Nathaniel Rothschild

Combining his famous banker name and balance sheet of Atticus Capital via loose cooperation, Nathaniel Rothschild was effective as activist shareholder in few cases, with highest profile ones being the raids on Freeport Mcmoran and Union Pacific.

Barry Rosenstein

Rosenstein’s and his Jana Partners are activist shareholders, employing heavy-duty research to help him spot special situations in the public-securities realm. Then he unleashes hell, most famous being Rosenstein letter from last year, filed with the SEC and attacking the Houston Exploration Company, included the following scathing conclusion: “In sum, this board appears to have a perverse desire to destroy shareholder value.”

Mirko Kovats

Mirko Kovats, through his majority owned and controlled A-Tec Industries AG, a Vienna Stock Exchange traded industrial group, has built a strong base in non-ferrious metals and industrial engineering businesses. Has been able to take control of some key copper and related assets in Central and Eastern Europe. Took over ATB, AE&E and Montanwerke Brixlegg, consolidating into A-Tec.

Volkert Doeksen

Volkert Doeksen of AlpInvest Partners (originally NIB Capital). Being connected with Dresdner Kleinwort and Warburg Pincus, invests in club deals. Alumni of Kleinwort Benson, Dillon Read and Mortgan Stanley.

Howard Mark Lorber

Howard Mark Lorber works through Vector Gorup Ltd., a NYSE listed holding company. Took control of Gouglas Elliman ight before NYC real estate taking off, which helped this largest residential real estate brokerage in the New York City area. He is also chairman of Nathan Foods and is part of the New Valley Corp (Western Union) and works financial magic through Aegis Capital and Ladenburg Thalman, both boker-dealers.

James Mitarotonda

With a small headcount and moderate balance sheet, Mitarotonda's Barrington Capital goes after great deals, which he can than sell to his giant participating partners, among them Ramius and DB Zwirn. Money is no subject to Barrington, as co-investors are available, given its track recod in swaying board members and even general shareholder's meetings, to the strategy and planned course, all per Barrington Capital's vision. Pep Boys, the largest deal by size, and Syms, Steve Madden, Griffon, Register.Com, where all companies entered by Mitarotonda and over course of time forced to change strategy. Will buy 5-12% of any given stock and persist with the agenda of the change, untill tears down walls of resistance, in all of the companies dealt with.

Thomas Hudson

Hudson's Pirate Capital is one of the first activist shareholders. Has had some phenomenal deals done, and some marginal ones, but overall has a great hit ratio, going after companies with strong tangible value hidden in balance sheets and bad strategy. The biggest dives so far have been Pep Boys and GenCorp. In Pep Boys deal Hudson shadowed two players who already where in the stock, Jim Mitarotonda of Barrington Capital and Armen Grigorian of Defoe Capital, and with last entry but with bigger bang, was able to tilt the company into the road map already in place by Mitarotanda and Grigorian. The Board was taken over, the CEO is gone. James Mitarotonda is the new Chairman and interim CEO. Pep Boys, in addition to being one of Pirate's largest dives, shows also that Hudson is not the "buccaneer" people say he is. He is more cautious and more collegial when it comes to large and defining deals. Pep Boys had other players, under surface: Ramius and DB Zwirn, for starters. Pirate Capital was more of a consensus sealer of the deal. Deals that he has done: Brinks Company, CKE Retaurants, Allied Defense and James River.

Warren Lichtenstein

Head of Steel Partners, a NY hedge fund that focuses on deep value and activist investing, and holds its average investment for approximately three to five years often pressuring management endlessly to deliver higher dividends and buybacks with a threat to takeover the company if his demands are unmet. His methods are questioned as being too short-term minded and value-extracting rather than nurturing future growth, albeit very profitable for himself. Among his deals are: GenCorp, United Industries. He recently graduated to going after larger corporations, from his usual sandbox of $20 - $100 million companies. He will take positions less than 15% of stock of any given company, currently around 25 of them, and starts the process of "alignment of opinion".

