AS A MEMBER of Oman’s Royal Family, Her Excellency Sayyida Zawan al-Said might be expected firmly to support her country’s government, or at least to keep a low profile where matters of domestic politics and international relations are concerned. This is the Gulf, after all, where women are meant to be seen and not heard.

But although the Sayyida presents the splendorous picture one expects from a Gulf royal – when she strides into the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Muscat to meet me, it’s in a Dolce & Gabbana denim waistcoat and jeans that hug her curvy figure, with a Chanel handbag swinging from her arm – her voice, with its distant hint of a lisp, is a different matter. When Zawan speaks, she hardly blends into the background – though this is due mostly to the fact that she can be heard every day on Oman’s only English-language radio station, hosting a breakfast show on which she regularly takes the Government to task and fields listeners’ calls on everything from male injectable contraceptives to women’s rights, Madonna’s latest change of style or whatever else might also cross her mind.

Far from being a quiet face in the royal crowd, Zawan has taken on a calling few in the Arab world – whether women or men – would dare to try: after a dozen years of work she has transformed herself into an American-style “shock jock”, with two popular and eyebrow-raising English-language radio shows each day that have just completed their first year on the air. When I meet her she is on her way to London for a well-deserved break, and to seek out foreign broadcasting talent who might be able to help her expand her offerings beyond Early On, the breakfast show she hosts from 7am to 9am five mornings a week, and Later On, the afternoon drivetime show she produces.

And far from earning the wrath of Omani society, her candour has been widely appreciated by listeners who call in to her shows or even drop by to be part of her studio audience ‹ once they get over their shock.

Though her subject matter might seem unremarkable to a Western audience, the relatively autocratic Gulf does not yet have many presenters who question things – such as whether it’s fair to have the police hiding speed cameras behind the bushes – or who ridicule Sultan Qaboos bin Said al-Said’s “meet-the-people” tour (”not a single woman among these so-called people”).

The 39-year-old BBC-trained broadcaster describes her show as “a bit of a wake-up call for a lot of people”. A typical comment from a caller: “I’m so glad someone is saying that at long last” ‹ though a segment on the search for female Viagra inspired one listener to call in with the news that “we’re so sick of faking it”, a comment that itself must have been something of a wake-up call for many listeners.

Though there is no ratings service in Oman to track Early On’s popularity, it is “the most listened-to programme”, according to Zawan, and has even attracted media attention in neighbouring states such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

At the same time, Zawan is aware that much of its success is due to a lack of choice: “It’s the only breakfast show on the only radio station for the British expatriate and English-speaking Omani communities,” she says.

But compared to what came before it, Early On is “extremely, extremely popular”, Zawan adds. “It was just a nothing breakfast show before. You had a string of songs and there was no one saying anything and it had no name and no specific presenter. I just waited and thought, gosh, what a goldmine this is.”

When she approached Oman’s Minister of Information about taking over the show, he was sceptical at first, but finally offered her the slot – with no support and no pay. After the first three weeks of funding, producing, co-ordinating and presenting the show herself, as well as raising three children, Zawan was ready to quit. But with some encouragement from her husband, a retired Omani brigadier – and in light of the fact that the show was a runaway hit within days of going on the air – she persevered, eventually striking a deal with the Ministry of Information under which she would continue to provide free programming to the station in return for the freedom to seek her own commercial backing.

Six months later she signed up HSBC to sponsor Early On, and soon after that landed Bank Muscat as a sponsor for Later On. Except for some bells and whistles that she says give her shows a more professional feel (things like the programmes’ jingles, voiceovers and other effects, which she pays for herself), the sponsorships cover most of her costs, and the salaries of ten people who work for her.

While it probably hasn’t been hard to outdo Radio Oman’s traditional fare, Zawan has also been lucky in that she hit the airwaves at a time when the country is hungry to be engaged by a liberal dialogue on politics and current events.

October 2003 saw all Omanis get the vote for the first time. But turnout to elect the Majlis al-Shura, or consultative council, the country’s parliament, was hardly stellar, coming in at less than 25 per cent of the 800,000 Omanis eligible to vote. Political analysts in Oman and the United States say the low numbers are due to the fact that most Omanis still do not feel they have a political voice, despite Sultan Qaboos’s token steps toward democratisation. The Majlis – like most in the Arab world – is not empowered to make any laws but only to comment on those proposed by the Sultan’s Cabinet. And political campaigns are forbidden to use the mass media, making it difficult for the more than 500 candidates who were standing to reach more people than they could shake hands with.

