Web2Summit: Murdoch - Acquisitions Are Too Expensive

Having bought MySpace for what now appears to be a very cheap price ($580 million vs. Facebook's reported $15 Billion), and doing more acquisitions to bolster MySpace, like PhotoBucket, Rupert Murdoch finds most startups these days too expensive.

Kara Swisher asks: if Facebook is worth $15 billion today, what's MySpace worth? Rupert doesn't know for sure, but he does say that it tells us that NewsCorp is totally under-valued. It's got a market cap of something like $71 billion, with EBIT of $5 billion, vs Facebook with reported revenues of a few hundred million.

John presses the issue: should MySpace be spun out to unlock the value?

Rupert insists that News Corp is already the most valuable media property apart from Google...."if you consider Google a media company." (I do.) Chris likes the idea of a spinout as a separate public company, but Rupert likes it the way it is, and just looks for News Corp to realize the value itself.

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