Attended Tulane University and transferred before eventually graduating with his BA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He also manages a charitable organization called Steel Partners Foundation that is a significant donor to building of a first Jewish synagogue in Aspen, Colorado.

Edward Lampert

Lampert's investment style can best be described as "concentrated value", often focusing on the retail sector. His takeover of Kmart and later of Sears and later merger of both companies left many people wander where he came from. His true dealmaking capabilities were tested in the deal of his lifetime when in 2003, he was kidnapped from the parking lot of his office, but Lampert convinced his captors to let him go after two days, promising to pay them after he is free.

Tony Christianson

For 28 years working as a director or investor in more than 120 companies, Christianson, Managing General Partner of the Cherry Tree Partners, has been involved in more than 200 private equity financings, 50 merger and acquisition transactions, and 22 initial public offerings. He is on the boards of over 15 fast growing companies.

Samuel J. Heyman

During the 80s he was a corporate raider, using debt provided by Drexel Burnham Lambert. Successful targets of his raids were the GAF Materials Corp. and International Specialty Products. He also made large sums of money in failed take-overs of Borg-Warner and Union Carbide. He has recently been involved in takeover attempts on Dexter, London Stock Exchange and Hercules Corp.

He achieved notoriety in Australia during the Qantas takeover when his hedge fund, declined to accept Airline Partners Australia's offer for his share, and after the failure of the offer subsequently accepted for over half his holding, although this was unsuccessful. As his total holding was said to be 10% of Qantas' shares, he had at risk over a billion dollars (Australian) in shares, and was possibly in violation of Qantas foreign shareholding rules.

Vincent Bolloré

Bolloré started his investment career as a bank trainee at Rothschild.

His personal investment career began when he took over the reins at his family-controlled conglomerate Bolloré, which deals in maritime freight and African trade, and paper manufacturing. The company he leads today employs 33,000 people around the world.

He is a well-known corporate raider in France who has succeeded in making money by taking large stakes in French listed companies, in particular the building and construction group Bouygues, where he left with a sizeable capital gain after a power-struggle.

In 2005, through his family company, Bolloré expanded his media interests by launching the Direct 8 television station. Towards the end of 2005, he began building a stake in independent British group Aegis.As at 19 July, 2006, his stake in Aegis stood at 29%. Direct Soir, a free newspaper, was launched in June 2006. In January 2008, he manifested interest in becoming a shareholder of famed, but troubled, Italian car manufacturer Pininfarina.

He is a close personal friend of French President Sarkozy. It has been told that their friendship goes back over 20 years Sarkozy has been criticized for accepting vacations from Bolloré; however, both have insisted that no conflict of interest exists.

Irwin L. Jacobs

One of the original raiders rat-pack members, Irwin L Jacobs now rests on his laurel leafs, and is the CEO of several large corporations, including Genmar Holdings, Inc. the worlds largest boat building company. He earned the nickname "Irv the Liquidator" for his aggressive business practices in the 1970s and early 1980s. He is a deal maker and bargain hunter based in Minneapolis and became wealthy by taking big stakes in Fortune 500 conglomerates, usually with the goal of unlocking value by breaking them up. He now owns many businesses including: Watkins Inc., Jacobs Management Corp., Jacobs Industries, Inc., J.Y.J. Corp., C.O.M.B. Co., Federal Financial Corporation, FFC Realty, Watkins, Inc., Northwestern Bag Corporation, Nationwide Collection Service, Inc., 1. Jacobs Enterprises, Kodicor, Inc., Brown-Minneapolis Tank and Fabricating Co., Regional Accounts Corporation, Nationwide Accounts, Corporation, Jacobs Bag Corporation, Lawndale Industries Inc., EQC of Indiana, Inc., Touch Corporation, JMSL Acquiring Corporation, S.J. Industries, Inc., JII Air Service, Inc., P.S.T. Acquiring Corporation.

