There’s a lot of expected people on here and probably just as many unexpected… namely the guy on the cover:
NEW YORK (November 27, 2007)— DETAILS’ December issue picks its annual Power 50, ranking 50 of the most powerful individuals—aged 45 and under, not all of them likeable— who represent the zeitgeist of 2007. Started in 2002, the Power 50 list is not always based on the traditional sense of power, but is instead based on the men who control what’s top of mind at a cocktail party, in the boardroom, and in the bedroom. These men control viewing patterns, buying habits, anxieties, lust—the things one thinks about.
On the DETAILS Power 50 List 2007, Silicon Valley savants rub shoulders with Father of the Year Kevin Federline, preachers consort with pornographers, and High School Musical 2 goody-two-shoes walk the halls with the new wave of school shooters.
“The Power 50 is our unique and irreverent guide to the people, trends and ideas that shaped 2007,” said Daniel Peres, DETAILS editor in chief. “Whether it was the Disney Kids infiltrating our daily lives, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg taking over the internet, or Harry Potter completing his journey, this list chronicles not only the traditional movers and shakers, but the people—from low-brow entertainment to self-help freaks—who influenced what we read, thought, discussed and explored. DETAILS enjoyed going along for the ride and we look forward to what 2008 has in store.”
The full list includes:
#1 Zac Efron, Shia LaBoeuf, and the Disney Kids (ages: 15 to 27): Efron, LaBoeuf, Miley Cyrus, Hilary Duff, and the other Disney creations are infiltrating adult headspace like an airborne superbug. Like it or not, we’re all caught in the mouse’s trap.
#2 The Surge (average age: 27): What do you call 20,000 soldiers sent off to fight a war that’s long since been lost? George W. Bush calls it The Surge, conveying power, momentum, and impermanence.
#3 Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook (age: 23): Nearly four years ago, Mark Zuckerberg registered the domain name thefacebook.com and soon after dropped out of Harvard. Today, his social-networking website, known simply as Facebook, is arguably the hottest Internet property on the planet.
#4 The Bible Beaters (age: born again yesterday): The Jesus freak has gotten crafty. The Christian right has lately adopted a kinder, gentler strategy—one that’s frighteningly effective: insidious religious propaganda in pop-culture packaging.
#5 School Shooters: Eric Harris and Dylan Kleboid (ages: 18 and 17): Eight years on, and the bodies are still piling up. Harris and Kelboid, who murdered 12 of their Columbine High School classmates in 1999, remain the role models for the killers responsible for this year’s school shootings.
#6 Subprime Suckers (age: 34): These are the guys riding one of the biggest waves of the Bush years: a flood of P.T. Barnum-style “subprime” loans approved without any concern that maybe the borrowers couldn’t actually afford them.
#7 Good Fathers: Kevin Federline and Larry Birkhead (ages: 29 and 34): Meet America’s new parental role models. We all expected Federline and Birkhead to crash and burn as fathers. Instead, by being more visible presences in their children’s lives than many Hollywood A-listers, they emerged as unlikely candidates for Dad of the Year.
#8 Muqtada al-Sadr, Shiite Cleric (age: 34): As the major players begin to plan for a post–U.S. Iraq, Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr has already burnished his statesman credentials, ordering a cease-fire for his Mahdi army (while still unofficially siccing them on his enemies).
#9 The Other F Word (age: forever young): If you take a look back, it appears that 2007 was the year of the F-word—but not the one you’re thinking of. It’s a word that anyone who ever spent time in an American schoolyard is familiar with: faggot.
#10 Howard Wolfson, Political Consultant for Hillary Clinton (age: 40; last year’s rank: 47): Hillary’s ascendancy has less to do with Bill than with the vintage-Rove-style deftness of her top strategist, Howard Wolfson, who has steered her through every controversy she’s faced over the past eight years.
#11 Erik Prince, founder and CEO, Blackwater Worldwide (age: 38): A conservative Republican with ties to the Bush administration, Erik Prince built his army-for-hire from veterans of elite forces. Since 2003, the private security firm has reportedly earned upwards of $100 million a year.
#12 Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google founders (ages: both 34; last year’s rank: 11): In addition to contributing yet another verb to the popular lexicon this year (“Google it”), Bin and Page snapped up the billion dollar Internet phenom YouTube and saw the stock price of their Internet colossus exceed $600 a share.
#13 Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, YouTube founders (ages: 28 and 30; last year’s rank: 2): When offered $1.65 billion for a 20-month-old Internet start up, Hurley and Chen didn’t compromise their site’s messy democracy.
#14 Stephen Paul Jones, YouPorn creator (age: 27): Since its debut in August 2006, the user-generated video-sharing site YouPorn has become the Web’s most popular adult site.
