Simon Cowell

Simon Cowell is a British music executive, television producer, and reality-TV personality whose two-decade career has built one of the most-influential international reality-TV-singing-competition empires in the history of the medium. He was born Simon Phillip Cowell on October 7, 1959, in Lambeth, London, into a music-industry family — his father Eric Cowell was a real-estate executive, and his mother Julie was a ballet dancer. He left school at 16 without completing his A-levels and worked initially in the mailroom at EMI Music Publishing.

His music-industry career through the 1980s and 1990s included A&R work at multiple British labels — particularly Fanfare Records and BMG — where he signed and developed acts including Five, Westlife, and Robson & Jerome. His career-launching reality-TV role came in 2001 as a judge on the British ITV singing competition Pop Idol, alongside Pete Waterman and Nicki Chapman. The show was an immediate British TV hit, and the format was sold internationally — including the 2002 American adaptation American Idol, where Cowell joined the original judging panel alongside Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson.

American Idol ran on Fox from 2002 to 2016 and became one of the most-watched American TV shows of the 2000s. Cowell's acid-tongued judge persona — particularly his catchphrase "That was atrocious" — made him one of the American reality-TV figures of the 2000s. He left American Idol in 2010 to launch his own format The X Factor on Fox (which ran 2011–2013) and continued judging the British X Factor through 2018.

Cowell's Syco Music and Syco TV production companies have produced both the original British X Factor (which ran 2004–2018) and the Britain's Got Talent franchise (2007–present, now exported to over 70 countries internationally). The franchise has produced multiple acts including Susan Boyle, Leona Lewis, One Direction, and Little Mix. He has been with girlfriend Lauren Silverman since 2013, and the couple has one son.

His name Simon is from the Hebrew Shim'on meaning "he has heard" — referring to the apostle Simon Peter and the Old Testament son of Jacob. Simon has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for over a century.