(FORTUNE Magazine) – Friends, it is time. Once again we reach for the envelopes and announce the ten most notorious businesspersons of the year. As usual, relative notoriety is gauged by the number of articles in the Nexis electronic database wherein each of these characters got mentioned during the year. Also as usual, we start out by agonizing a bit over what makes one a businessperson and how come we are not counting Michael Jackson, who certainly seems to be selling something or other and would actually lead the list (with 22,697 articles) if allowed to compete. Our answer, reflecting four decades of hanging around FORTUNE, is that we know it when we see it and Michael is no Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Please do not write in to point out that neither is Ted Turner. Figures shown after each name represent the number of Nexis citations. The top ten: (1) Ross Perot (21,767) leads the list, as he did last year, and one still feels obliged to think of him as a bizperson even though he has turned over operational control of Perot Systems Corp. to his old pal Mort Myerson even though Mort has stalwartly supported NAFTA. (2) Rupert Murdoch (6,111) vaults into second place, up from seventh, helped appreciably by a social conscience that evidently does not permit him to stand by when there is an opportunity to lose money but fight evil, especially as represented by retrograde newspaper unions like those he is now sticking it to at the New York Post. (3) Donald Trump (3,986) was identified in last year's list as the ''ex- boyfriend'' of Marla Maples. This was during a hiatus in their world-famous amour, but the characterization would appear to have regained its validity. The nuptial spectacular at New York's Plaza hotel, owned by Donald and various banks, accounted for perhaps one-quarter of his 1993 citations. (4) Ted Turner (3,938), president and chairman of Turner Broadcasting, is another guy who gets his Nexis totals boosted by the flashy femme factor. About 600 of his 1993 articles also referred to Jane Fonda. (5) George Steinbrenner (3,504) always gets lots of ink by mismanaging the New York Yankees, but last year he drew additional media attention for the bankruptcy of his Florida-based American Ship Building Co. (6) Barry Diller (3,200), head of the QVC Network, is a new and somewhat anomalous entry on the list, which he made because of the long investment- / banking soap opera over whether he or Sumner Redstone of Viacom would get to take over Martin Davis's Paramount Communications. The anomaly is, how come Barry is No. 6 while neither Sumner nor Marty came close to making the list? (7) Bill Gates (2,682) of Microsoft also made news with wedding plans -- he got married on January 1, 1994 -- but as the young lady was a mere marketing manager and not a showbiz babe, media reportage mentioning the event accounted for only about 1% of Bill's rap sheet.

(8) George Soros (2,496) seems to be making the transition from investment sage to sage, period, and now gets listened to respectfully not only about gold (whose price rose sharply in December on rumors that George was buying) but also about war crimes in Bosnia and the economic future of Eastern Europe. (9) John Sculley (2,267) garnered headlines aplenty in 1993 by getting pushed up, up, and out of Apple Computer. (10) Michael Milken (2,006) edged out Lou Gerstner (2,005), the new chairman of IBM, by getting released from prison and then turning out to be much in demand as a lecturer to business-school students at UCLA, all of which riled California legislators and got Michael into Doonesbury.