Zawan does what she can to move the political dialogue along with comments on things like the Sultan’s meet-the-people tour, but even she is constrained. “At the end of the day, I would have liked to know who these candidates were,” she says. “But how could you move towards a more publicised, political comment when you actually have a huge big notice stuck on the board saying ‘No one is allowed to talk to any of the candidates standing for election on any of the programmes’? How do you react? That just says it all, really.”

Nevertheless, for the Arab world she remains an unusually freewheeling presenter. Some have chalked this up to her royal heritage: her father was an Omani government minister and brother of Sultan Qaboos’s father, making the Sultan her first cousin.

Zawan, of course, disagrees with the notion that her royal blood has given her more latitude, and holds that anyone could say what she says on Omani radio. When I ask why she feels the freedom to speak out when others don’t, she gives an answer that is odd to hear, coming from royalty: “I feel I have nothing to lose.”

Though her lineage probably helped her gain access to the Minister of Information to propose her show, she did not simply walk into a career in radio. After taking advantage of London University’s external degree programme to study English literature at Oxford, Zawan cast about for direction before trying Radio Oman in 1991. Having found her passion, she went on to take a graduate degree in broadcast journalism and has pressed ahead with her ambitions ever since.

Now, with five hours of independent commercial programming on Radio Oman, Zawan has created what she calls “a radio station within a radio station”, and hopes to take it even further. While in London she will be looking for a presenter with a lively enough personality to take over her duties with Early On (her search in Oman proved fruitless), which would allow her to start a third programme in the lunchtime slot. At that point, she says: “The next step is to open my own radio station.”

Her dreams include even more than that. She is currently drafting a proposal for an English-language television entertainment show (”a really massive big programme”) to offer to an Arabic station, and hints that she would like one day to be in the business of commissioning such fare, rather than producing it. So how long will it be before we’re tuning into Zawan-TV? “I’m trying actually to be less of a control freak, so I don’t get hurt,” she laughs. She is committed to Oman and to helping to develop the media there, but admits to the possibility that her ambitions might one day take her abroad again: “At the end of the day, does it really matter where you base yourself if you are able to have your own satellite TV station?”

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“Did I show you my leather outfit?” Philip Kaplan pops up off the sofa and lopes through his midtown Manhattan loft, returning with a white leather pants-and-vest set. “Touch it,” he urges, pointing to the big red star stitched onto the vest. “It’s python. Made by the guy who does all the stuff for Guns N’ Roses and Marilyn Manson. The pants were like $2,000, and the vest was like $1,000.” He strokes the python. “I designed it,” he says proudly.

Until recently, Philip Kaplan could only dream about buying $3,000 rock-star outfits. When he arrived in New York from Chevy Chase, Maryland, five years ago, he lived at his grandmother’s apartment on the Upper West Side, in his mother’s childhood bedroom, because he couldn’t make rent. “I knew the locations of all the ATMs that gave out $10 bills,” he recalls.

Even at the height of the tech boom, when he had come up with FuckedCompany.com, the dot-bomb Web site he still runs out of his apartment, he couldn’t afford that much “rich-guy stuff,” as he calls it, with a dismissive wave. Then one day last year, when he was 26, he sat down to figure his net worth for a mortgage application. Somewhere along the way, he had hit seven figures. “I called my parents,” he says. “I was like, ‘Guess what?’”

Kaplan will only say that he’s “a 7- or 8-millionaire,” but the exact number isn’t the point. The point is that in the not-so-distant past, Kaplan was just a nice kid from the suburbs who could hardly afford a round of drinks. Now he’s a guy who once spent so large at the Tribeca Grand Hotel bar that the management comped him a room at closing time because they didn’t want the party to end.

When I first meet him, Kaplan has been up for 48 hours straight, staring at lines of code on his computer screen. Because he often works all night and sleeps late into the afternoon, he left the steel shutters on the bedroom windows of his loft on 31st Street. “I don’t want to be a cog in the machine,” he says. “I want to be the machine.”

Scattered around his Aeron chair are a bunch of shoeboxes that have just been delivered by UPS. Kaplan keeps buying shoes on Zappos.com because they have his size – no small thing to a guy with size 14 feet. He still favors jeans and t-shirts at home, but when he wanted to sharpen up his wardrobe recently, he kept the Versace boutique open late so he could buy a couple $2,000 suits. The upgrade is extending to his home : Kaplan has just closed on a new triplex apartment on 15th Street. We hail a cab to go see it. (If Kaplan had a few more errands to do, he might have hired a car and driver for the afternoon. He likes to drive, but like most New Yorkers, he doesn’t own a car. On a recent trip to L.A., he rented a $400-a-day Corvette.)

