Rush Hour

That would be plenty for any normal planetary being to handle, but Russell Simmons is not normal. He is 46 going on 12, with the manic energy of a teenager and the goofy, almost cartoonish grin of someone who can't believe how great life is. Easygoing, profane, and hilarious, Simmons regularly speaks all over the country to everyone from small-town entrepreneurs to Harvard MBAs, is photographed at every social event, takes an intensive yoga class every single day, and somehow makes it home every night to his palatial 35,000-square-foot spread in Saddle River, New Jersey, to see his two daughters, Ming Lee, 3, and Aoki Lee, 11 months. He has a platinum Rolodex of friends and contacts whose scope boggles the mind. How does he keep it together?

"Everybody around me is smarter than me," he says. "I don't keep track of shit, and I don't have to worry about nothing." Yeah, right. Simmons may not know what's happening on any particular day--"I had a 1 o'clock? What's that about?" he yelps at his best friend, the speakerphone--but he is, in fact, deeply involved in most aspects of his company, whether it's adding buttons on a suit, tinkering with the color of the sports drink, or canning a sneaker commercial that's already been shot. Simmons's management style is a mix of the business skills he learned selling fake coke on the streets of Queens; a mellow nonjudgmentalism, which he credits to his yoga practice; and the eclectic curiosity and unfailing optimism of a born entrepreneur.

Simmons can happily have a political dialogue with New York governor George Pataki or former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, and just as happily hang out with his friend Spuddy from Hollis, the Queens neighborhood where he grew up. Although Simmons moves effortlessly from Hamptons polo matches to the clubs frequented by 50 Cent, the rapper who's been shot nine times, he doesn't change much. He still graciously accepts tapes from the eager wannabe rappers whom he runs into on the street. He wears a Timex, although he owns part of a Swiss company, Grimoldi, whose watch faces are encrusted in diamonds. "What you see is what you get," says Donny Deutsch, chairman and CEO of Deutsch Inc., an advertising agency that has worked with Simmons. "He doesn't pretend to be what he's not."

Simmons is a man of contradictions. A true yoga fanatic who goes every afternoon to a class, no matter where he is, as well as a vegan, he has no trouble buying his wife a Bentley or building a home that some call a shrine to conspicuous consumption (it does have a meditation room). "Being a renunciate [a term for someone who gives up material benefits for spiritual reasons] is bullshit," he says. "Yeah, we've got this tremendous house, we got a flower man, a fish man, Basquiats, Warhols, a bunch of crap in here. But to deprive yourself of the world's toys is different from not being attached to them."

Simmons supported a PETA-led protest against the treatment of chickens at KFC, yet at the same time let a collar of real fur sneak into his men's clothing line. He is close to Minister Louis Farrakhan and actively defends the idea of reparations to African-Americans for slavery, yet is just as happy to break bread with Ronald Perelman or Donald Trump. ("He's my nigga," he says affectionately of The Donald. Responds Trump, after a pause: "I think that's a great compliment, and I think I will thank him for that.") He gets on with nearly everyone, and that has made him a political and economic force to reckon with.

One thing Simmons is not is a by-the-book details guy. He surrounds himself with people he trusts to handle the day-to-day aspects of his business. He is a kind of grand pooh-bah of marketing, a master brander and hype creator who leverages his reputation as the grandaddy of hip-hop to bring people together and let things combust. "Not only does he have a finger on the pulse of popular culture," says Tommy Hilfiger, a friend and rival, "but he also truly recognizes raw material and understands how to turn that potential into a marketable product."

Simmons is happiest as a connector of people and trafficker of information. He has always focused on the common interests of people from various races and classes, rather than their differences, and spends much of his life trying to bring together people with similar goals but disparate backgrounds. "He's just interested in people," says Island/Def Jam CEO Lyor Cohen, "and because he's interested, they're interested. He wants to know the nuances of how other people live, receive art, and experience culture. It has nothing to do with adding a number to the Rolodex. When you cut him open, that's what he bleeds."