Black Media Takeout

On paper, 37-year-old Fred Mwangaguhunga seems a lot like other successful businessmen. He has an MBA and a law degree from Columbia University, as well as a passion for his business that keeps him working seven days a week (and he says he hasn’t taken vacation in five years). But what makes Mwangaguhunga special—besides his difficult to pronounce surname—is his business, MediaTakeOut.com, an extremely popular and controversial urban gossip site.

Starting a gossip site wasn’t a lifelong aspiration of Mwangaguhunga. The son of Ugandan immigrants who stressed education and the security of a good 9-to-5 job, he initially chose a more traditional education and career path. After law school, Mwangaguhunga practiced corporate tax law at a Wall Street firm for four years, but ever since he was a teen he knew that he wanted to run his own business. “I started working at 14. I worked with a bunch of small business guys who videotaped weddings, and they started off pretty small, ” he says. “At some point they were the biggest, or certainly the most reputable, wedding photographers in New York.”

Working with the small photography and videography company that did big jobs, like shooting the weddings of Donald Trump and Eddie Murphy, inspired the young New York native. “I knew that I wanted to do what they did—take something small and make it big, ” he says. “I liked the idea that they were working for themselves [and] employing people, all that.”