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Media Centric May 29, 2008, 5:00PM EST

How to Get Rich—and Notorious

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Dennis still owns more than 50 titles in Britain and Australia, including the interesting electronic-only, downloadable magazine Monkey. The technology offers a much richer experience than digital translations of magazines—photos become videos, that sort of thing. But Monkey plows terrain immediately familiar to Maxim readers. (The man himself gleefully describes it as "an idiot magazine for young idiots to whom I am immensely grateful.") He also owns the news digest The Week, which is published in the U.S. and Britain. An edition for Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong comes this fall, and Dennis is mulling Indian and Canadian versions as well. In his New York offices, he brags, are 15 to 20 empty desks to be filled by employees of his next venture, about which he keeps mum as to both topic and time frame.

He's more expansive when not discussing expansion, and especially on the topic of how to amass staggering sums. Among his chief maxims: Prune overhead regularly; team spirit is for losers; pay yourself just enough to eat; and hire others to do the day-to-day. His most crucial point: "ownership isn't the important thing. It's the only thing." Dennis counsels readers to sell early, a guideline he admits he's often failed to follow. (It's widely believed he's passed on bigger offers for his American magazines. Dennis refuses to discuss any offers for those properties.) He's also pretty frank about the collateral costs of getting rich, in time and relationships with the people closest to those who seek serious fortune. His own pursuit, he writes, "led me into a lifestyle of narcotics, drink, and consolatory debauchery."

His is a get-rich-quick book, in fact, that warns off all but those who want monstrous wealth very, very badly, as Dennis did. He makes it amply clear, in the book and in conversation, that the sheer animal instincts and appetites that made him so fearsome a competitor, so smashing a success, extracted a heavy toll. Even at his age, they sometimes still do.

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So Did He Or Didn't He?

The five-hour-long interview with Felix Dennis that formed the basis for Ginny Dougary's lengthy Apr.2 front-page story for The Times of London revealed much about the enormously successful entrepreneur. In it, he discussed his thoughts on monogamy, his mother, his estranged father, mortality, his reflections on his imprisonment and the men he met there, the special glassware he had made during his crack years, as well as the supposed murder to which he confessed. He subsequently recanted.

Fine is BusinessWeek's MediaCentric columnist and Fine On Media blogger .

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