His greatest contribution was probably the strong support he showed, at very crucial initial stages, to the Special Olympics. Jacobs founded FLW Outdoors, the parent organization of the Wal-Mart FLW Our, a series of sportfishing tours best know for its bass fikshing tournaments, which were developed with an eye toward media coverage in general and television coverage in particular.

Christer Gardell

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: Sitting in isolation and away from London, Paris or New York, the Sage of Stockholm, is the ultimate activist investor and the ultimate buggy man of Nordic corporate fairy tales. His company, Cevian Capital, would be a softy in New York, but for Scandinavia he is the ghost of pillaging Vikings. No company is large enough in Europe for him to take 1-4% ownership, take over the board and fire the management, to get his way. He will even partner with the likes of Carl Icahn for added firepower.

BIG DEALS: Volvo, TeliaSonera, Munich Re.

Gerardo Braggiotti

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: The long time member of Mediobanca crew, turned soft touch Lazard banker, is back into the realm of independence, his own bank of Banca Leonardo. He is the dealmaker of old Europe and old European money. Names like Agneli, Frere and David-Weill are his partners and backers. His targets are European Fortune 100.

SPECIAL GIFTS: The Style of a Dealmaker.

Vinod Khosla

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: In the last couple of years, Khosla, 53, has emerged as Silicon Valley’s pre-eminent eco-investor, laying out more than $300 million of his personal fortune to back scores of start-ups in green technology: biofuels (KiOR turns biomass into crude oil in just a few hours), fuel-efficiency technologies (Transonic Combustion cuts oil consumption in half), and carbon sequestration (cement-maker Calera drastically reduces carbon emissions). The Sun Microsystems co-founder is also an active developer of Internet software, including the popular Facebook applications iLike and Slide.

CAN BE PROUD OF: According to Fast Company, Khosla’s six best deals for the venture-capital outfit Kleiner Perkins turned $314 million of seed money into $15 billion in cash and stock.

ON THE RECORD: “The main problem to solving problems is having the problems be critical enough to get attention It’s almost like a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

Armen Sarkissian

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: It is increasingly apparent that any major oil and energy deal done between the West and Eastern Europe, including Russia and Kazakhstan, needs to be not only initiated but also blessed by Sarkissian. Last several years have seen over dozen deals in excess of $10 billion, which would not have happened if it was not up to him. If you are lets say BP and lets say want to take a 20% share in a major oil project east of Austria, you better have Sarkissian's number, and his good graces. This will help get on good side of presidents and prime ministers.

CAN BE PROUD OF: Eurasia Center, a non-profit think tank based in London, and his short but very productive tenure as prime minister of Armenia. Armenia has seen explosive growth 1998 - 2006 period, mainly due to Sarkissian's road map of economic freedom initiatives and overall growth.

John Paulson

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: Paulson—“J.P.” to his friends—saw the subprime crash coming and figured out how to capitalize on it: by some estimates he personally reaped as much as $3.7 billion last year alone. Now he’s looking to squeeze some blood out of Yahoo—he started buying up 50 million shares of the beleaguered Web portal after Microsoft’s unsolicited bid, and supported “activist investor” Carl Icahn’s overhaul of Yahoo’s board. His next target: distressed financial companies.

CRUCIFIXION-AVOIDANCE MOVE: Donated $15 million to a legal fund for families fighting foreclosure.

MANIFEST DESTINY: In the mid-1990s, Paulson, 52, bought a New York apartment and a mansion in the Hamptons at foreclosure sales.

Steven Rattner

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: Rattner’s investment firm has big stakes in media companies such as Cablevision, MGM, and Alpha Media Group (Maxim, Blender). He also enjoys playing the role of public intellectual, churning out opinion pieces on weighty subjects such as the federal budget deficit, hedge-fund regulation, the housing crunch, and the fate of newspapers, which he thinks should ultimately be converted to nonprofit public trusts or some new hybrid.

NEIGHBOR RELATIONS: Reportedly persuaded Comcast’s Brian Roberts, a longtime client, to buy out a Martha’s Vineyard neighbor that Rattner, 56, had feuded with.

