Chris Whittle

"WHITTLE HAS ALWAYS built businesses based on big ideas and then delivered thrills based at least as much on a sense of vertigo as profit. With his college pal Phillip Moffitt, he bought a dying Esquire magazine in 1979 for $3.5 million and breathed new life into it, and Hearst bought it seven years later for a reported $80 million. That was huge; it made Whittle a player. He launched Whittle Communications, which, in short, sought to produce a variety of targeted-audience media properties that would rewrite the rules of the communications business. Those products were sold off piecemeal during the breakup of Whittle's media empire in the mid-nineties, including the infamous Channel One, now owned by Primedia: free TVs and VCRs for any middle or high school willing to make its students watch a daily satellite news program stuffed with commercials for Pepsi and Reebok. While it was the source of Whittle's stubborn reputation in certain circles as the ultimate sleaze, Channel One has, in fact, long been a moneymaker. He wishes he still owned it."

He is married to Priscilla Rattazzi Whittle.