Down on 15th Street, Kaplan strides into his new place and opens his arms wide, surveying his kingdom. The large, empty ground-floor cube is fitted out with fixtures that were high-tech before he was born. “Isn’t it great?” He’d been looking in the million-dollar range, he says, but his broker showed him this $720,000 triplex because he knew it had something Kaplan would want: an underground bedroom that has no windows at all. Kaplan put 25 percent down. “There’s no reason to pay cash for anything with interest rates at 6 percent,” he says.

The new place also has a washer and dryer, which his current apartment lacks. One afternoon I go with him to the Laundromat to make good on an overdue bill. The last time they picked up his clothes, the sack tipped the scales at 76 pounds. “I just keep buying shirts and socks and let the rest of it get dirty,” Kaplan says cheerfully, writing a check for $170. “When I get to the point where I’m recycling underwear, that’s when I do my laundry.”

Kaplan takes pains to point out that as millionaires go, he is “not super bling-blingy.” But he has nothing against blowing cash in pursuit of a good time, and he’s flown himself to Vegas for the past two years for the Adult Video News Awards, where he rubs elbows (if only that) with the girls, parties with a porn photographer friend, and tries to get close to idols like Gene Simmons and Vince Neil.

If Neil didn’t remember Kaplan from the year before, it’s probably only because Neil has never seen Spel, the heavy metal band in which Kaplan moonlights, playing drums. One cold winter night, Kaplan rents a Ford Expedition to drive the group to a gig deep in the hinterlands of New Jersey. He picks his bandmates up at the $1,200-a-month rehearsal space he rents on Eighth Avenue where the guys also live. On stage, Kaplan beams from behind his drum set like a manic Charlie Watts. His best move is when he spins a stick and pushes his $800 Selima Optique glasses up the bridge of his nose in the same motion.

Spel is pretty good at their Jersey gig, but it’s clear that Kaplan shouldn’t quit his day job. Actually, he hasn’t had a day job in about four years. He quit a company called THINK New Ideas in 1999 to start his own Internet consultancy. Then he set up FuckedCompany in the spring of 2000, gave away the consultancy to his employees later that year, and has been happily working on his “art,” as he thinks of it, ever since. Besides FuckedCompany, Kaplan’s art consists of the handful of sites he’s dreamed up (like his latest, MarketBanker.com), almost all of which are designed, tested, maintained by Kaplan and a single employee. Kaplan usually eats at home so he can work more. If he wants a meal from a restaurant that doesn’t deliver to his neighborhood, he phones in a $14 pick-up order and hires a $25 courier service to get it for him. He would rather work than go on vacation. He likes to work so much that perhaps it’s not surprising that this interferes with his love life.

Kaplan is tall, handsome, nice, funny, and rich, so it seems odd that he wouldn’t have a girlfriend. “A girl might be really attracted to the things I’ve done, and then, once we get in a relationship, she’ll be frustrated that I can’t spend enough time with her,” he explains. “But I didn’t just wake up and have seven companies.” When he’s invited to the premiere of the movie Spun at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, the only girl he can think of to take is someone he chatted with recently on the Internet. “A normal bachelor millionaire would probably be able to lock down a date for that,” Kaplan muses. Even a fake rich guy like Joe Millionaire has better luck. “People perceive me as a man about town, but I’m just the dork who didn’t have any plans for Valentine’s Day,” Kaplan says. “I want a girl to use me for my money.”

One night, I meet Kaplan in Little Italy bar where he likes to hang out with a bunch of other young Internet successes every Monday night. “I have two very distinct groups of people who are my friends,” Kaplan says. “Half my crowd are not particularly rich, half are. It’s not like we sit around and count money. But we’ll go to a bar and get the $400 bottle of vodka and sit at a table and just be stupid.”

Not that Kaplan likes to be stupid with just anyone. He’s been to the Hamptons but has no wish to be part of that scene. Instead, Kaplan thinks he might prefer the seedy cool of Asbury Park on the Jersey shore, where he’s considering investment properties. “It’s half, like, crack den,” he admits, “but parts of it are starting to get nice.”

That’s about the state of things at his new home on on 15th Street, where we tread carefully on the stained shag rug of the upstairs balcony bedroom, soon to be Kaplan’s office, once it’s renovated. “A lot of doors are open,” he says. “The money thing definitely enables me to say maybe I want to have a magazine. I thought about opening a barbecue joint. “Everyone has one million-dollar idea every ten years, but the thing is, you have to do it, and nobody ever does,” he says. Kaplan’s latest? “A topless shoe shine. It takes a long time to shine a shoe, all that wiggling and stuff. It’ll be like Starbucks,” he says, his eyes flickering over an imaginary line of topless shoe-shine girls. “It’ll be everywhere.

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