Hubert Burda (born 9 February 1940) is a German billionaire publisher. He is the owner, publisher and general partner of Hubert Burda Media, a global media company of more than 600 media products, including websites, print magazines and other brands. It operates in 20 countries, predominantly in Germany and the UK. Its brands include Focus, Bunte and Radio Times. Burda is chairman of the conference Digital Life Design (DLD), which takes place annually in January in Munich. Forbes Magazine estimates his net worth at $4 billion. Early life Burda is the youngest son of the publishing couple Franz and Aenne Burda, alongside his older brothers Franz and Frieder. As a sixth-form pupil he took painting lessons daily and hoped to become a painter, against his father's wishes. His father permitted him to study art history only on condition that he wait until after the age of 25 to begin. Burda attended the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, where he studied art history with Hans Sedlmayr, as well as archaeology and sociology. He earned his doctorate in art history before the age of 26; his dissertation was titled Die Ruine in Hubert Robert's Pictures. After several traineeships in US advertising agencies and publishers, Burda worked until 1974 as publishing director of the Burda magazine . As an independent project, in 1969 he founded the magazine m - The Magazine For Men. Burda Holding Burda assumed the role of sole shareholder and CEO of Burda Holding in 1987. In 1988, he recruited the editorial director of Bild-Zeitung, Günter Prinz, from Springer-Verlag. In addition to the program magazine Super TV, Burda also established SUPERillu, the magazine with the largest circulation in what was then East Germany, launching six weeks before German reunification. In 1993, Burda collaborated with Helmut Markwort to develop the news magazine Focus, a rival to Der Spiegel. In 1999, Burda renamed the holding company to Hubert Burda Media. Under his father the firm's revenues were split broadly equally between printing and publishing, but under Hubert the firm significantly expanded its digital and international operations, including joint ventures with Hachette, Microsoft and Rizzoli and international expansion into countries such as Singapore, Thailand, India, Russia. Current operations In 2018, Hubert Burda Media employed 12,369 staff and achieved revenues of €2.66 billion in its four divisions (Digital Brands National, Media Brands National, Media Brands International and Print). Burda's German publishing arm generated over