The Observer – Top 100 Influential People in New York - From Marc Jacobs and Jon Stewart, to Henry Kravis and Lorne Michaels

The Observer – Top 100 Influential

People in New YorkFrom Marc Jacobs and Jon Stewart, to Henry Kravis, Lorne Michaels, and Lauren Santo Domingo - The Observer shares it’s top influential people in NYC.

How is this determined?

• Every year The Observer comes out with it’s Top 100 Influential People in New York. There are currently more than 8 million people living in New York City, so making the top 100 is pretty impressive. In order to determine who they would pick, the Observer asked these questions:

• Did this person move the needle somehow?

• Is there something of significance that he or she changed?

• The results were split up into 11 different categories. It include Art, Business, Entertainment, City Life, Media, Fashion, Society, Real Estate, Spirit of the City, Sports, and Tech-VC.

Art – Cindy Sherman• Cindy Sherman is one of the best-known

photographers on the planet. Her photographs—in which she often uses herself as subject—have upended the way we see art history, the way men see women, the way women see themselves and the way we all see ourselves.

• Though she started as a painter at Buffalo State College, Ms. Sherman launched herself to stardom with her iconic self-portraiture. Since the ’70s, she has photographed herself in an immense range of costumes, from Hollywood movie star to grotesque clown to Renaissance muse. For decades, her portraits—which are currently on display in galleries across North America and Europe—have explored and challenged the roles women play in contemporary society and throughout history. By acting as both subject and photographer, Ms. Sherman has demonstrated women’s capacity to forge their own identities and define their place in society on their own terms.

Business – Henry Kravis

• In the same year The New York Observer was getting going, a slightly bigger deal was in the works. The management of RJR Nabisco was trying to take the cigarette maker private and was offering a stunning fortune to do so. Henry Kravis offered more. Kravis won, and a legend was born.

• With mentor Jerome Kohlberg and cousin George Roberts, Mr. Kravis was a pioneer of “bootstrap capitalism,” using a company’s assets and debt capacity to acquire it with little equity. KKR’s leveraged buyouts of Beatrice, Kraft and other giant corporations defined the restructuring of American consumers’ most familiar brand names: Tropicana, Samsonite, Safeway, Salem, Winston, Oreo, Ritz, Snickers, MacMillan, Fleet Bank and many others.

• As if remaking how M&A are transacted isn’t enough, Mr. Kravis is a leading philanthropist as well as an astute collector of art. Along with his wife, Marie-Josée, he has been a tremendous supporter of New York institutions. He is a board member and a multimillion-dollar contributor to Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia Graduate School of Business. He also started the nonprofit New York City Investment Fund and is on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York City Ballet.

Entertainment - Lorne Michaels

• Who would have thought a kid from Toronto would go on to become the most important man in the history of American comedy? In 1975, NBC invited a 30-year-old comedy writer named Lorne Michaels to pitch a show to accomplish the minor feat of giving Johnny Carson Tonight reruns a rest at 11:30 p.m. on Saturdays. Appealing to younger audiences would be a plus.

• From this seed, Michaels gave birth to a late-night sketch show initially called NBC’s Saturday Night. (After a Howard Cosell-hosted variety show with a similar name tanked, Mr. Michaels’s show became Saturday Night Live.) SNL introduced the world to the original cast of “The Not Ready for Prime-Time Players,” including Chevy Chase, Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi and Gilda Radner. All became comedic icons.

• His show, which has remained firmly under his creative control for nearly 40 years—save a brief blip in the early ’80s—would go on to redefine late-night television, create a national comedic institution and remake American comedy. Most remarkably, SNL accomplished the impossible feat of making it cool to stay in on Saturday nights.

• Over the years, SNL’s supremacy would establish New York as the definitive comedian’s mecca. Even as Mr. Michaels conducted frequent talent raids in Chicago, L.A. and Toronto and at The Harvard Lampoon, the talent thrived and grew in the SNL environment. His impeccable eye for potential would only grow more acute as the years went on, with the show launching the careers of some of the biggest stars of our time—from Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers to Will Ferrell and Tina Fey—and spawning numerous TV shows and films, from Wayne’s World to 30 Rock.

Fashion - Marc Jacobs

• Marc Jacobs, the brash enfant terrible of high fashion, can’t seem to do anything without making a splash. Since he became creative director of luxury French fashion house Louis Vuitton, he has strengthened its business, breathing life into the formerly stuffy leather goods company with a now-iconic collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.

• His own lines, Marc Jacobs and Marc by Marc Jacobs, have become a wardrobe staple for millions of women (try to walk a Manhattan mile without spotting one of his trademark workwear bags). His retail mecca on Bleecker Street, which he runs with his partner, Robert Duffy, has transformed Greenwich Village, turning the neighborhood into a fashion haven. Add to this his activism on issues from AIDS to skin cancer—who can forget those T-shirts featuring naked celebrities?—and it becomes readily apparent that Mr. Jacobs is a whole lot more than just the name on your bag.

Media - Jon Stewart

• It’s time to face facts: Jon Stewart will probably never run for public office. As he often points out, his job is to tell jokes, often silly ones, on a network that also features a show with talking poop. But the very fact that he needs to remind us of this shows the significance of his extraordinary career in fake news. Yes, Jon Stewart is a comedian. But he has forever changed the very nature of comedy: what we think it is, and particularly what we think it can do.

