My highlights from the book: 

1. When Hearst was in college, he wrote his father that he intended to do something in publishing and politics -and he did, becoming San Francisco's, then New York's, and finally the nation's most powerful publisher. He served two terms in Congress and was, for half a century, a major force in American politics.

2. There has never been nor, most likely, will there ever again be-a publisher like William Randolph Hearst.

3. Decades before synergy became a corporate cliché, Hearst put the concept into practice. His magazine editors were directed to buy only stories which could be rewritten into screenplays to be produced by his film studio and serialized, reviewed, and publicized in his newspapers and magazines. He broadcast the news from his papers over the radio and pictured it in his newsreels. He was as dominant and pioneering a figure in the twentiethcentury communications and entertainment industries as Andrew Carnegie had been in steel, J. Pierpont Morgan in banking, John D. Rockefeller in oil, and Thomas Alva Edison in electricity. At the peak of his power in the middle 1930s, Time magazine estimated his newspaper audience alone at 20 million of the 120 plus million men, women, and children in the nation. His daily and Sunday papers were so powerful as vehicles of public opinion in the United States that Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Winston Churchill all wrote for him.

4. The Hearst I discovered was infinitely more fascinating than the one I had expected to find. This was also Winston Churchill's experience during his visit with Hearst at San Simeon and Los Angeles in 1929. "Hearst was most interesting to meet," Churchill wrote "I got to like him-a grave simple child-with no doubt a nasty temper- playing with the most costly toys. A vast income always overspent: ceaseless building and collecting...two magnificent establishments, two charming wives; complete indifference to public opinion, a 15 million daily circulation, oriental hospitalities, extreme personal courtesy and the appearance of a Quaker elder.

5. Phoebe asked if the public schools were not "rather rough-and-tumble for a delicate child like Willie?" “I do not see anything particularly delicate about Willie, replied Willie's father. If the public schools are rough-and-tumble they will do him good. So is the world rough-and-tumble. Willie might as well learn to face it."

6. He didn't care what the world thought.

7. Though Phoebe had tried her best to make her boy into a gentleman, he was his father's son as well as hers and preferred, like George Hearst, to do as he pleased.

8. Will's decision, made in college and adhered to the rest of his life, to give up drinking himself but host social gatherings at which liquor was abundant, put him at an enormous advantage. Sober, he was able to control events while those around him lost their bearings.

9. Every man, in this world, has his specialty, and when a man is fortunate enough to have found it, he is foolish beyond measure to leave it for something else.

10. While it is clear from this letter – and from several others- that George Hearst intended or rather hoped that his son would take over the Examiner, Will Hearst would, in the years to come, insist that his decision to become a publisher had been met by adamant opposition from his father. Will declined to give his father or anyone else credit for his entrance into newspaper publishing because doing so would have diminished his portrait of himself as a self-made man. Like other children of great men, Hearst both fed off and disowned his inheritance.

11. Though George was not about to let his son give up on Harvard - he abhorred quitters.

12. Tell him to stand in like a man and stick to his studies to the end.

13. His evenings were devoted to the theater – studying the newspaper industry, in preparation for his return to San Francisco to take over his father's newspaper. His text was Joseph Pulitzer's New York World.

14. Will was determined to escape the fate of a rich man's son born a generation too late. He was the dandified, Harvard-educated son of a California FortyNiner. His father's generation had settled the West, cleared the land, built the railroads, discovered and mined the precious metals, and made their oversized fortunes.

15. Hearst spent most of his waking hours at the Examiner and commuted back and forth across the Bay in his fifty-foot speed boat.

16. Because San Francisco, a city of no more than 350,000, had three strong morning papers, Hearst recognized that he would have to expand the Examiner's circulation base by delivering papers by railway north to Sacramento and south to Santa Cruz and San Jose.

17. “After I had lost about a quarter of a million by the paper," he told his interviewer, "my boy Will came out of school, and said he wanted to try his hand at the paper. He said that the reason that the paper did not pay was because it was not the best paper in the country. He said that if he had it he would make it the best paper and that then it would pay. I agreed to stand by him for two years. Now, I don't think there is a better paper in the country. I believe it is now worth upwards of a million."

