Ten years ago, he was a reclusive 31-year-old who, bashing away on a laptop in his grungy Hollywood apartment, shot to prominence after he broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal that threatened to bring down Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Now, Matt Drudge owns a luxurious home on Rivo Alto Island in Florida’s Biscayne Bay, a condominium at the Four Seasons in Miami, and is said to drive a black Mustang.

He remains an elusive, mysterious figure, but the Internet pioneer is arguably the world’s most powerful journalist.

Mr. Drudge is still an outsider, contemptuous of the cosy relationships and closed-door deals that keep the ordinary person from being privy to the secrets of the establishment.

He is the reason why people across the globe are now reading about Prince Harry serving in Afghanistan after he shattered a news blackout agreed between Fleet Street and Buckingham Palace.

His royal scoop came three days after he posted a photograph of Senator Obama dressed in the tribal garb of a Somali elder, claiming it had been sent as an e-mail by a member of Senator Clinton’s campaign.

It appeared to be a brazen attempt to fuel rumors that Obama was a dangerous Muslim, and within minutes, the photograph was topping the American news agenda.

Welcome to the world of the Drudge Report. A world in which the successor to Walter Cronkite and Bob Woodward is a loner with no university education or journalistic background.

Once derided by the press and political elites, he is now surreptitiously courted by them, such is their fear that he has the power to change the course of the American election.

The Lewinsky scandal and the 2008 presidential campaign are the bookends to what could be described as the Drudge decade. At its start, he was the antagonist who came from nowhere — Mr. Clinton initially fumbled the site’s name, calling it the Sludge Report. By its end, he had become Mrs. Clinton’s weapon of choice against Mr. Obama.

Just as he disclosed details of Mr. Clinton’s tawdry affair with Ms. Lewinsky while Newsweek editors agonized over whether to publish the story, Mr. Drudge posted on the Internet the news of Harry’s front-line service against the Taliban without regard to any niceties.

Within an hour, Buckingham Palace had lifted the embargo and Harry was the lead item on Web sites and news networks around the world.

It all seems a long way from Matthew Nathan Drudge’s days as a gifted but directionless schoolboy growing up in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Takoma Park.

The son of divorced parents who lived with his mother, he would, he said later, wander past ABC News headquarters and “daydream” of being on the inside; and “stare up at the Washington Post news room over on 15th Street, look up longingly, knowing I’d never get in.”

After stints at 7-Eleven, McDonald’s, and a New York grocery store, he gravitated to Los Angeles in 1989. He worked as a runner on “The Price Is Right” game show before landing a job in the gift shop at CBS Studios — a window into Hollywood — and rising to become its manager.

In 1994, his father, Bob, worried that the self-styled “aimless teen” was turning into a rudderless adult, gave him a Packard-Bell computer in the hope that it might spur him on to achieve more.

The upshot was that Mr. Drudge produced an e-mail newsletter filled with snippets of gossip. Soon he began to focus more on politics, charging an annual $10 fee to his subscribers — who grew to 85,000 by 1997.

Today, the Drudge Report attracts more than 3 million different users a month and registers more than 16 million page views a day. So much Internet traffic can be directed from the Drudge Report to a linked item that unprepared Web sites have been known to collapse under the strain.

Although the mainstream American press tend to pass Drudge off as a salacious rumor-monger, reporters often tip him off about their exclusives and about the stories that their editors have refused to run.

For politicians, the effect can be akin to an injection. A positive story can give a shot of adrenaline to a flagging campaign. More commonly, negative information can be like being given a dose of poison.

The Republicans have so far been the most assiduous courters of Mr. Drudge, a conservative populist who passionately opposes abortion and taxes. Research directors of the Republican National Committee have even made pilgrimages to Miami to pay homage to him.

One of the biggest surprises of the 2008 campaign, however, has been the connection between the Drudge Report and the Clinton campaign.

But the attempt to woo the man who came close to being her husband’s nemesis appears to have backfired.

“The Clinton campaign has clearly had an ability to move negative stuff about Edwards and Obama in a way that we did not have,” the chief strategist to John Edwards, Joseph Trippi, said.

“They tried to take some of the tactics that had worked against them and use them for their own gain just when people were getting sick of that kind of politics, the sort that’s all about what’s the next bucket of blood that’s about to be dropped on the Drudge Report.”

The story about the Obama photograph led to widespread condemnation of the Clinton campaign — prompting some to wonder whether it had been deliberately placed to discredit her.