Billionaire real estate tycoon Sam Zell, 65, had an unorthodox message for Stanford Law School students last night.

“I thought law school was the biggest fucking bore of my life,” he told a few hundred people gathered for a lecture sponsored by the Rock Center for Corporate Governance.

“But,” he said to the relief of anxious professors and students taking hundreds of thousands of dollars out in loans, “you’ve got to understand it if you’re gonna play, particularly if you’re going to play at a high level.”

His crude language matched his laid-back wardrobe. He eschews ties, often wears jeans and has maintained a casual dress code for his employees since the 1960s. In his two-hour public appearance — reception, lecture, question-and-answer session — the man who has made headlines this week for orchestrating an $8.2 billion buyout of media conglomerate Tribune, which owns 23 television stations and is the parent company of the Los Angeles Times, was full of candor.

His performance was an amalgamation of Charles Foster Kane, Gordon Gekko and Jim Cramer. He was the old village elder mentoring the eager, young warriors in one breath; the next, he was the ruthless, take-no-prisoners investment baron who has stirred fear in newsrooms around the country with the possibility of deep cutbacks.

He sounded like the fictitious main character of Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” [“I think it would be fun to own a newspaper”] when he talked about his foray into the industry. He deflected several questions about how he would turn around Tribune and declined to give specifics, reminding reporters that he has only been “a newspaper man since Monday, and not even that.”

“Give me two weeks to become a genius,” he joked.

Zell, who calls himself “The Grave Dancer,” has been labeled a “bottom-feeder” in press accounts. When he lambasted the onerous requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley and talked about his love for the free market, he sounded like Gecko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film “Wall Street” speaking at the Teldar Paper annual meeting.

“I was born 90 days after my parents came to this country,” he said, beaming with pride. “My father taught me that the streets are paved with gold, that there is no other country in the world that has the kind of opportunity that we have here. I believe that.

“Yes, the U.S. is severely criticized in a lot of different places around the world, but in the end the most common question that I hear as I travel around the world is ‘Where’s my fucking visa?’”

He told students never to take themselves seriously and to enjoy whatever line of work they pursue.

“If it ain’t fun, I don’t do it,” he said, calling the maxim a “Sam-ism.”

“I really believe that the 11th Commandment is ‘thou shall not takes one’s self too seriously.’ When you’re the owner, you can do that.”

At other points in his lecture, he seemed most like Jim Cramer, the goofy host of CNBC’s “Mad Money” television show who dispenses investment advice to callers.

“I hated academia,” he told the crowd, packed with high-ranking University administrators. “I thought it was boring as hell, so I had to start and build businesses while I was an undergraduate and while I was in law school as a way of keeping my sanity.”

He bragged that he made $150,000 during his last year of law school at the University of Michigan. And that, he told the crowd, was in 1960s dollars.

His friends love his irreverence and continual exertion of energy.

Zell’s old fraternity buddy Lon Allan JD ‘68, who introduced him at the event, said, “Not too many people sell a business for $39 billion and then before the ink is dry, rather than going sailing in the Mediterranean, buy another business for eight or 10 or 12 billion.”