Image credit William Randolph Hearst Biography William Randolph Hearst was born on April 29, 1863, in San Francisco, California, as the only child of George Hearst, a self-made multimillionaire miner and rancher, and Phoebe Apperson Hearst. In 1887, at 23 he became Proprietor of the San Francisco Examiner which his father, George Hearst, accepted as payment for a gambling debt... In 1903, Mr.