Matthew Staver / Bloomberg News
RUPERT MURDOCH
Starting as head of a tiny newspaper chain founded by his late father, the News Corp. CEO built a media giant.
Competition is enjoyable. It's the reason for being in business. You have to like to win. I like to win. My father was more of an editor and publisher. I would have liked to do more of that. But I had to be more concerned with other things, and it dragged me into other businesses. But maybe it's in my genes. When I started, there was a much larger newspaper than us, and we had to compete to survive. You do that with better journalism. And then you have to endure. Stick it out. And we did that.
It's what we've done in New York with The Post. There's a tremendous amount of competition in that market, but we've created a superb newspaper, and we're the only ones who go up in circulation at a stable rate.
Probably the toughest thing I have ever done was in Britain when we bought [satellite operator] BSkyB. We saw a real opening. About the only TV people were getting back then in Britain was the BBC and BBC Lite. We felt people wanted better TV and were willing to pay for it. We lost money in the first two or three years. My bankers weren't very happy with me, but we knew that if we could stick with it there would be a huge market, and there is.
We saw an opening for Fox News [in 1996], too. We didn't think CNN was entitled to a monopoly on 24-hour news, and the entire news business had become monolithic, with the three networks and CNN. In the beginning it was tough getting people to carry us. But we did it.
Now we've got MySpace. When we first got it, it looked like we paid a lot for that [and outbid Viacom in the process]. We came into that a little late, and I think Viacom probably thought they had it. But we wanted it more, and I told my people to get it. I like to win, and that was a big win for us.