After working for 68 years straight as the CEO and chair of public companies, you would expect Rupert Murdoch’s 90th birthday to be a big thing.
The only comparable contemporary act of uninterrupted institutional leadership is the Queen, who turns 95 next month after ascending to the throne in February 1952.
Given recent events, maybe Rupert and the Queen should call a joint press conference and retire together to let their squabbling families sort out their differences.
Rupert returned from Oxford in 1953 to take the reins of publicly listed News Ltd after his father Keith Murdoch’s shock death in October the previous year. Professionally, he has never been anything but a public company CEO. Since 1990 he has also insisted on being chairman of the board, whether it was News Corp, BSkyB, 21st Century Fox or Fox Corp.
A fanatical control freak, Rupert is a trust fund kid who has never had to take orders in a work place.
Rupert was born in Melbourne on this day in 1931 and shows no sign of slowing down. Indeed, eldest son and heir apparent Lachlan Murdoch famously told Michael Wolff in 2008: “Don’t you know, my dad’s never going to die?”
Like former Cabcharge CEO Reg Kermode, there is every chance Rupert will die in office rather than resign or retire ahead of time.
There has been a smattering of pieces about Rupert’s milestone birthday and the following are recommended reading: Chris Warren in Crikey; The Guardian, The Economist, and The New York Times.
However, as usual, Rupert media outlets that he controls are not allowed to independently cover such an event unless he approves. He doesn’t want anyone talking about his age, so even his Australian corporate fawner-in-chief Terry McCrann is yet comment on the milestone.
The only AGM where Rupert and I engaged on the age question was this exchange in New York back in 2010:
Question: “You’re turning 80 next March. You’re the world’s longest-serving CEO — 57 years in the chair.”
Rupert Murdoch: “I don’t think so.”
Question: “Do you know who’s served longer at a public company?”
Rupert Murdoch: “I don’t know — I’m sure there has been…”
Question: “What are the plans when you turn 80? No possible intentions of slowing down at all?”
Rupert Murdoch: “No. When my health gives out, I will get out of the way and not before unless the board decides to remove me, but that is another matter.”
Rupert was indeed the world’s longest-serving public company CEO 10 years ago and even more more so today. The nearest rival is Warren Buffett, 90, who became executive chairman of Berkshire Hathaway in 1970 at the age of 39.
Whilst his outrageous annual pay packet hasn’t diminished, Rupert has been making fewer public appearances in recent years. He rarely attends the Fox or News Corp quarterly conference calls. Rupert’s last public utterance was when he was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the peculiar, London-based Australia Day Foundation on January 26 and released a brief video slamming what he described as “awful woke orthodoxy”.
This was another green light to his various global cultural warriors arguing against climate change action, gender equality, racial justice and various other so-called “woke” issues which powerful and entitled white men like Rupert feel threatened by.
According to SMH gossip columnist Andrew Hornery, Rupert is spending his 90th birthday at his California home but a big family celebration is planned for later in the year when flying restrictions are lifted.
But where is his all-staff email, an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal or the birthday interview on Fox News?
Contrast Rupert’s birthday silence with the extraordinary fanfare surrounding The Australian’s 50th birthday in 2014, or Rupert’s attendance as guest-of-honour at the IPA’s 70th birthday in 2013, where he was lauded by Tony Abbott.
Despite his age, Rupert Murdoch has never been bigger, richer, more powerful or more hated — so much so that his two biggest US media enemies, CNN and The New York Times, are teaming up to produce a six-part documentary on him that will air some time in 2021-22.
I spent two hours being interviewed by CNN’s documentary makers a couple of weeks ago and have never seen such a professional TV operation in action.
Rather than third parties talking about Rupert, he really should sit down and pen an autobiography about his extraordinary career inheriting one afternoon newspaper in sleepy Adelaide and building an unprecedented media empire which has seen him emerge as leader of arguably the world’s most powerful family, amassing a tidy $30 billion pile along the way.
It’s just such a shame that this notorious former Australian citizen has done more damage than good, unethically debauching journalism, warmongering, denying climate change, pulling Britain out of the EU and backing destructive demagogues like Donald Trump.
Rupert, you’re now 90. It’s time to go before you do any more damage.
Will Murdoch ever step down? How much damage will he do before he leaves his post? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for Crikey’s Your Say section.