#15 Green Guilt-Trippers (age: thirtysomething): Meet the greener-than-thou crusader: your smug suburban neighbor with the Prius, the bumper-sticker guy in line at the burrito place, the soul-patched doer in the next cubicle. They’re the voices of 21st century green guilt.
#16 Joel Osteen, Pastor, Lakewood Church (age 44): Known as the Smiling Preacher, Osteen has become the most popular pastor in America by casting God in the role of benevolent life coach.
#17 Kevin Martin, Chairman, Federal Communications Commission (age: 40): Since Martin was appointed in 2005, he has held the door open for some of the biggest media-consolidating deals ever, including a $67 billion AT&T-BellSouth merger and the pending $13 billion Sirius-XM satellite radio deal.
#18 Rascal Flatts: Gary Levox, Joe Don Rooney, Jay Demarcus (ages 37, 32, 36): The soundtrack for Middle ‘Merica has always been country music, but these three very-average-looking dudes are appealing to a much bigger fan base than their forebears did.
#19 The Politician’s Son: Andrew Giuliani (age 21); Craig, Ben, Josh, Matt, Tagg Romney (ages: 26, 29, 32, 36, 37): The person who could most easily torpedo the presidential campaign of America’s Mayor is not a former mistress or political insider; it’s Rudy Giuliani’s own estranged son, Andrew.
#20 Ryan Seacrest (age 33; last year’s rank 33): This telegenic host is a fierce workaholic who’s established himself as a dynamic Hollywood entrepreneur.
#21 Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria (age 42; last year’s rank: 25): While Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been hogging the world stage, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has been stealthily competing for the title of Biggest Threat to the United States.
#22 Jonathan Ive, Senior VP of Industrial Design, Apple (age: 40; last year’s rank: 30): The success of the iPod made it hard to imagine that Jonathan Ive could design a product to rival it. Yet the reclusive Brit did just that, crafting the must-have gadget of the 21st century: the iPhone.
#23 Perez Hilton (aka Mario Lavandeira), blogger and proprietor, PerezHilton.com (age: 29; last year’s rank: 5): The shrewdest man in the take-no-prisoners world of Hollywood gossip rules from a laptop in the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Sunset Boulevard.
#24 Andrew Bieniawski, Office of Global Threat Reduction, National Nuclear Security Administration (age: 40): Forget the $40 billion spent annually on Homeland Security’s border patrols and ports; our main defense against a terrorist detonating a dirty bomb is Andrew Bieniawski.
#25 Michael Levine and Howard Nuchow, coheads, CAA Sports (ages: 36 and 37): The old model was simple: Win the big games, go to Disney World, get some endorsements. But now that sports stars are hosting SNL and hawking clothing lines, an athlete’s on-the-field performance is becoming secondary to his celebrity portfolio. Enter the powerhouse agency CAA, which launched a sports division last year to give the full “Hollywood treatment” to more than 35 pro athletes.
#26 David Plouffe, campaign manager, Obama 2008 (age: 43): Barack Obama’s guerrilla strategist has a clear plan for his candidate: make him the Macintosh to Hillary Clinton’s PC.
#27 Xavier Von Erck, founder, Perverted Justice (age: 28): Von Erck founded the website perverted- justice.com with the goal of outing suspected pedophiles by any means necessary.
#28 David Cutler, professor of Economics, Harvard University (age: 42): Raise your hand if you think we’ll get universal health-care coverage because it’s “the moral thing to do.” If it’s enacted, it will probably be for economic reasons—and it’ll likely be thanks to Cutler.
#29 Iggy, adoptee dog (age: 6 months or 3.5 in dog years): Ellen DeGeneres adopted a pup, Iggy, but then dumped him on her hairdresser when she discovered Iggy didn’t get along with her cats. When the shelter reclaimed the dog, we were all left to watch as DeGeneres sobbed and wailed through her show.
#30 Boys Behind Girly TV: Josh Schwartz, Executive Producer, Gossip Girl (age: 31), and Tony DiSanto, executive producer, The Hills (age: 39): To watch guilty-pleasure TV is to obsess over one-dimensional characters with an intensity you’d never admit to in real life. Schwartz and DiSanto are masters at creating those characters.
#31 Ben Silverman, cochairman, NBC Entertainment and NBC Universal (age: 37): When he was appointed to one of the most powerful jobs in television in May, Silverman had been on a five-year winning streak, founding Reveille Productions, working with brands like American Express and McDonalds’s to underwrite production costs, and creating American pop-culture touchstones by importing foreign hits like The Office and Ugly Betty.
#32 Revenge of the Nerds: Judd Apatow, writer, director, producer (last year’s rank: 16), and Seth Rogen, actor, writer, producer (ages 39 and 25): At first, it was just a cute underdog story. The creator of two canceled TV series about social outcasts (Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared) strikes gold by making a 40-year-old virgin a viable leading man, using the resulting clout to produce his husky protégé’s films. Then Knocked Up and Superbad, both starring Rogen, grossed $270 million this summer.
