Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, wants to shift the internet power base.

Last week his for-profit company, Wikia, announced its purchase of Grub, a web crawler. Grub will be incorporated into Wikia’s search engine, which, like Wikipedia, will seek editorial input from a broad web audience.

Angelo Mozilo, who made news this week with his startlingly candid assessment of the nation’s housing market, is a self-made man.

To pay tuition when he attended Catholic high school, he got a job with a mortgage company during the week and continued to work in his father’s Bronx butcher shop on the weekends, according to his biography with The Horatio Alger Association.

The affair between Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and a local TV reporter may become an issue in a proposed real estate development in the city.

Telemundo, owner of KVEA-TV, is weighing the fate of journalist Mirthala Salinas, who reported on the mayor while she was romantically involved with him.

At the same time, NBC Universal, owner of Telemundo, has proposed a $3-billion development in Los Angeles that includes 2,900 new homes and 1.6 million square feet of commercial space. The project would require city approval.

Serial entrepreneur While Marc Andreessen has done it again.

The founder of Opsware will receive about $160 million as his share of the company’s $1.6 billion sale to Hewlett-Packard. On his blog Monday, Andreessen described the eight-year run of his company, which began with the name Loudcloud, as an “unbelievable journey.”

Mark Zuckerberg has spent much of his time fending off potential buyers of his company, Facebook. Next week, he’ll be defending against plaintiffs who claim he stole their idea for the web site.

In late 2002, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, classmates at Harvard, began developing a social-networking website to be called Harvard Connection or connectu.com. They recruited Zuckerberg to help program the site, but Zuckerberg instead founded what is now known as Facebook.

Differences with her father, Sumner Redstone, have led Shari Redstone to consider selling her 20% stake in the family business, National Amusements.

Sumner Redstone posted a letter on Forbes.com Friday, saying he would weigh a fair offer from his daughter. Ms. Redstone issued a statement later in the day saying she would consider a sale, and noting that National Amusements had been “publicly valued at $8 billion.”

It’s not a good time to be a member of the board of directors of Dow Jones & Co., owner of The Wall Street Journal.

One director resigned Thursday because of the board’s decision to
approve a $5 billion buyout offer from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. A second director is under investigation by the SEC because of insider
trading allegations related to that buyout offer.

The board of directors of Dow Jones said late Tuesday night that itw as “prepared to approve” a buyout offer from Rupert Murdoch, which would give the conservative press baron control of The Wall Street Journal.

Fine, but the real news is that Al Gore says Murdoch is a man of his word who supports independent voices, according to The New York Times.

It’s not often that the Times buries a lead, but this is one of them. The newspaper acknowledged that Gore’s support is an “unlikely endorsement,” but put it at the very end of its main Murdoch-Dow Jones story, posted to its Web site late Tuesday night.

The dramatic rise of the hedge fund is being seen not only in the worlds of business, politics and government, but in philanthropy. One of the best examples is the Robin Hood Foundation,, a nonprofit fighting poverty in New York City.

While controversial tech entrepreneur Vinod Gupta
widely cultivates political alliances around the country, he stays
close to home when he picks board members for his Omaha-based company,
infoUSA.

Six of the company’s eight directors, including Gupta, have strong ties to Omaha or Nebraska, a Muckety analysis shows. A seventh is a name partner in a law firm that did more then $1 million in business with infoUSA last year.

Truly independent directors are a key to responsible corporate governance, experts say. If directors are too close to a CEO, they can’t properly oversee his actions.

Gupta’s lavish spending on his political connections, including naming buildings after Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton in one of his India projects, have caused a backlash. Some infoUSA shareholders sued Gupta for wasting company money.