Mark Getty: “I’m one of those people everyone hates”

Mark Getty, grandson of oil baron Jean Paul, transformed a small picture library in Camden into a global $3bn business. He remains excited by its prospects. Jane Lewis reports.

2018 Lucie Awards
(Image credit: Mike Coppola / Staff)

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Mark Getty: building businesses is his thing
(Image credit: 2018 Getty Images)

Mark Getty describes the most important moment of his working life as the saleof Getty Oil in 1984 "it freed me from the need tofeel that I had to join the family business". Instead, he chose to build one of the world's biggest and best-known photographic agencies, says The Times."If there's something vaguely newsworthy happening in the world, the chances are that Getty Images will be there." Its vast archive of picture libraries is legendary.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.