In the wake of the 2011 protests/riots/brouhaha in Egypt, it's been lamented that E2 has nothing on the man they're directed against. My attempt to remedy this. Updated 11/2/2011 to reflect Mubarak's walk-like-an-Egyptian exit from office.
Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak, to you. Underweight Silvio Berlusconi lookalike, better known for being the former (fourth and most recent) President of the Arab Republic of Egypt, a role he held from 1981 to 2011. Married with two sons, Alaa and Gamal, and little else known about his personal life. In terms of background, he's a career Air Force officer. Rose to the rank of Air Chief Marshal, personally enriching himself and his family to the tune of several billion dollars via corruption over defence contracts and the like. Allegedly. Ended up as deputy minister for defence, and latterly served as Anwar el-Sadat's Vice-President from 1975-1981, in which office he was primarily concerned with exactly how Egypt was going to extricate itself from the fallout from the Yom Kippur War of 1973. He was more or less catapulted into the presidency when his predecessor Sadat was assassinated by hardliners in the Egyptian Army opposed to a peace agreement with Israel.
In terms of his governance of Egypt, in foreign relations he proved more or less a pragmatist, having been able to get Egypt readmitted to the Arab League (from which it had been suspended on the basis of the same peace treaty that got Sadat killed), but equally to broadly normalise relations with Israel and increase military co-operation with the United States. This latter has made Egypt something of a regional power in North Africa, at least militarily - US and Egyptian forces train together biannually under the auspices of Operation Bright Star, and Egyptian troops took part in the first Gulf War, in exchange for a significant financial remuneration. That the links forged during his tenure between the US and Egyptian militaries may have formed a significant part of his downfall is a fine example of the vicissitudes of court politics.
As for domestic politics, the Egyptian government under Mubarak more or less seemed to alternate between doing nothing at all and doing things that only made any given situation worse. Corruption is rife amongst officials (this being one of the protesters' grievances), but on the other hand arbitrary detention, censorship and bans on public political meetings were, by most accounts, relatively common. Atop all of this, of course, is the spectre of Islamic extremism. Since the 90s there have been a number of bombings targeted at Egyptian tourist resorts used primarily by westerners, and most recently a car bomb outside a church in Alexandria that killed over 20 people. There are a number of militant Islamic terrorist groups suspected to be active in Egypt, including Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, as well as the (banned) Islamist political group, the Muslim Brotherhood. These both simultaneously provide a genuine threat to the Egyptian state, and a pretext for suppressing any particularly effective dissent.
Successive US governments have seen Mubarak as an effective bolster against radical Islamism in the Middle East, and up until now have been content not to draw attention to his government's human rights record. There is a fair amount of evidence for extraordinary rendition directed towards Egypt, amongst other places, and the alleged use of torture by Egyptian police and intelligence services may give one pause for thought. Robert Baer, the author and erstwhile CIA officer, characterised the situation thusly;
'If you want a good interrogation, you send someone to Jordan. If you want them to be killed, you send them to Egypt or Syria.'
It may also be worth noting that amidst the protests across Egypt, Mubarak was quick to appoint Gen. Omar Suleiman, the head of Egyptian intelligence, as his Vice-President. This, more or less, being the man doing the killing in that framework.
In other words, another US (and to a lesser extent, European) backed minor dictator whose own injustices were taken as read because he was considered the lesser of two evils, who ended up on the wrong side of history. Que sera sera.