News Corp

"*Home Alone* was number one at the box office for twelve weeks. The cash that poured in came along exactly when Rupert’s News Corp was technically on the verge of bankruptcy. Rupert had been going around the world to bank after bank to persuade them not to call in the huge loans he’d taken out over the years to finance his acquisitions. Of the many things I do respect him for, the biggest was his handling of the seminal crisis in his career. He was under tremendous pressure for more than a year, but he never complained or tried to lay off the blame. He was humbled but stalwart throughout; a real mensch is the only way I can describe him. If not for Fox and *Home Alone,* his whole company would have gone down. It really was the cash, almost five hundred million, from *this* one film that saved him. Think of that—a little Christmas comedy saved Rupert Murdoch and allowed all that followed."

"By now, I had zero relationship with Marvin Davis and began to play by the strictest interpretation of the joint venture. I disliked the way Marvin had mixed his personal life with the business of Fox, so I called him up and said now that the company was a joint venture, he would no longer be able to dictate or authorize any expenditure on his own. He couldn’t have his Carousel Ball charity dinner paid for by Fox, or have his children officed at the studio, or any of the myriad nonbusiness items he’d been charging to the studio. He said, “I’ll do what I want.” I told him, “I want to be very clear—listen carefully. You own fifty percent of the equity of this company, and you have fifty percent rights with the other owner, News Corp. I’m the chief executive officer, and I have all operating powers. All you have is your half vote, so you can literally do nothing in the conduct of the business other than vote your shares, which unless you have the vote of Murdoch means you can’t do squat.” Fox wasn’t going to be any more fun for Marvin Davis. I was finally learning how to play by big-boy rules."

"I found myself stuck in this slow, snaking receiving line with Anna Murdoch, Rupert’s wife at the time, who was also a News Corp board member. She casually asked me what I thought of the meeting, and out of my mouth flew, not without some surprising and uncalled-for vehemence, “What difference does it make what I think? I’m just a hired hand.” Anna laughed it off, but I didn’t. Those words escaped before I knew I was even thinking them. It was such an unusually unguarded moment that a bell rang in my head, one that not only was overpoweringly loud but couldn’t be unrung. I had been thinking something I hadn’t yet acknowledged to myself: that Fox wasn’t really mine, that however I acted as if it were, it wasn’t."

"Half an hour later the TVNZ team returned. Downey talked to them about contract law, about the nature of offer and acceptance. ‘This morning we made you an offer and you did not accept it so, to clear the air and make sure of exactly what we are saying now, that offer is gone because you did not accept it,’ he said. ‘We are starting again.’ In a brilliant deal for Sky, by the end of the negotiation TVNZ agreed to pay $5 million over three years—the same cost of Sky’s full package of rights from News Corp over the same period. ‘The beauty of the story for us,’ says Heatley, ‘is that for the first three years that Sky had wall-to-wall rugby, and while our subscriber numbers went through the roof, it cost us nothing. In exchange for a package of delayed rights and nothing live, we got TVNZ to pay us the same amount of money that we were paying Murdoch. I don’t want us to sound like smartarses, because I don’t mean it like that, but if TVNZ had been willing to pay that amount to News Corp, TVNZ could have won the exclusive rights for itself. But for various reasons the board of a government-owned company is a lot slower than the board of a private company. So instead of getting the rights itself, it had unknowingly just agreed to pay the full cost of us getting them.’ Ironically, just as Sky’s board had gone into the negotiation feeling under pressure from the government because Sky had the full package of rugby rights, TVNZ’s board had probably gone into the negotiation also feeling under pressure from the government because TVNZ did not have any rights. Board members may even have thought their jobs could have been on the line. After all, if the prime minister was angry that the live games were all going to be on Sky, how much angrier might he have been if TVNZ had emerged from the negotiations without even delayed coverage rights? For Sky, the deal was a triumph. ‘We felt very happy. It was fun,’ Downey says."

"Around the time that Sky floated, all the talk in the investment community was about the internet. Even though it was years before the advent of social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram, there were already fortunes being made by those who invested in the right companies. Trying to analyse or use instinct or simply guess which the ‘right’ ones were was the key to making money. Walker Wireless was part of the hype. To tap into these opportunities, Heatley, Todd, News Corp and Japan’s Softbank Corporation formed a company that they thought had bright prospects. They called it eVentures New Zealand and Heatley had a 20 per cent stake. Its role was not only to invest in e-commerce and internet-related companies but to create new ones. Its founders were hoping to experience the sort of success with start-up companies that the original shareholders in PayPal and Trade Me later enjoyed. They also wanted to introduce to New Zealand online products that were working overseas."

"Chisholm’s role in the negotiations was to maximise the return for News Corp. Heatley’s was to maximise the exclusivity for Sky, while minimising—as far as reasonable—the financial outlay. Both men knew the picture. TVNZ also wanted the rights, but its board was likely wrestling with the constraints faced by the boards of all government-owned companies: trying to weigh the public tolerance for spending against people’s expectations of service and trying to second-guess what their minister-shareholders would want them to do. TV3 would also want the rights but was likely to be priced out of contention, especially since it had just beaten Sky to the Super League rights so, Heatley thought, had probably spent its budget. But he could take nothing for granted."