The brash chairman of the advertising agency founded by his dad, Deutsch is an inescapable media presence and the former host of the late CNBC show, The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch.

Donny's father, David Deutsch, started a small ad agency called David Deutsch Associates in 1969. Donny took a job at the company shortly after graduating from Wharton but didn't take his work very seriously and was almost immediately fired by his dad for slacking off on the job. David Deutsch eventually rehired Donny on the creative side and following his dad's retirement in the early 1990s, Deutsch Jr. took the helm of the agency. Promptly dropping David's name from the letterhead, he renamed it Deutsch, Inc. and set about carving out a rep as one of the most aggressive agencies in town. With a team of young, creative staffers on board (mostly "Jews, chicks, and fags" in Donny's words), Deutsch Inc. grew exponentially during the '90s thanks to the addition of blue-chip clients like Bank of America, Ikea, Domino's, Pfizer, Mitsubishi, Old Navy, and Revlon. By the time Donny cashed out in 2000, selling to Interpublic for a reported $300 million, Deutsch Inc. had 1,000 employees and more than $2 billion in annual billings. While still nominally chairman of the agency, these days Donny busies himself working on Donny Deutsch, the brand.

Since offloading his agency, Deutsch has been on a mission to achieve star status outside of advertising. In 2004, he began hosting a nightly show on CNBC, The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, which debuted as a general talk show but later transitioned into business-oriented self-help fare and was eventually put on hiatus in late-2008. He's also become a seasonal ritual on good pal Donald Trump's The Apprentice, published his first book in 2005, and habitually pops up on MSNBC's Morning Joe.

Known to have something of a wandering eye, Donny separated from his second wife, Stacy Josloff, in 2005. (His first wife was Jodi Deutsch.) He's since had a baby, Daisy, with his ex-girlfriend Amanda Zacharia, a real estate broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman. [Image via Getty]