Australian press lord, Rupert Murdoch, has finally got the Bancroft family to agree to sell him the Wall Street Journal. The paper is a trophy for Murdoch, probably marking the peak of his career.
Family-owned businesses must be becoming relics of the past. Most firms are now "in play" all the time - ready to be taken over, looted, stripped, leveraged, and resold to the highest bidder. Even if a business is in family hands, the son of the founder typically goes to business school and discovers modern finance. There, he learns that a firm should manage its figures so as to report steadily rising earnings…and that it should borrow money early and often…and that it should go public at an opportune time so as to give the owners a "liquidity event" that will put them on easy street.
We wonder what people do on Easy Street. Besides, the Bancroft family was already living on Easy Street. What are they going to do now?
Charity work…politics…or world improvement - what ever they take up, it is sure to be worse than running a good newspaper.
Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning Australia
P.S. to get The Daily Reckoning direct to your inbox sign up to our free e-mail newsletter or if you prefer to use RSS, subscribe to the Daily Reckoning RSS feed.
Related Articles:
- None Found
About the Author
Best-selling investment author Bill Bonner is the founder and president of Agora Publishing, one of the world's most successful consumer newsletter companies. Owner of both Fleet Street Publications and MoneyWeek magazine in the UK, he is also author of the free daily e-mail The Daily Reckoning.
Comment by Dan Travis on 3 August 2007:
You've got to love Rupert Murdoch. You can certainly argue that he has his own agenda. Well maybe no one will argue that he does have his own agenda.
Is is possible for one to control so much influential media. He's now got snobby rich white men with Fox and the Wall Street Journal. But he also has control of their kids with Myspace.
What next?