Best Known As: Business Person

Gist:  Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC (born 11 March 1931), usually known as Rupert Murdoch, is an Australian-born global media mogul. He owns media outlets and is a major shareholder, chairman and managing director of News Corporation (News Corp). Beginning with one newspaper in Adelaide, Murdoch acquired and started other publications in his native Australia before expanding News Corp into the UK, US and Asian media markets. It was in the UK that he diversified into TV, creating Sky Television in 1989. In recent years he has become a leading investor in satellite television, the film industry and the Internet.

According to the 2009 Forbes 400, Murdoch is the 132nd-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $4 billion.

Life Facts:  Rupert Murdoch was born in Melbourne, Victoria. His father Sir Keith Murdoch was heavily in debt when he died in 1952, but possessed within a private family trust a considerable number of newspaper shares, some of which may have actually belonged to The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd. The trustees, in consultation with Rupert's mother, Lady Murdoch (now Dame Elisabeth Murdoch), were forced to sell many of the shares and other property in order to pay death duties and repay debt. Elisabeth was able to retain only the family home, Cruden Farm, plus the shares in News Limited and its subsidiaries, a Melbourne magazine publishing company named Southdown Press and The Barrier Miner, a regional newspaper at Broken Hill, New South Wales.

In early summer 2008, a "tentative truce" was brokered during a secret meeting between Barack Obama, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes (President of the Fox News Channel) at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. Obama resented Fox News's portrayal of him "as suspicious, foreign, fearsome - just short of a terrorist," while Ailes said "it might not have been this way if Obama had more willingly come on the air instead of so often giving Fox the back of his hand."

In 1999, The Economist reported that Newscorp Investments had made £11.4 billion ($20.1 billion) in profits over the previous 11 years but had paid no net corporation tax. It also reported that after an examination of the available accounts, Newscorp could normally have been expected to pay corporate tax of approximately $350 million. The article explained that in practice the corporation's complex structure, international scope and use of offshore tax havens allowed News Corporation to pay minimal taxes.