John Kluge

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John Kluge, who died on 7 September aged 95, was once listed as the wealthiest man in America.

He built an investment in a radio station into a broadcasting empire that was the forerunner to Fox Television.

Kluge was born in Chemnitz, Germany, on 21 September 1914, the son of an engineer. In 1922 the family moved to the US, where they settled in Detroit, Kluge (right) working for a time on a Ford assembly line. He earned an economics degree from Columbia in 1937 and worked in Army intelligence during the Second World War.

He bought his first radio station in 1946, later expanding into television. His holdings, Metromedia Broadcasting, grew into seven TV stations and 14 radio stations. In 1983, Kluge took Metromedia private in a leveraged buyout and then sold off properties piecemeal for $4.65bn, including the 1985 sale of seven big-city television stations to Rupert Murdoch for $2bn. The stations served as the basis for Murdoch's Fox television network.

"I felt that television was going to change," Kluge told Forbes magazine. "I just thought that it was going to get more competitive." The magazine labeled Kluge as the wealthiest man in America in 1989, 1990 and 1991, with a net worth of more than $5bn.

Other Kluge properties included the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team and Playbill magazine. He was a noted philanthropist – he famously brought the British schoolboy Craig Shergold, who had an apparently terminal brain tumour, over to the US for treatment in 1991. Shergold is now a healthy adult.