Brian Roberts has been the force behind Comcast's growth. Now he's in the hunt for Fox

Brian Roberts was about 13 when he started working at Comcast in the early 1970s, earning 25 cents an hour assembling payment coupon books to send to the Philadelphia company's cable TV customers. As a high school student, he would shadow his father - the company's co-founder - at meetings with bankers and lawyers.

So when Roberts graduated in 1981 from the Wharton School, he figured he would work with his dad at Comcast. But Ralph Roberts suggested that he first spend a couple of years at another firm - advice that did not sit well with his son.

He was "persistent, day after day, until finally, he looked me in the eye and said: 'Why are you rejecting me?' " the late Ralph Roberts would recall in a 2003 book, "Wired to Win: Entrepreneurs of the American Cable Industry."

Brian Roberts' tenacity paid off: His father relented and sent him to a Comcast operation in Trenton, N.J. Brian Roberts climbed poles, strung cable wire and learned about marketing. He joined the corporate office in 1984, was named president in 1990, at the age of 31, and