BIG DEAL: New York mayor Michael Bloomberg announced in January that he was putting his wealth (estimated at more than $11.5 billion) under Quadrangle’s management to avoid any conflicts of interest.

Michael Moritz

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: A former journalist (he served as the San Francisco–bureau chief for Time), Moritz, 54, is regarded as the most powerful venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Among his prescient investments: Google, PayPal, and Yahoo.

HIRING TECHNIQUE: “Given the choice between cutoffs and sandals or cuff links and Brioni, we’re going to take the first every time.”

QUOTE: “We had the good fortune of seeing a lot of the things and habits that tend to lead to the downfall and demise of young companies, and it’s helpful to have a litany of them to refer to from time to time.”

John Malone

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: Malone is best known as a deal-maker who is constantly accumulating and unwinding stakes in various media and telecom companies. The most recent dissolution: his relationship with Barry Diller. In a complicated and ugly court case, Malone sought to boot Diller out of his IAC/InterActiveCorp, but lost. Now he’s thinking about swapping his large stake in Time Warner for the company’s AOL division.

BIG NEW FRIEND: Oprah, now a partner, via Malone’s Discovery Communications, in OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network.

LABEL-DEFYING MOVE: Wall Street was convinced that Malone, 67, would take control of DirecTV, the country’s biggest satellite-TV service, and flip it for another asset. But so far Malone appears to be interested in operating the service in conjunction with Liberty’s cable programming.

ON THE RECORD: Malone, quoted in a Wall Street Journal article that later became a key point of contention in the Liberty Media/IAC trial: “There was a time when there was, I think, a 20 percent Barry premium” on Wall Street. “Today you could argue there is a Barry discount.”

Henry Kravis

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: The leveraged-buyout pioneer plans again to take K.K.R. public, targeting global infrastructure plays (toll roads and airports) and fixed income. He might want to think about security guards as well: this winter, protesters gathered outside his Upper East Side co-op to show a Web documentary entitled War on Greed: Starring Henry Kravis & His Homes. The film accuses Kravis and K.K.R. of destroying American jobs and exploiting tax loopholes, but in the process shows just how nice Kravis’s homes are.

NEW LITTLE ENEMY: Comedian Lewis Black targeted Kravis, 64, and K.K.R. in another Web video, railing against what he sees as their unfair earnings.

BIGGEST GAFFE: Last May, just before the market meltdown, he told a group of Canadian investment heads, “The private-equity world is in its golden era right now. The stars are aligned.”

Ted Forstmann

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: The leveraged-buyout king made his original fortune turning around distressed companies such as Gulfstream and General Instrument. Now he’s trying his hand in the world of sports. His IMG agency represents the top stars in tennis (Roger Federer, Maria Sharapova), golf (Tiger Woods, Annika Sorenstam)—even modeling (Gisele Bündchen, Kate Moss). The company also produces more televised sports programming than anyone. It’s not unusual for IMG to stage nearly a dozen events on any given weekend. His latest coup: an exclusive 20-year deal with China to produce sporting events for CCTV, the country’s largest TV broadcaster.

MODE OF TRANSPORT: A Gulfstream GV.

LITTLE BUDDY: Monica Seles.

ROMANTIC RELATIONS: Forstmann, 68, is currently dating Top Chef hostess Padma Lakshmi. He insists his past relationships with Princess Diana and Elizabeth Hurley were purely platonic.

Bruce Wasserstein

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: Under Wasserstein’s leadership, Lazard—which focuses on giving advice to clients rather than on speculating with its own capital—has avoided the big problems that have ensnared its larger Wall Street investment-banking rivals. And his magazine, New York, added another National Magazine Award to its collection.

RECENT DEALS: Belgian brewer InBev’s $52 billion purchase of Anheuser-Busch, the K.K.R. public offering, and the sale of Bear Stearns to J. P. Morgan Chase.

MAKEOVER BONA FIDES: Wasserstein, once chubby and rumpled, is now slim and crisply dressed.

