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Who

Real estate developer Mortimer B. Zuckerman is the chairman of Boston Properties, one of the largest real estate developers in the United States, and the owner of U.S. News & World Report and the New York Daily News.

Backstory

The son of a Montreal tobacco and candy wholesaler who passed away when Mort was 17, the future real estate mogul headed off to college at McGill at age 16, then moved to the U.S. in the late '50s to attend business school at Wharton and law school at Harvard. After briefly enrolling in a PhD program, he turned to real estate, taking a job at a Boston-based development firm called Cabot, Cabot & Forbes at a starting salary $8,750. Zuckerman soon became one of the firm's young stars; he proved himself to be a pretty brash operator a few years later when he struck out on his own and teamed up with Ed Linde to form Boston Properties: Zuckerman immediately filed suit against his former employer over his ownership interest in a property he developed and ended up collecting a $5 million, which he used to make some of his first real estate deals.

In the early '70s, Zuckerman and Linde began developing office buildings on the outskirts of Boston; they later moved into Boston proper and expanded to other cities during the '80s. By the middle part of the decade, Boston Properties had assembled 50 properties in its portfolio, 10 million square feet of real estate in Washington, Boston, New York, and San Francisco. It was during the company's growth spurt that Zuckerman started making his first investments in media, acquiring a small local newspaper chain in New England in the mid-'70s, The Atlantic in 1980, and U.S. News & World Report four years later. He purchased the Daily News in 1992.

Of note

Zuckerman continues to serve as chairman of Boston Properties—Ed Linde is the company's CEO—and today the publicly-traded real-estate investment trust controls more than 130 commercial properties across the country. In New York, Boston Property's portfolio includes 599 Lexington (where Zuckerman's own 18th floor office is located) and 7 Times Square, which was built in 2004. But the company continues to grow: Boston Properties is constructing a 40-story tower on West 55th Street and, in May 2008, teamed up with Goldman Sachs and the governments of Qatar and Kuwait to buy a collection of office buildings from Harry Macklowe for $3.95 billion, including the famed GM building on Fifth and 59th Street for $2.9 billion.

But while there's little question Zuckerman has been enormously successful in the real estate game, his media track record is mixed. The Daily News squeezes out a small profit, but it still lags behind the Post, and U.S. News has been losing money for years and has failed to close the gap with its larger rivals, Time and Newsweek. Zuckerman did extraordinarily well with his purchase of Fast Company—he unloaded it at the height of the dotcom boom for $350 million—but his more recent magazine forays haven't panned out. In 2003, Zuckerman—along with Harvey Weinstein, Donny Deutsch, Nelson Peltz, and Jeffrey Epstein—put in a bid for New York, ultimately losing out to Bruce Wasserstein. Zuckerman teamed up with Epstein in 2004 to fund Maer Roshan's Radar, pullong out 14 months later after losing their $10 million investment. More recently, Zuckerman pursued Newsday, submitting a bid of $580 million, matching an offer by arch-nemesis Rupert Murdoch. Cablevision, led by Jim Dolan, ended up walking away with the paper instead.

Keeping score

Zuckerman is worth $2.8 billion according to Forbes.

On the job

Zuckerman isn't the sort of developer who spends his days on construction sites wearing a hard hat. Owning media outlets generates the sort of political and social currency that gives him entrée to the Washington political establishment and lands him an occasional seat on Sunday morning political talk shows. And he actively exercises his political influence as the editor-in-chief of U.S. News: While he isn't exactly sitting at his desk proofreading copy, he pens a regular column (which is edited by Harry Evans) and has a hand in the editorial direction of the magazine. (He plays a similar role at the Daily News, directing the overall tone of the political coverage and picking candidates to endorse at election time.) He's used his political capital over the years to serve as a behind-the-scenes deal broker on a variety of issues. He informally helped Bill Clinton with U.S.-Russian relations. And he's long been a close advisor to various Israeli political leaders and an influential go-between in matters pertaining to the Jewish community. In 2001, he succeeded Ron Lauder as the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Grudge

With the Daily News and the Post at each other's throats, Zuckerman has been a bitter rival of Rupert Murdoch for years. The Daily News questions the Post's circulation numbers. The Post chides "the Daily Snooze" for every misspelling and factual error. The News revels in the scandals at Page Six and refers to the column as "Page Fix." The Post questions the methodology used to generate U.S. News's college rankings. And on and on. The one thing they don't do is go after each other personally. Several years ago, PR guru Howard Rubenstein negotiated a pact between the two moguls to keep their private lives out of their respective papers.

Pet causes

Zuckerman gives to a variety of medical causes and Jewish charitable groups. In 2006, he announced his largest gift yet when he handed a $100 million check to Harold Varmus of Memorial Sloan-Kettering. His connection to Sloan-Kettering is personal: His daughter, Abigail, suffered from a childhood cancer that was treated at MSK. Zuckerman is also an NYU trustee and is on the boards of a dozen political groups and Jewish organizations. He donated $10 million to Harvard's Kennedy School in 2004.

Personal

A notorious bachelor—the Washington Post once described him as having "dated more women than Italy has had governments"—Zuckerman's been connected to Nora Ephron, Gloria Steinem, Arianna Huffington, Diane von Furstenberg, Patricia Duff, and Marisa Berenson. In 1996, he tied the knot with art curator Marla Prather. (Justice Stephen Breyer officiated.) In 1997, they had a daughter, Abigail, before separating in 2000 and divorcing in 2001.

Habitat

After a massive flood destroyed his triplex penthouse apartment at 950 Fifth Avenue in 2005 (his neighbor back in the day was disgraced Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski), Zuckerman decamped to the Palace Hotel where he spent months in a triplex suite that cost $10,000 a night. He's since moved back into the apartment, which is decorated with paintings by Picasso, Rothko, and Matisse and sculptures by Frank Stella. Zuckerman also has a four-acre spread on Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton, not far from Allen Grubman and Martha Stewart, and a home in Aspen that he purchased for $8 million in 2000.

Toys

Zuckerman has a helicopter to ferry him to the Hamptons. For longer trips, he relies on a $60 million, 18-seat Gulfstream G550 or a $35 million Falcon 900 that seats 14 people.

True story

A film director pal, Irwin Winkler, cast him in the 1999 film, At First Sight. The role? Billionaire mogul Zuckerman played a homeless man.