Tom Anderson

Tom Anderson

Tom Anderson is an American internet entrepreneur. His most notable achievement is the founding of the social networking website ‘MySpace’. Known as ‘MySpace Tom’, Anderson became the default picture of the website that became the favorite website of millions of people.

Anderson was born on 8th November 1970. As a high schooler, Anderson was a computer hacker with the pseudonym ‘Lord Flathead’. He was able to crack the security code of Chase Manhattan Bank, an incident that even led to the FBI coming to get him. However they could not arrest him as he was underage. He attended University of California, Berkeley where he studied Rhetoric and English. Later on he joined a band as their lead singer. He then gained a degree in Critical Film Studies from the University of California in Los Angeles.

He started off in 2000 with a job as product tester and copywriter at a digital storage company named XDrive. This was where he met his future business partner Chris DeWolfe. After XDrive went into bankruptcy, Anderson and DeWolfe started ResponseBase, a direct marketing company which they sold off to eUniverse in 2002. The next year Anderson started working on a social networking site along with some former eUniverse employees which became known as MySpace. It was intended for connecting fans with their favorite bands and sharing music. You can also make blogs, interactive profiles and write posts. By 2006 it had 106 million accounts and 230 thousand new accounts made every day. MySpace started gaining popularity eventually becoming the most renowned social networking website in the U.S. It is listed in the slot number 85 of Alexa Top 500 Global Sites in 2010. MySpace retained the position of most popular social networking site till 2008 until its competitors such as Facebook took over. Anderson was the default friend on MySpace; by September 2008, he had 237,991,950 friends. People called him ‘soul of the website’. Tom also appeared as a cameo in the comedy ‘Funny People’.

Anderson was the president of Intermix Media which was the replacement of eUniverse after being sold to News Corps. In July 2005, MySpace was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corps for 580 million dollars. He was replaced as President of News Corps in 2009 and by 2010 Anderson was not the default friend on MySpace anymore. His name was changed to the profile ‘Today on MySpace’ or ‘TOM’. Anderson also has profiles on other social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

With a net worth of 60 million dollars, Anderson has proved himself as a successful entrepreneur. With his trait of opportunism, Anderson saw the gap in social networking and created a website that instantly appealed to the masses. It was his genius mind that could recognize the aspects of social networking that would attract people. He knew his target audience and made a site that would meet their needs. He was the brain behind MySpace (along with DeWolfe, of course!) which became the sixth most famous website in the world.