Looking back in fifty years, it will be clear that the single person who could be fairly labelled as the one who did the most to irrevocably destroy our world, including all its wondrous beauty and variety, was grumpy, innocuous-seeming Rupert Murdoch.
As we do Adolf Hitler.
Nothing seems innocuous about that evil old troll!
So if a single such person could be such a damaging influence on $billions/trillions and millions of peoples’, it doesn’t augur too well for the species (or the planet ?) ,if there’s needed, or could be another single person to do the opposite..You’d have thought by now, a lot of people would have gotten over the immortal dreams about/of Pharoahs & Pyramids..Maybe there’s a spanner still stuck, or a screw loose, some where back in the old pavlovian ring a ding ding carrot n stick cerebral cortex.? :-).
I’m sure that posterity will remember him as the most destructive influence on the western world since the end of WWII.
And unless climate change is a complete hoax, or we somehow pull away from the gravitational force of Rupert, possibly the individual responsible for more human death than any that lived before.
My sincere belief is that climate change is not crap.
I agree his destructiveness has been appalling but, Dog, don’t get sucked into the NewsCorp ‘believe/don’t believe’ approach to climate change. That’s been one of their great deceptions and a way of villifying scientists as a class. I have never heard a road engineer asked ‘do you believe in traffic congestion or not’. It’s a matter of observation and evidence. And the climate ‘traffic counts’ are telling us unequivocally that things are getting disastrous. Except for Andrew Bolt and Co, who like to dig up some counts taken at 3.00am and scream ‘where’s the problem?’.
Precisely, BrianD, it’s not a matter of “belief”, as if those who accept evidence are engaged in some fervid religious endeavour to bring a new religion into being.
The reality is all about observable, provable fact. If only one has the wit to listen & learn, & is not distracted by the destructive quasi-religious frantic self-justifying belief system Bolt & so many of Rupe’s acolytes follow.
I strongly suspect the love of money & power – especially Rupe’s & that of the fossil fuel beneficiaries – is the real basis of the whole problem of denial of all of the evidence.
Despite other things one might criticise Margaret Thatcher for, she actually understood the problem because she had a science degree.
It would be unusual, but if only she’d added a Sociology degree as well, …………..
Not insurance I’m afraid Sailor. The Federal AG has a law degree!
MrsT originally graduated in chemistry and worked for a while on ways of making Mr Whippy ice “cream” less prone to melting – it involved removing any trace of milk fat.
She then married and had two kids and graduated with a law degree whilst the nanny raised them.
Mark was apparently been dropped on his head several times during that period – fortunately Carol turned out well and loathed him, not hiding that fact.
I believe she emigrated to this country and worked as a journalist for some years.
Thanks Agni, I do remember the story of the high melting-point ice cream made with higher melting point vegetable fats.
That was while the Malaysian palm oil industry was making huge inroads into the EU.(I used to work in the fats & oils industry) with many different palm oil product variations, after so many years of just exporting the unchanged oil to Europe who then did the value-adding themselves.
I really appreciated your comments about the Thatcher kids – adds to my knowledge, or at least lightens my mood!
Thanks!
You’re welcome.
To add – Carol returned to Blighty in the latter days of MrsT’s reign to help her mother when she had enough on her plate with the Wets & general societal collapse.
Mark was really getting into big trouble, lost on Dakka rally, influence peddling, dubious activites in various southern African trouble spots including a failed coup, and generally being a blot on the family escutcheon.
It was he who popularised the term “big wodges of wonga” (mean loadzamoney) after one of his spectacular failures which was owed to some unsavoury types not particular about how they collected.
Dennis had to call in some big favours from his erstwhile petrochemical pals’ mercenaries to save his worthless hide.
Carol had a relationship with an Irish political hot-head who was a near carbon copy of her brother; i.e up to his ears in only god, him and associates knew what.
The guy was a backbencher in Thatcher’s gov but a Minister, perjuror, inmate, Deacon and, eventually a vicar of the Anglican Church. One can’t say that he hasn’t been around.
Thanks again folks, for the illuminating stories about Maggies’ kids.
IMHO, there is much Maggie did which i find repugnant.
But I return to my original point that, after studying chemistry (she did it around the time I did), she’d have learned about the molecular vibrations that absorb & emit only specific energies (wavelengths/frequencies) of incoming radiation.