#33 Cheaters: Barry Bonds (Age: 43), Tim Donaghy (age: 40), and Michael Rasmussen (age: 33): The biggest sports stories of 2007 all have one thing in common: the stench of cheating.
#34 Bobby Jindal, Governor-elect, Louisiana (age: 36): If you want to know whether—and when—the Republican Party will gird itself to regain control in Washington, keep your eye on Louisiana, where Jindal won the gubernatorial election in a landslide in October.
#35 Vocal Vets (average age: 25): To call the Iraq war “another Vietnam” is to overlook one critical difference: This time the protesters aren’t heckling the veterans; they are the veterans.
#36 The Exonerated: Reade Seligmann, David Evans, and Colin Finnerty; Duke Lacrosse players (ages: 21): Sure, we all thought they did it. It was a closed case. Wrong. Not only were they innocent, they triumphed over an unethical D.A. who suppressed evidence and ironically, became the only person to be jailed over the whole affair.
#37 Career Doctors, Justin Timberlake, Mark Ronson, and Timbaland (last year’s rank: 29; ages: 26, 32, 36): The music industry is about one thing these days: finding the right career-maker.
#38 The Bodyguard (average age: thirtysomething): Thanks to a revolving cast of loose-lipped lovers and undermining manager-moms, the bodyguard has emerged as the modern celebrity’s trusted confidant—making him one of the most powerful swimmers in a shark-infested pool.
#39 Antoine Arnault, communications director, Louis Vuitton (age: 30): The son of LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault, Antoine Arnault could successfully cruise on nepotism. Instead, as communications director for Louis Vuitton, Antoine has made proactive—and sometimes risky—plays.
#40 Steven Rubenstein, President, Rubenstein Communications (age: 38): Forget spin, in the world of public relations Rubenstein is the ultimate wash-and-rinse man. The power broker has done damage control for Naomi Campbell and HBO’s embattled ex-honcho Chris Albrecht, among others.
#41 Harry Potter, Wizard (age: 17): Nine years after her fictional boy wizard first cast his spell in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling is the wealthiest author in history.
#42 Mr. Contagious: Andrew Speaker, Tuberculosis carrier (age: 32): This spring, a young Atlanta lawyer named Andrew Speaker caught a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, initially diagnosed as a super-germ capable of infecting and killing tens of thousands of people, and then he stepped onto a plane.
#43 Gameboy: Jason Jones, cofounder of Bungie Studios, creator of the Halo Franchise (age: 35): On September 25, the gamer nation delivered the kind of box office Hollywood rarely enjoys these days when the first-person shooter Halo 3 hit the market and rang up $300 million in sales—in a week—to become the most successful launch in history.
#44 Jay-Z, President and CEO, Def Jam Recordings (age: 38; last year’s rank: 20). It’s a measure of the man’s stature that this counts as an off year: Jay-Z’s protégé Rihanna has the No. 1 song of the year in “Umbrella”—owing to a Jay guest spot—which helped his Def Jam label group become the industry’s second-largest record company.
#45 Well-Dressed Man (age: in his prime): Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Gregory Peck: Those guys looked so good in suits—impeccably cut specimens garnished with tie bars, pocket squares, and fedoras, that 50 years later, we’re still trying to capture the essence of their aesthetic.
#46 Ira Ehrenpreis, General Partner, Technology Partners (age: 38): In 2000, when a certain former vice president thrust environmental issues onto the national stage, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis saw a golden opportunity: he guided his firm, Technology Partners, into investments in clean energy, transportation, and water.
#47 Michael Rapino, CEO, Live Nation (age: 41): Everyone knows that the real money in the music business is in tours and T-shirts – not album sales. That’s why Live Nation, the largest concert promoter in the world, is considered the industry’s sugar daddy.
#48 Markos Mouslitsas, founder, Daily Kos (age: 36; last year’s rank: 43): Now that Mouslitsas’ liberal blog, which counts Jimmy Carter among its contributors, gets 600,000 visitors a day, the entire left half of the Hill looks to the Kos the way networks look to the Nielsens.
#49 Kelly Slater, Surfer (age: 35): Being a world-champion surfer has always been near the top of the list of male fantasy careers, but Slater has ridden the enviable profession to new heights.
#50 Tyler Perry, playwright, actor, director, author, producer (age: 38): A studio head began a recent meeting with Perry by asking, “So who are you, and what do you do?” This to a man whose production company will gross more than $1 billion by 2009, a man who controls a media empire that includes books (one a New York Times No. 1 bestseller) and television (TBS shelled out $200 million for Tyler Perry’s House of Payne).
Check out the full listing at Details.com