18. It was time to look beyond San Francisco to the larger world. For Hearst, just as it had been for Joseph Pulitzer a decade earlier, New York City was the logical next stop.

19. There was something almost pathetic in thirty-year-old Will Hearst's asking his mother for a regular salary.

20. Hearst was not only convinced that he would succeed, but expected to do so as extravagantly as he had in San Francisco. His strategy was simple, and given the competitive situation in New York, probably the only one possible. He decided to keep the price of the Morning Journal at a penny, but give readers as much news, entertainment, sports, and spectacle as Joseph Pulitzer's World, Bennett's Herald, and Dana's Sun provided for twice that price.

21. Pulitzer had pursued the same course on entering New York in 1882. At that time, the city's only two-cent paper was Dana's Sun, but it offered its readers only four pages for that price. Pulitzer gave them eight and often twelve. His circulation doubled in four months. By the time the Times and the Herald reduced their price to two cents, Pulitzer had already attracted enough loyal readers to make his paper a success.

22. The measure of a commercially successful newspaper is not simply how well it reports the big events, but what it does when there are no dying statesmen, bloodthirsty desperadoes, or heinous crimes to write about. Hearst succeeded in New York not only because he knew how to report the big stories, but because he was a master at constructing news from nothing.

23. He studies the American people from the standpoint of the vaudeville theatre, is the master mind of a movement that keeps a large part of the nation in an uproar.

24. William remained calm, polite, and well-mannered in the extreme. "Not once," according to Abbott, who worked with him for sixteen years, "did he ever show signs of irritation or lose his temper. To those whom he knew and whose work he liked, he was in those days an ideal boss. A good piece of work always brought a word of congratulation over the 'phone and not infrequently more substantial recognition."

25. He didn't care what people thought of him and despised society.

26. Complaining of this sort was entirely uncharacteristic for Hearst, who never revealed his interior thoughts to anyone other than his mother.

27. Hearst kept his distance from the public. He was personally shy and professionally wary. Perhaps because he knew how the press worked, he never spoke informally or off the record and did not invite the press to his home. He remained a man of mystery.

28. He listened to no one, trusted no one. He simply has a movement of his own.

29. Any kind of success arrogated envy and hatred. The best punishment is to succeed more.

30. When he saw an item he wanted, he bought it, regardless of whether he had the money in the bank to pay for it.

31. Julia Morgan was the perfect choice for the Chief. She was frail-looking, only five feet tall, and weighed no more than one hundred pounds, but she was as indefatigable as her employer. "Wearing tailored suits and French silk blouses," her biographer Sara Boutelle has written, "she clambered over scaffolds and descended into trenches to make sure that the walls and drains met her high standards. The head of a busy, prosperous practice, she worked quietly and alone.”

32. The financial situation of your various companies is in an alarmingly serious condition. The Chief went blithely on spending money like water. When he learned another publisher had bought a castle, he wanted to find a “really fine castle” for him. This was at the very same time he was spending hundred of thousands of dollars annually constructing his castle at San Simeon.

33. Had Hearst reduced his spending to compensate for the loss in revenues from circulation and advertising, he might have been able to weather the storm. But he had taken no effective cost cutting measures. Worse yet, he accelerated his spending. His financial advisers pleaded with him to slow down his spending. Hearst, hoping that the economy would magically rebound, refused to listen.

34. It had taken almost half a century, but his debts had finally grown to the point where no banker in his right mind would consider refunding them.

35. For fifty years, Hearst had ruled his empire as autocratically as his heroes Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte had theirs. He had trusted no one, rejected suggestions that he share power or delegate decision-making, and refused to name a successor. At age seventy-four, he was as hearty as ever and convinced that if left alone he could once again pull off a miracle. But no one believed him capable of making the tough decisions that were necessary and cutting back on personal and corporate spending. The Chief was a builder, not a wrecker; an accumulator, not a liquidator. The banks refused to loan the corporation anything as long as the old man was in control.

36. He faced the crises of bankruptcy and liquidation by himself. There is no evidence that he confided in anyone.