• He took a flagging satire of news shows on an obscure network and transformed it into one of our primary platforms for speaking truth to power.

• Born Jon Leibowitz in 1962, Mr. Stewart became one of the fresh faces on the stand-up circuit in the ’90s. His stint on The Larry Sanders Show and a few brief but memorable turns in television and film introduced Mr. Stewart to comedy audiences, but he really made his mark after taking over the faltering Daily Show from Craig Kilborn. Mr. Stewart was instrumental in changing the format and focus of the show, encouraging his correspondents (including Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell and Ed Helms) to take a political stance and let their opinions inspire their comedy. In so doing, Mr. Stewart and his multiple-Emmy-winning staff not only created the most biting satire of American politics in television history, they invented a new way of informing the public about the issues. Studies show that not only do many young Americans get much of their news from The Daily Show, but that the show’s content is as substantive as that of “serious” news programs.

Society – Lauren Santo Domingo

• Lauren Santo Domingo is giving the job—yes, “job” because she makes it pay—of socialite in New York City some 21st-century updates. Sure, she’s got icy-blond good looks, a millionaire upbringing and a billion-heir husband, but she’s also managed to make bank on something she’s an expert at: exclusivity. In 2011, Ms. Santo Domingo co-founded Moda Operandi, a fashion startup that allows members to pre-order looks straight off the runway, months before they hit stores.

• Public-embarrassment- and reality-show-free, Ms. Santo Domingo (with credit to her PR past) has also managed to bring Gilded Age respectability back to the “Manhattan socialite” moniker while still embracing (and properly using) social media platforms. Ms. Santo Domingo is a pro at keeping it classy, and her hydrogen peroxide-sharp tweets (followed by 58,000 users) and envy-inducing Instagram feed prove she’s a socialite for the digital age.

Tech-VC – David Karp

• When David Karp was 14, his parents recognized that Bronx Science could not keep up with him and introduced him to the animation producer Fred Siebert, with whom he interned. Mr. Karp moved on to work as the chief technology officer for UrbanBaby, an Internet forum for parents, and in February 2007, he founded his own company. It provided a platform for the rapid-fire posting of text, photos, quotes, links, music and videos. It was designed to make blogging and information-sharing easier.

• The program was called Tumblr, which, at the moment, employs 164 people and contains 96 million blogs and 44.3 billion posts. Mr. Karp, who was included in this year’s Forbes 30 under 30 list, has made a good sum of money—he purchased a condo in Williamsburg for $1.6 million last year, and his net worth is greater than $200 million—but he’s still figuring out how to monetize his website with meaningful modes of advertising. He dismisses the revenue models of Twitter and Facebook, with their “little blue links,” as he calls them. However Mr. Karp’s ambitions play out, the insignia on Tumblr’s About page keeps the company grounded: Made in NY.

Complete List

ArtsCindy ShermanAndy WarholLarry GagosianGlenn LowryAgnes GundJeff KoonsJerry Saltz and Roberta SmithMarina AbramovicJames Levine

BusinessGeorge SorosJames DimonCarl IcahnRonald PerelmanMichael SteinhardtPaul SingerHenry KravisBernard Madoff

Kenneth ChenaultHenry KravisBernard MadoffKenneth ChenaultLaurence FinkStephen Schwarzman

City Life

Carrie BradshawDanny MeyerIan SchragerMario BataliDavid ChangJulian Niccolini

EntertainmentJay-Z and Beyoncé Cameron MackintoshPeter GelbJerry Seinfeld

Martin ScorseseSpike LeePeter GelbJerry SeinfeldMartin ScorseseSpike LeeMadonna Woody AllenScott RudinHarvey and Bob Weinstein Robert De NiroLorne MichaelsHoward Stern

Fashion

Ralph Lauren Marc JacobsAnna WintourJenna LyonsMichael Kors

Terry LungrenVera WangCathy Horyn

Media

Jon StewartStrauss ZelnickRupert MurdochJoan DidionHelen Gurley BrownRegis PhilbinMartha StewartTom WolfeMortimer ZuckermanDavid LettermanTom FrestonNick DentonRoger AilesPaula ScherBarbara Walters

Complete List

Jeffery ZuckerMichiko Kakutani

Politics

Bill ClintonRudolph GiulianiCory BookerAndrew CuomoMichael BloombergHillary ClintonCharles Schumer

Real Estate

Stephen Ross, Jeff Blau, and Bruce BealDonald TrumpAnthony MalkinGary BarnettDouglas Durst

Jonathon (Jody) DurstLarry Silverstein

Society

Tinsley MortimerDerek BlasbergLee Radziwill and Mercedes BassBrook AstorC.Z. GuestLauren Santo Domingo

Spirit of the City

Howard RubensteinRaymond KellyRandi WeingartenRobert Hammond and Joshua DavidAl Sharpton

Joel KleinCardinal Timothy DolanMasamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger

Sports

Brian CashmanJoe TorreDerek JeterEli ManningJohn Mara and Robert Wood Johnson IV

Tech-VC

Kenneth LererShana FisherKevin RyanDavid KarpBarry DillerFred Wilson

Source

• All information and biographies in this power point came directly from: The Observer Top 100 Influential People