Keith Rupert Murdoch . Director and main shareholder of News Corporation, which includes the newspapers The Sun and The Times, or the conglomerates of satellite networks Fox and Sky, the largest and most influential media corporation in the world.
Biographical synthesis
He was born on November as March as 1931 , in Melbourne, Australia. In 1985 he became a US citizen. His parents were Keith Murdoch, a journalist and confidant of Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes during World War I, and Elisabeth Greene, from an upper-class family.
Rupert was educated at the Geelong Grammar School in Victoria and later at Worcester College, Oxford. Australian media mogul, nationalized American. He began in 1952 , being the head of the Adelaide News newspaper and the Sunday Mail, owned by his family. And, after more or less thirty years, he formed one of the empires of communication that does not stop growing.
Tycoon’s personal life
He was married three times: in 1956 to Patricia Booker, with whom he has a daughter, Prudence, and from whom he separated in 1967 . That same year he married his employee, Anna Torv, with whom he had three children Elisabeth, Lachlan and James, whom he divorced in 1998 . Then, in 1999 , he married the Chinese journalist Wendi Deng, with whom he had two daughters: Grace and Chloe.
Murdoch career
Beginning of the empire
Murdoch is noted for his conservative political leanings. From his US media, especially from Fox News, he supported the George W. Bush government and the invasion of Iraq, and from the British he opposed the euro . Today it has televisions, newspapers, magazines, editorials and Internet portals all over the planet. Rupert Murdoch has owned 20th Century Fox Film Studios since 1986 . He has Fox filming studios in Australia and the United States . In addition, he is the owner of the Fox news channel. After his father died in 1952In his early 20s, he was in charge of the Adelaide News newspaper and the Sunday Mail Sunday. It was from here that he managed to form the News Corporation empire. The building of his empire began in his home country, when he joined 50% of his family business with the company of Lloyd Dumas, owner of the Advertiser. Later, he became interested in the world of television and in 1958 he managed to operate Channel 9 in Adelaide, which later allowed him to buy the Sunday Times, from Perth , in Western Australia.
Tycoon Heritage
20th Century Fox Film Studios
Twenty years later he made the leap to Europe , first in the United Kingdom . There, in 1981 , it bought Times Newspapers Limited, the group that owns, among others, The Times and The Sunday Times. In London it also acquired Today and the tabloids The Sun and News of the World, as well as several regional newspapers, magazines and the Sky satellite channel.
In 1988, it acquired 20% of the capital of the Pearson group, which owns the Financial Times, bought half of The Economist and obtained 14% of Reuters , although it sold its stake in 1988 . In May 1990 , the agreement to merge its satellite television with British Satellite Broadcasting took place and it was left with 50% of the resulting company, BSkyB. In Australia he founded The Australian, the country’s first national newspaper, and also has: Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mirror, Sunday Sun, among many others, as well as several magazines and television channels.
Finally, he has turned his attention to the Internet business, and in 2005 he acquired the popular MySpace.com portal.
He also grew up in the United States, where he owns The New York Post and The Chicago Sun Times. He owned the Boston Herald, although he sold it to get a television in the city.
Failures
However, Rupert Murdoch has also had his failures, among others, such as the attempted purchase of Silvio Berlusconi’s Fininvest consortium television networks ; the Time-Warner purchase; the union with Canal Plus of France or the acquisition of Manchester United – rejected by the British Department of Industry and Commerce.