The bit of that incoming radiation that we call infrared is perceived by us as heat. It’s the absorption then re-emission of “heat” in all directions (including back at the ground) by compounds (especially the “greenhouse gases” – they just happen to have bond strengths which absorb strongly in the infrared) that are and have been heating our planet for a century. Takes a while to build up to the level us to notice.
Again, I repeat that I’m no fan of much that she did. But at least Maggie understood that chemistry. And also the causes of – therefore solutions for – acid rain (see 1985 Helsinki Protocols for reduction in sulphur emissions).
Thus I am grateful to Somerville College, Oxford Uni, for educating her to this level at least.
So as her heritage despite Boris Johnston, UK’s global warming reduction laws are light-years ahead of Scotty from Marketing’s understanding.
To say nothing of Rupe’s.
But hey, the Kormanator, now that he’s head of the OECD has suddenly discovered that there is a climate crisis!
Must be something in the euroid air?
Pity that he fought, so successfully, against any such notion whilst in government here.
Quite some time ago I pointed out that Abbott was objecting to the existence of climate change only as a role in a play. Some subscribers considered the observation uninformed.
When was Moloch ever seen as “innocuous“?
His virulence has been more devastating in its short, medium &long term effects than his saddle mates, the Four Horsemen, combined.
Unlike the $30B Man, they did there fell work for free, it being their nature.
At every step he had choices, made them and we have suffered the results.
… as well as “their fell work..”
I remember when Terry wrote that Rupert would live forever…. pretty sure he believed it.
But I also remember when he wrote at the start of the GFC that it was just a correction of little significance.
That would be Tezza ‘Bond Booster’ Maccy – “this country needs Bond more than Bond needs it” being one of his more memorable judgements not long before it ll turned to dust & ashes, among other substances.
Like Polonius, always on hand to proffer advice and always wrong.
Beautifully put Stephen
Just remind us; it was Rupert who told a recent AGM audience that, with regard to the subject of global warming and the numerous denialists embedded in the corporation, he told everyone present – “…..there are none around here”…….?
Obviously he wasn’t referring to the Melbourne office and the likes of the opinionated Bolt or the very well rounded McCrann………….right ?
His legacy will be a media landscape he helped create- one with a diminished public understanding of issues, and hyper-partisan rhetoric winning the day.
Apparently, Murdoch has left The Times alone.
You are, I suppose, paraphrasing the great man’s own words.
Just in case anyone’s in doubt, he did no such thing. He wasted little time changing The Times from a newspaper of record, run to a high standard of journalism, into a shameless propaganda rag. The memoirs of the last Times editor of any credibility, Harold Evans, tell the sordid story.
Thanks for the note SSR. A Guardian reader and a pom conveyed such a sentiment to me as recently as yesterday. Any suggestions as to a pom newspaper of merit?
The ‘newspaper of record’, if that is the implication of ‘merit’, is now an extinct species, at least for any general readership publication of significant readership. No doubt there are some very local, specialist or niche papers that still have good standards.
All the current national dailies are partisan in their own way and their biases feed through into pretty much all they print. The main distinction is between the ones that still try to adhere to facts (even if selective) in a fair number of their reports and use some logic, and those that have gone full retard. Add in the general collapse in quality caused by the financial woes of the industry and it’s a thoroughly depressing picture.
Without doubt these days the best national UK publication with investigative political and financial reporting is Private Eye.
The ‘newspaper of record’, if that is the implication of ‘merit’, is now an extinct species, at least for any general readership publication of significant readership. No doubt there are some very local, specialist or niche papers that still have good standards.
All the current national dailies are partisan in their own way and their biases feed through into pretty much all they print. The main distinction is between the ones that still try to adhere to facts (even if selective) in a fair number of their reports and use some logic, and those that have gone full unhinged. Add in the general collapse in quality caused by the financial woes of the industry and it’s a thoroughly depressing picture.
Without doubt these days the best national UK publication with investigative political and financial reporting is Private Eye.
The Morning Star?
.mmm What about “WatchTower”?
The wokey content that is printed by your august recommendation is responsible (i.e. the content and not the publication) for the state of the contemporary rudderless Left
I haven’t seen it for some years so was unaware of it having succumbed to woksterizm.
No one could accuse “WatchTower” of that… or has even that fortress also been breached?
Forward xtian soldiers, ignore the blood & fire.
Somewhere in the distance a wildcat growls and the wind howls.
At one point, in attempting to slows its decline to a tory Beobachter, he reduced the price to 20p, lower than his other slime sheet, the Sun.