SPOUSAL RELATIONS: In July the New York Daily News reported that Wasserstein, 60, had separated from third wife Claude and was involved with a “young Asian beauty.”

Kirk Kerkorian

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: As the owner and boss, at the age of 91, of a little known Tracinda Corporation (named after daughters Tracy and Linda), Kerkorian is feared and respected by corporate America. No CEO is safe in his chair, if something better could be done with his company while making over $5 billion. Tracinda troops, all loyal to Kerkorian, will swarm and company, large or larger, until the achievable is achieved. Chrysler was sold to Daimler Benz, MGM took over Mirage creating the largest gaming group, General Motors went through boot camp, MGM Studios starting making blockbuster films again, Ford's move to new age fuel concepts, all thanks to Kerkorian's midas touch. This professional boxer during youth, turned combat pilot during WII, and later taking on the Vegas and becoming the largest casino mogul, is the ultimate Mr. American Success Story. Fierce in actions and agile in thinking he is Mr. Smooth.

RECENT DEALS: Large stock positions taken and pressures applied on General Motors and Ford Motors Company.

Jacob Rothschild

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: The scion of the great 19th-century banking dynasty has been looking for 21st-century riches by financing the development of oil, gas, metal, and mining resources in Central Asia. He’s invested in the public stock offerings of Kazakhstan’s leading oil company and biggest commercial banks. Last year he helped raise $250 million from a public offering of his Tau Capital fund, which invests in Kazakhstan as well as Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan.

LITTLE BUDDY: Steve Schwarzman. (Lord Rothschild, 72, is on the International Advisory Board of Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group.)

PRIZED POSSESSION: His personal collection of some 15,000 bottles of Rothschild wines dating back to 1870.

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: This nephew of Saudi king Abdullah is the world’s 19th-richest person—and the wealthiest of all Arabs. He built much of his $21 billion fortune with a stunningly shrewd investment in Citibank when it was struggling in the early 90s. Now the devout Muslim is Citi’s biggest individual shareholder—and the largest foreign investor in America, with stakes in News Corp. and Time Warner. Charming, candid, and progressive in his outlook—he hires women for key positions—he’s highly mobile and well connected: this spring he toured 23 nations, meeting with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Rupert Murdoch.

BIG LOSS: Alwaleed, 53, lost billions when Citibank’s stock price collapsed because of the subprime-mortgage crisis—and he joined with other big investors to infuse $12.5 billion in new capital into the troubled bank. But his losses were partly mitigated by gains from his holdings in the Four Seasons and Fairmont hotel chains, which have thrived in the Middle Eastern market.

WINGS: Boeing 747-400 while he waits for delivery of his $310 million Airbus A380 Flying Palace. It’s expected that the superjumbo jet will have a gym, formal dining rooms, and a cinema. It’s so big that it can land only at airports in major cities.

CRIB: 317-room palace in Riyadh. It features four separate kitchens for four different cuisines: Lebanese, Arabian, Continental, and Asian.

EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY EXCESSIVE BEHAVIOR: Travels with a staff of 60.

LATEST ACT OF DO-GOODERY: Donated $15.7 million apiece to Cambridge University and the University of Edinburgh to build new Islamic-studies centers.

Carlos Slim Helú

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: Slim’s empire is built on his near monopoly of the Mexican phone industry. He controls more than 90 percent of the landline market and 75 percent of the cell-phone business. But his money and power also can be seen everywhere from Fifth Avenue (as in Saks, of which he owns 10.8 percent) to Fleet Street (he was reported to have recently purchased 1 percent of The Independent’s parent company). Slim’s $60 billion net worth is nearly 7 percent of Mexico’s entire G.D.P.—making him the richest man on the planet.

RARE MISSTEP: Slim, 68, spent $2 billion to buy CompUSA, but couldn’t make the business work despite repeated turnaround attempts. He shuttered the last of the stores and sold the brand earlier this year.

COOL FRIEND: Shakira.

