William A. Randolph history

Inspired by the example of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, he convinced George to give him control of the San Francisco Examiner, which the elder Hearst—who won election as a United States senator in 1886—had acquired as a platform for his political career.

Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887 after taking control of The San Francisco Examiner from his father.

Nonetheless, through his newspapers and magazines, he exercised enormous political influence, and was famously blamed for pushing public opinion with his yellow journalism type of reporting leading the United States into a war with Spain in 1898.

The Republican William Howard Taft worked as a judge in Ohio Superior Court and in the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals before accepting a post as the first civilian governor of the Philippines in 1900.

Hearst’s interest in politics led him to election to the United States House of Representatives as a Congressman from New York in 1902.

Despite garnering significant support, Hearst lost the 1904 Democratic presidential bid to Alton B. Parker, who went down in a resounding defeat to Theodore Roosevelt.

By 1917, Hearst had become romantically involved with a young actress named Marion Davies, and was soon shepherding her career, including roles in many of the movies he produced.

By 1925 Hearst had established or acquired newspapers in every section of the United States, as well as several magazines.

Hearst’s increasingly reactionary politics alienated many working-class readers of his newspapers and led his influence to decline, as did his visit to Germany in 1934 to meet with Adolf Hitler, whose essays he published in syndication.

At the peak of his fortune, in 1935, he owned 28 major newspapers and 18 magazines, along with several radio stations, movie companies, and news services.

Released in 1941, Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane infuriated Hearst with its brutal portrait of an obsessive media mogul clearly based on his life.

Hearst left his San Simeon estate in 1947 to seek medical care unavailable in the remote location.

William Randolph Hearst died in Beverly Hills on August 14, 1951, at the age of 88.

Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on January 12, 1964.

In 1993 Bezos married Mackenzie Tuttle, whom he had met at D.E. Shaw.

In 1994 he quit D.E. Shaw and moved to Seattle, Washington, to open a virtual bookstore.

It sold its first book in 1995.

In June 1998 it began selling CDs, and later that year it added videos.

In 1999 Bezos added auctions to the site and invested in other virtual stores.

Aside from Amazon, Bezos founded a spaceflight company, Blue Origin, in 2000.

As more companies battled for Internet dollars, Bezos saw the need to diversify, and by 2005 Amazon offered a vast array of products, including consumer electronics, apparel, and hardware.

Amazon diversified even further in 2006 by introducing Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud-computing service that eventually became the largest such service in the world.

In late 2007 Amazon released a new handheld reading device called the Kindle, a digital book reader with wireless Internet connectivity, enabling customers to purchase, download, read, and store a vast selection of books on demand.

Amazon announced in 2010 that sales of Kindle books had surpassed those of hardcover books.

The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013)

Bezos’s net worth was calculated in 2018 at $112 billion, making him the richest person in the world.