American media producer David Geffen was BOTD in 1943. He was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish parents who emigrated to the United States from Palestine. He studied briefly at the University of Texas and Brooklyn College before moving to Hollywood to pursue a show-business career. Starting in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency, he became a talent agent, scoring success representing singer Laura Nyro and the rock-folk group Crosby Stills & Nash. He co-founded Asylum Records in 1971, signing artists including the Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Linda Ronstadt, leaving in 1975 to become vice chairman of Warner Bros film studios. Retiring due to ill health, he re-emerged in 1980 to co-found Geffen Records, signing Donna Summer and John Lennon as his first key clients. His client list included Cher, Elton John, Sonic Youth, Aerosmith, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Peter Gabriel, Guns N’ Roses, Nirvana and Neil Young. Through the Geffen Film Company, he produced 1980s comedies Little Shop of Horrors, Risky Business and Beetlejuice, before co-founding the DreamWorks studio with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. A prominent philanthropist, he has made donations to schools of medicine in New York and Los Angeles, the Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts, the Yale School of Drama and the Columbia Business School. He was also a prominent funder of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, and donated money to oppose the anti-gay Proposition 8 initiative. After years of speculation about his homosexuality, which included almost marrying Cher, he came out as gay in 1992. He owns the world’s most valuable private art collection, with works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning and Gustav Klimt. He has also been branded America’s biggest individual polluter, due to his private planes and super-yachts. His relationship with college footballer Jamie Kuntz ended with Kuntz facing felony charges for stalking. A further relationship with college student Jeremy Lingvall ended in 2012. In 2023, he married David Armstrong, a former go-go dancer and porn actor 50 years his junior, filing for divorce in 2025. Armstrong retaliated with a civil lawsuit, against Geffen, claiming he was used as a sexual commodity and that the marriage was a “sick game”.