CLOUD OF UNCERTAINTY: The Mexican government is confronting Slim’s telephone dominance, forcing him to open up to a competitor.

AESTHETE BONA FIDES: His blossoming collection of Rodin sculptures and Renoirs places him among the world’s top art spenders, according to ArtNews.

Vivi Nevo

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: The animated operator is said to have large stakes in Goldman Sachs, as well as Time Warner and Yahoo (each down some 13 percent). But despite these minor setbacks, Nevo, 43, was still able to afford a diamond ring for his new fiancé, Chinese actress Ziyi Zhang (Memoirs of a Geisha; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).

COOL FRIEND: Lenny Kravitz.

RECENT ANOINTMENT: Awarded the 23rd spot on Details magazine’s Power 50 list, apparently because he has “taken over the space in your head.” Not sure what that means.

MOGUL BONA FIDES: An early investor in Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s company, Nevo recently invested in online music site Buzznet and Internet-based ad agency Spot Runner alongside Rupert Murdoch and Herb Allen’s Allen & Co.

Sumner Redstone

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: Nearly every profile of Redstone seems required to make a King Lear allusion, with the mogul frequently described as ailing and impulsive. In the last year he’s fought publicly with his only daughter, Shari, David Geffen, and Google. The Google conflict will eventually get resolved by very expensive lawyers, but the Geffen dustup may prove even more costly: Geffen and partner Steven Spielberg look ready to pull up stakes and take their DreamWorks studio away from Redstone’s Paramount—an embarrassing defeat for a mogul who has never truly been accepted in Hollywood.

EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY CONTRADICTORY BEHAVIOR: Two years after “firing” Tom Cruise, Redstone announced he’d work with the actor again after all, in yet another Mission: Impossible movie: “He’s a great actor and behaving very well these days.”

SWORN ENEMY: Mortality. Addressing succession plans in a recent interview, Redstone, 85, said, “I’m not worried about it ’cause it’s going to be another 20, 30 years.”

Herb Allen

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: His New York investment-banking firm spends an estimated $10 million staging its famed annual five-day retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho. While Herb, 68, is tightly bonded with the top players, his son Herbert Allen III, 41, cultivates the younger, up-and-comer attendees from new-media start-ups such as Digg, Ning, and Joost.

BIG DEALS: Advised Murdoch on his takeover of Dow Jones. The firm also guided NBC Universal on its $925 million purchase of Oxygen Media, the TV channel backed by investors Oprah Winfrey and Paul Allen.

MAN-OF-THE-PEOPLE MOVE: Wrote a New York Times op-ed calling for taxation on investment income of the endowments of the wealthiest colleges and universities (including his own alma mater, Williams College).

SIDE PROJECT: Allen is helping fund the former Major League Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent’s oral-history-of-baseball project.

Ronald Perelman

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: Perelman has one of the most disparate portfolios of any billionaire, with holdings in everything from Revlon to educational-testing-products manufacturer Scantron—a few of which always seem to be giving him fits. The latest: AM General, which makes the Hummer and Humvee. G.M. owns the Hummer brand, and in an age when it takes a small inheritance to fill the behemoth’s tank, the company is expected to drop it. Meanwhile, Perelman’s most public investment, Revlon, declared a rare quarterly profit in the second quarter of this year.

BOATING BUDDIES: Denzel Washington, Penny Marshall, and Saif Qaddafi (son of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi) attended Perelman’s birthday party on his 188-foot Ultima III yacht in St. Barth’s in December.

EX-SPOUSAL RELATIONS i: Third wife Patricia Duff re-entered the picture this year when Caleigh, her 13-year-old daughter with Perelman, sought a protective order (aided by Perelman’s lawyers) against her mother. (Duff counters that the animosity stems from normal teenage angst.)

EX-SPOUSAL RELATIONS ii: Perelman, 65, exercised the naming rights he received from a $20 million donation to his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, renaming Logan Hall after his second wife, the late gossip columnist Claudia Cohen. It is located in the Perelman Quadrangle. In July, he also sued Cohen’s brother over her fortune, which daughter Samantha is entitled to.

