Profile · South Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Kay Koplovitz (née Smith)
Founder and longtime CEO of USA Network; raised in South Milwaukee
$174,960
Kay Koplovitz founded and ran USA Network, becoming the first woman to head a U.S. television network. She held the CEO job from the channel’s 1977 launch until a $4.5 billion sale in 1998, and under her watch the Sci-Fi Channel went on air in 1992. Born Kay Smith in Milwaukee on April 11, 1945, she spent kindergarten in Cudahy, then grew up at 510 Elm Street in South Milwaukee from age five through high school, where she was valedictorian for the Rockets. Her father sold for Ladish; her mother kept house. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1967 with degrees in communications and biology, earned Phi Beta Kappa, and wrote a Michigan State thesis on satellites after hearing Arthur C. Clarke lecture between her junior and senior years. She never owned USA Network, and she resigned in 1998 after Barry Diller took control. The Elm Street house and the South Milwaukee Rockets remain the hometown story she tells—the same grit she traces to a childhood fight to finish Cudahy kindergarten after the family moved.