nonetheless, we press on, as it has become filled with earnest billionaire techies in recent years, rather than those scary media barons of yore.
Still, and no surprise, AllThingD.com’s uber-boss Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. leads the list for his audacious $5 billion grab of Dow Jones.
But No. 2 and No. 3 are Silicon Valley stars Steve Jobs of Apple and those separated-at-birth Google twins (Larry Page and Sergey Brin). Reasons: Duh, iPhone for Jobs and the twins’ sheer do-no-evil evil plot to take over the known world and now, apparently, space.
But after these, it’s more of a parade of scarier investment types (except for folksy-but-probably-scary Warren Buffett at No. 5), flashy pols (Bill Clinton, Michael Bloomberg) and the usual coterie of Hollywood and media types (Steven Spielberg, of course, as well as Dick Parsons of Time Warner).
In any case, here’s the number rundown for digital types:
No. 10: Bill and Melinda Gates (for their philanthropy)
No. 15: Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg (him for Net stuff; her for renewed fashion empire)
No. 17: Howard Stringer (Sony struggles, but who doesn’t like Sir Howard?)
No. 23 Jeff Bezos (he managed to lose the Amazon.bomb moniker)
No. 56: Mike Moritz (new entry on the list for the clever VC)
No. 61: Jeff Skoll (but for media and not for Web stuff)
No. 62: Vinod Khosla (another new VC entry!)
No. 71: Paul Allen (just because!)
No. 83: Jonathan Ive (more iPhone mania)
No. 98: Arianna Huffington (Daaaarling, we’re thrilled)
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