Will the Next Great Mogul Please Stand Up?

The swag bag for last week's All Things Digital conference was pretty tight. It included wine, DVDs, and Guitar Hero III. I'm suggesting an addition for next year: mogul trading cards. They could have vital statistics, outlandish one-liners, the biggest go-for-the-jugular business moves, and, of course, any trophies in the form of mansions, yachts, and famous wives.

It would be fitting, because this fantastic conference, organized by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, isn't about financial results. Nor is it really even about technology. It is all about the moguls behind the giants of tech and entertainment, as these two industries meld into one in our evolving world. And with the likes of Viacom's Sumner Redstone, News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch, and InterActive Corp.'s Barry Diller getting older, I'm a little concerned about our mogul farm system.

No one on stage was a slouch. Each keynoter has created a fundamental shift in media or technology, affecting how millions of people interact with the world and each other. But is it too much to ask for a little showmanship in the modern mogul?

To see what I mean, look no further than Rupert Murdoch, who spent an hour riffing on anything Mossberg and Swisher could throw at him:

• On The Wall Street Journal: The site should be able to charge three times as much for premium content. If it can't, there's something wrong with the Journal and its 2,000 reporters.
• On the movie business: The silly staggering of a film's theatrical release, then DVD release, then television debut is the byproduct of an antiquated system propped up by multiplexes. He can't wait to see it eradicated.
• On politics: Murdoch insisted Fox News was indeed "fair and balanced." He then turned around and all but endorsed Barack Obama for president.
• And on the whole Yahoo-Microsoft drama? "Just get on with it," Murdoch said, looking every bit as exhausted by the topic as Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Yahoo's Jerry Yang did earlier that week.

The crowd could have listened all night.

Barry Diller was so entertaining on a variety of topics that Swisher hardly grilled him about his failed Internet conglomerate strategy at IAC. Asked about Hollywood's lack of original new media content, he said he wasn't surprised, calling Hollywood "a community so inbred it's a wonder their children have any teeth."

The best, most human moment came when Diller said he'd gotten too absorbed in fixing trouble. Now, he wanted to get back to creating it. In other words, go from manager to innovative disrupter.

Diller and Murdoch move seamlessly between New York, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley, and that takes intensity, swagger, and a little bit of glam. Those qualities were required back when they were building their empires. To be a mogul then, you had to be able to hold a room at a cocktail party, control a boardroom with an iron fist, and scare the bejesus out of potential competitors, whether in egocentric Hollywood or power-broker Wall Street. (Diller was even wearing sunglasses in the audience on opening night -- still the Hollywood bigshot, snarked a former executive of Diller's later.)

As the computing age began, Silicon Valley became the new breeding ground, creating the second generation of moguls. But Silicon Valley moguls don't have the same command, the same renaissance-man qualities, because to make it in technology it's all about smarts, long hours, and changing the world through code. No trophy wives. No society galas. And definitely no red carpets. The average Valley mogul doesn't drive a McClaren S1, he drives a Toyota Prius.

It's not that the IT explosion of the last few decades hasn't given us anyone. There's black-turtlenecked Steve Jobs of Apple, who's not just charming but has a full-on "reality distortion field." Who else could force the music industry kicking and screaming into the digital age for just 99¢ a song? And don't forget the yachting bad boy Larry Ellison of Oracle, the real-life inspiration behind Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man. Even Amazon's Jeff Bezos gets some credit. A few attendees at D noted in awe after his keynote that he was the one guy from the dotcom era who made Wall Street bend to his will -- money-losing quarter after money-losing quarter, with his chortling laugh punctuating conference calls the whole way. And those who believed have been richly rewarded.

But the list ends about there. Forget reality distortion field, many in attendance felt Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang couldn't even succinctly explain what Yahoo's new mission is. As venture capitalist David Hornik pointed out in our interview, on paper it was crazy that Kara Swisher asked Jerry Yang why he was qualified to lead Yahoo. After all, he built Yahoo -- one of the greatest success stories in Silicon Valley's history and the largest Internet property in the world. Nonetheless, people in the hallway spent a good deal of the conference debating that very point. He had guts to come and get on stage, given how hard Swisher has been on him and the chaos swirling around the company. But he just didn't inspire.

Michael Dell, who has recently retaken the helm of Dell, was even less impressive. He came off defensive, "on message," and, even worse for a mogul, boring. A good number of attendees cleared out during his keynote, and Mark Veverka, West Coast Editor of Barrons, said if he were to buy or sell any of the companies based on body language, Dell would be a sell. "I've seen Michael Dell before and he was passionate, but that was just all gone," Veverka said. Of course, later in the week, Dell had an impressive earnings surprise, and ultimately, numbers matter more than charisma.

Time Warner's Jeff Bewkes -- with his so-called "anchorman good looks" -- didn't do much better when he trumpeted AOL's No. 1 position in global instant messaging, news, finance, sports, and entertainment. Too bad it wasn't true. Scott Moore, Yahoo's Senior Vice President in charge of Media, underscored Yahoo's dominance, reading the latest comScore numbers off his smart phone during the Q&A. "You'd probably know better than me," Bewkes fumbled, still on stage. Swisher quipped he'd just brought a knife to a gunfight.

