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Chris DeWolfe is an American entrepreneur, and one of the creators of Myspace, of which he is also the former CEO. He has the sixth account ever made on the site. During DeWolfe's tenure, MySpace became the top social network, with over 135 million worldwide unique visitors a month. Under DeWolfe, music became a defining feature of MySpace, which was credited with challenging and reinventing the music label industry with the MySpace Music section, which allowed unsigned artists to post their music for free and launched the careers of several famous musicians, among them Lily Allen and Sean Kingston. Currently, DeWolfe is the CEO of Social Gaming Network.
DeWolfe got his vision for MySpace while taking a course titled, "The Impact of Tech on Media and Entertainment," during the final year of his college. In the final project for his class, DeWolfe created "Sitegeist" which had elements of CitySearch, Match.com mixed with the function of IM. DeWolfe got an "A" on his project and used it as inspiration in creating MySpace.
DeWolfe was integral to the sale of MySpace to News Corporation in 2005 for $580 million and remained as its CEO until March 2009, at which point, MySpace was larger than its competitor, Facebook. On April 22, 2009, News Corp. announced DeWolfe would step down as CEO and will be a strategic adviser to Myspace and serve on the board of MySpace China. The former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta replaced him.
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