EX-SPOUSAL RELATIONS iii: Perelman and fourth wife Ellen Barkin are locked in a legal squabble over the funding of her production company, Applehead. He claims Barkin and her brother are misappropriating Applehead’s capital; she alleges that Perelman didn’t cough up the cash he promised.

CASTING CALL: Told CNBC’s Donny Deutsch that he would want Robert Downey Jr. to play him in a biopic.

Barry Diller

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp chalks up $6 billion in annual revenues from Web sites such as the HSN home-shopping network, Ticketmaster, Match.com, Ask.com, and Evite. And power spouse von Furstenberg’s expanding fashion empire brings in revenues of nearly $200 million a year from 56 countries.

MOGUL RELATIONS: Diller’s plan to break up his IAC conglomerate into five separate pieces, or “Baby Barrys,” was an acknowledgment that his strategy of the past 13 years wasn’t working any longer. But the bold move threatened to strip control from his biggest shareholder and erstwhile friend, Liberty Media’s John Malone, who had held a majority vote under IAC’s old corporate governance. Malone sued to push Diller, 66, and von Furstenberg, 61, off the IAC board, and his people piled on testimony that portrayed Diller as enjoying lavish perks and compensation without delivering commensurate results to shareholders. It proved to have no effect on the outcome: in March the judge ruled in favor of Diller.

OFFICE DIGS: A stairway lined with 3,000 Swarovski crystals winds through DVF’s headquarters, in a former meatpacking plant. Four blocks away, Diller sits in one of his five executive offices that take up an entire floor of the iconic IAC building.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: Von Furstenberg recently collaborated with DC Comics to create a fashion line inspired by Wonder Woman.

François-Henri Pinault

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: In 2005, when Pinault took over his family’s two-pillared business, PPR, the first thing he did was replace many of his father’s business associates, including Tom Ford, who was designing for Gucci. (Vogue editor Anna Wintour expressed her dismay over the ousting.) He also sold off Printemps, the chain that was the second P in PPR. Since then he’s been emphasizing star brands over star designers, a strategy that seems to be working: the company saw a 35 percent increase in net profit in 2007, and even the money-losing YSL label posted a 35 percent improvement (although it’s unclear when the label will be out of the red).

ACCESSORY: Timepieces. He owns more than 60.

MOGUL RELATIONS: The battle between LVMH and PPR continues. Pinault, 46, wasn’t a fan of Bernard Arnault’s plan to buy the French financial daily Les Echos, and was one of the 100-some businesspeople who signed a petition calling for the paper to maintain its editorial independence.

ALTER EGO: One of PPR’s fastest-growing business units, CFAO, isn’t a luxury label but rather a distribution business that sells diverse products such as cars and pharmaceuticals across Africa and Vietnam.

Roman Abramovich

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: Although he speaks surprisingly little English, for years this oligarch has been investing and spending on a czar-like scale in his home away from home of London. Abramovich, 41, was thought to be the mystery buyer who paid $33.6 million for Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (a record for a living artist at auction) as well as $86.3 million for Francis Bacon’s Triptych, 1976 (a record for contemporary art at auction) in May. He’s also joining two existing town houses to build a $300 million home in Knightsbridge.

LITTLE BUDDY: Pop train wreck Amy Winehouse, whom Abramovich paid a reported $2 million to sing at the opening gala of his girlfriend’s art gallery, in Moscow, this summer.

WINGS: A Boeing 767 with anti-missile system.

WHEELS: A Ferrari FXX, one of only 30 made.

EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLY CONTRADICTORY BEHAVIOR: Just weeks after stepping down as governor of Chukotka, in Russia, in July, Abramovich decided he was into politics after all. He will run for speaker in the Duma of the remote arctic region in October’s election.

THORN IN HIS SIDE: A multi-billion-dollar lawsuit in London’s High Court alleging that he colluded with cool friend Vladimir Putin to force a rival Russian billionaire to sell a Moscow TV station, an aluminum producer, and an oil-and-gas company at prices far below market value. Abramovich disputes the claim.

