Who

Gottlieb runs TVT, the struggling indie label that specializes in hip-hop and hard rock.

Backstory

A Yale and Harvard Law grad, Gottlieb is an unlikely mogul in the world of rap and hard rock. In 1985, he founded the record label TVT out of his apartment with plans to release TV theme songs. (TVT once stood for "Tee Vee Toons.") But Gottlieb quickly branched out and he earned first big success with Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine, following up with other successful hard rock acts like Marilyn Manson and Ministry. In the mid-'90s, the label expanded into rap, hiring Irv Gotti who signed up Ja Rule and Lil' Jon. TVT has suffered from the same woes that have befallen the rest of the industry in recent years as music sales have plummeted. But TVT has had to deal with its own unique problems as well. In 2007, a federal jury concluded that it had sabotaged another company's plan to release old recordings by TVT rapper Pitbull. The $9.1 court judgment prompted TVT to file for bankruptcy and lay off about half its staff in 2008. The company has since announced plans to sell its assets to The Orchard, a distributor of digital music.

Drama

Gottlieb had a longstanding dispute with Def Jam and Lyor Cohen. In 1994, Gottlieb signed a Queens DJ named Irving Lorenzo (or DJ Irv as he was known at the time) as a producer and talent scout at the label. Lorenzo soon signed Cash Money Click, a three-man crew which featured Ja Rule. By 1996, Lorenzo—who was going by Irv Gotti at that point—defected to Def Jam and set up the label Murder Inc. under the Def Jam umbrella. When Gottlieb tried to capitalize on Ja's success by re-releasing several of his older albums, he claimed Def Jam's Cohen blocked him from doing so. The matter eventually went to trial and Gottlieb won a whopping $132 million verdict. The amount was later reduced to $53 million and was then overturned altogether on appeal.

Personal

Gottlieb and his wife, Stephanie, have two kids and live at 55 Central Park West. In 1998, he paid $8.6 million for the building's 4,500-square-foot penthouse, the apartment featured in the movie Ghostbusters which was once occupied by Calvin Klein, David Geffen and Keith Barish. Oddly, although Gottlieb managed to outbid Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols for the stunning apartment, he's yet to move in or sell it.

True story

After a contract dispute with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Reznor retaliated by putting the words "fuck you steve" on a computer monitor in the background in the video Gave Up. Years later, when the news broke that TVT was filing for Chapter 11, a still-bitter Reznor gloated on nineinchnails.com, "Not ALL news about the music industry is bad these days."