Speaking of violence, Steve Ballmer terrified everyone with an odd moment of intensity, threatening that Microsoft would keep "coming, and coming, and coming" in the battle to beat Google. Meanwhile, Bill Gates looked like he might have left permanent claw marks in the arms of his red chair as Mossberg endlessly needled him about whether Vista was an outright failure. Neither of them had anything close to old-school mogul panache.

Then there was the mogul in the making, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg -- Swisher's so-called "toddler CEO." He was the youngest keynoter, and the only one running a still-private startup. I've spent more time interviewing Zuckerberg than anyone else who took the stage, so it's hard for me to view his keynote as a detached potential investor or partner. In one-on-one meetings over pizza in the dorm-room-like filth of Facebook's engineering headquarters, Zuckerberg is impressive: thought-provoking, self-assured, visionary. You see why people call him a young Bill Gates or a young Marc Andreessen. But like Gates, he doesn't loosen up much on stage.

It was Zuckerberg's first appearance with Facebook's new president, Sheryl Sandberg, and he was his usual awkward self with the familiar talking points. Many felt he deferred too many of the substantive questions to his No. 2 -- something Yang didn't do hours earlier when he shared the stage with Yahoo President Sue Decker. Meanwhile, Sandberg played the role of the more polished, chatty executive. But what Zuckerberg lacked in polish, Sandberg seemed to lack in authenticity. It was clear Facebook wasn't her company. She just didn't seem to have that fire in her belly. If you could fuse them together and have the gutsy no-we're-not-selling ballsy conviction of Zuckerberg with the more evident charm of Sandberg, you might have a new mogul to represent the new Internet age. But as-is, neither seemed quite up to the job.

The whole thing left me wondering how much it all matters in the business world -- to have a CEO who offends, entertains, and inspires, all while he or she leaves you wanting more. A week ago, I would have said that in business, substance matters, not style. But seeing so many of these iconic leaders who dominate the covers of glossy business magazine in the flesh, it occurred to me how much being CEO of a publicly traded company -- much less a media or Internet empire -- is about putting on a show. As Veverka put it, for the biggest investors, it's not about what CEOs say, given the restrictions around publicly traded companies, but how they say it.

Tech has largely gotten a pass, but as the Web becomes the leading media and entertainment platform, its moguls may require more of the élan seen with the Diller-Murdoch generation. To win, they must sell to advertisers, not corporate IT folks, and -- gasp -- even court Hollywood. It worked for Bill Gates to be just a geek; today, Mark Zuckerberg needs to be more than that.

All of these moguls have done bold things. Unadvisable things. Things that have made Wall Street balk and the press erupt in ridicule. Is Zuckerberg turning down billions of dollars for his barely-break-even company any less ballsy than Rupert-tabloid-Murdoch buying The Wall Street Journal, a paper so un-glitzy that it still has dot pictures? Is Jerry Yang turning down a 60% premium for Yahoo despite three months when he couldn't scare up another bidder any less bold than Larry Ellison gobbling up more than 40 software companies, whether they wanted to be acquired or not?

Barry Diller had a great one-liner about Microsoft and Yahoo that applies to all of these cases: When you turn down that much of a premium with no other clear option, "one side is smart and wily, and the other side has to be otherwise." He said he'd leave it up to us to determine which was which.

I love CEOs who make bold, unadvisable moves -- and investors should, too. That's where true visionary genius comes in. It's what inspires the best employees. That's where massive swings in stock price come from. Frankly, it's the moments when a chief executive actually earns his or her outlandish pay. But maybe the key to being a true mogul isn't just making that bold decision that could wreck a company -- or turn it into an empire -- it's selling us all on the belief that he's the one who is the genius and not the idiot.

In the end, there was one surprising candidate for the next great media mogul: Bobby Kotick of Activision. Hardly flashy but completely at ease in the spotlight, he explained with conviction that no startups were going to eat his lunch, because the capital requirements were simply too high. He deftly deflected concerns about the violence in videogames by joking that Activision games limit violence to small animals, and then deferred questions about what he's witnessed over the last few months as a Yahoo board member by saying, "Can't we get back to talking about violence in videogames?" Even Swisher was charmed, pausing at one point to say, "Oh, Bobby Kotick, I do enjoy you." He seemed to be the only mogul not collecting Social Security that utterly charmed the whole room. Even Veverka said Activision would get his vote as the stock to buy based on body language alone.

In the endless debate over who wins the new-media battle of the living room, Kotick -- and a few others at the conference -- made an argument that it's ultimately videogame companies. Think about it: The widening demographics of videogame players, the integration of Blu-Ray players into the Play Station 3, and of course, the degree to which Kotick's Guitar Hero has spurred sales of classic rock albums all make the case. And as Activision and Vivendi Games work to close the near-$20 billion deal announced last December, Kotick will be the man at the helm of the largest gaming company in the world.

As the head of this empire, Kotick straddles music, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Valley. It might be fitting that the next great mogul is a gamer, not a computing whiz kid.