Bernard Arnault

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: France’s richest man ($26 billion) sits atop the 60-brand behemoth LVMH. He also makes investments through his Groupe Arnault and Blue Capital fund (which just became the largest shareholder in Carrefour, the planet’s second-biggest retailer after Wal-Mart). Last winter he added the French financial daily Les Echos to his robust media portfolio, and he made a splash in June when he snapped up motorboat manufacturer Princess Yachts for nearly $400 million.

BRAGGING RIGHTS: LVMH, which owns six champagne brands (Veuve Clicquot, Krug, and Moët & Chandon among them), controls the largest share of the limited grape output from France’s Champagne region.

NEPOTISM ALERT: Both his son Antoine and daughter Delphine sit on LVMH’s board.

THORN IN HIS SIDE: Watches. The 59-year-old magnate apparently feels that LVMH isn’t No. 1 in the luxury-timepiece market yet. He acquired the Swiss brand Hublot earlier this year to help close the gap. (He already owns Tag Heuer and Christian Dior.)

POWER STRUGGLE: LVMH is battling peddlers of counterfeits. In June, a French court ordered eBay to pay the luxury label $61 million for selling imitation LVMH goods on its site.

Warren Buffett

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: As the crisis in the credit markets caused just about every deal to freeze up, Buffett, 78, went on a buying spree. He helped fund Mars’s $23 billion takeover of Wrigley and Dow Chemical’s $15 billion acquisition of Rohm and Hass. He also closed a $4.5 billion deal for a controlling piece of the Pritzker-family holding firm. But while he sees gems in the U.S., he’s down on the market overall. Investors hope that he has a more optimistic take on his own company, which in the first half of 2008 was down 19.5 percent, its worst performance since 1990.

LATEST BIG DEAL: As a large shareholder in Anheuser-Busch, Berkshire will realize a $770 million gain when Belgian company InBev NV’s planned $52 billion takeover of the American brewer goes through.

SIGNS OF OMNIPOTENCE: This spring, as Bear Stearns was spiraling down the drain, the investment bank desperately reached out to Buffett for backing, knowing that any sign of support from the business guru would mollify the market. He passed.

ON THE RECORD: “You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out—and what we are witnessing at some of our largest financial institutions is an ugly sight.”

Rupert Murdoch

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE: Now that he finally owns The Wall Street Journal (and the rest of Dow Jones), you’d think Murdoch would feel he’s at the apex of his career. But the 77-year-old mogul is still eyeing higher peaks—such as displacing The New York Times as America’s top general-interest newspaper. He may also be looking to increase his presence on the Web: his proxies have looked at possible combinations of his MySpace social network with Yahoo.

POLITICAL RELATIONS: Often characterized as a right-wing ideologue, Murdoch is a clear-eyed pragmatist. Hence his decision to move away from the Hillary Clinton camp during the Democratic primary and all but endorse Barack Obama, whom he calls a “rock star.” Still, the News Corp. chief found the time in June to dine with GeorgeW. Bush and British prime minister Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street.

MOGUL MISHAP: At Herb Allen’s Sun Valley confab, Murdoch misplaced his wedding band, sending a gaggle of waiting journalists to their hands and knees in search of it. (The ring was never found.)

FAMILY BUSINESS: A Murdoch-family trust distributed $600 million in cash and News Corp. shares to Rupert’s first four children last year. The payout was supposed to help heal a dispute about inheritance brought on by Murdoch’s marriage to Wendi Deng, his third wife, with whom he’s had two more kids.

MANIFEST DESTINY: Murdoch’s genes indicate that he’d be an excellent long-distance runner, according to a DNA test he took at The Wall Street Journal’s D conference this year.

PHILANTHROPY WATCH: He and Wendi support N.Y.C.’s P.S. 184M, the first public elementary and middle school in the country that provides a bilingual education in English and Mandarin Chinese.