Murdoch/27″/dt1st/mark2nd

By FRANK SWERTLOW

Staff Reporter

News Corp. hopes to raise $1.9 billion from a public offering in Fox Entertainment Group, but an inquiring investor would be hard pressed to chat about the deal with the company’s peripatetic chairman.

Rupert Murdoch, “the boss,” as he is called by his loyalists, could be in New York tinkering with a headline for his racy tabloid, the New York Post, or in London discussing programming buys for British Sky Broadcasting.

Then again, he could be in Hong Kong, studying ad revenues for Star TV, or in Los Angeles looking at a script for Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., or possibly on his way to Sydney, to make a deal for Fox Sports.

“As his business expands, this is a man who responds accordingly,” said a former News Corp. executive. “He likes to go where the action is. He’s never in one place.”

Which, for the many investors, media executives, analysts and others who would like a piece of Murdoch’s time, presents a major challenge.

News Corp. is operationally very different from other large media conglomerates like Walt Disney Co. Many of its holdings are joint ventures with other companies, diffusing ownership among hundreds of investors and corporations around the globe but the majority control and overwhelming operational authority rests with Murdoch.

Even media titans like Disney Chairman Michael Eisner have to answer to their larger shareholders; Murdoch is beholden to no one. And Murdoch, unlike Eisner, has nothing resembling a home base, making him difficult, if not impossible, to keep up with.

Murdoch, in short, has become the quintessential globe-trotting executive, a symbol of the rootless businessman who is more at home in the sky, jetting from one deal to the next.

“I call them the masters of time and space,” said Joel Kotkin, a fellow at the Pepperdine University Institute for Public Policy. “They feel they are above their place of origin.”

Murdoch still maintains a home in his native Australia. But he also has homes in New York, Los Angeles, London and a vacation house in Sun Valley, Idaho. Forbes magazine, in its recently released Forbes 400, listed Murdoch as a resident of New York. He currently lives at the Mercer Hotel in the Soho district, not far from one of his holdings, the New York Post.

But just last year, News Corp. officials said Los Angeles was Murdoch’s home base. Indeed, for two years he has been on the Business Journal’s list of the 50 richest Angelenos. After the split with his wife Anna, he put up for sale the Beverly Hills mansion in which they had lived.

A Murdoch spokeswoman said the media czar will now be bicoastal, maintaining residences in New York and Los Angeles.

Murdoch became a U.S. citizen in 1985, not because of his allegiance to this country but for economic reasons. U.S. law barred foreign entities from owning TV stations here.

“What is his home town?” Kotkin asked. “New York? Los Angeles? Sydney? London? People like this have 20 houses, but in a way they are homeless.”

Murdoch’s real home could be a Boeing 737 business jet that one insider said he is buying and outfitting with a bedroom.

A News Corp. spokesman declined to comment on the aircraft and a Boeing Co. spokesman would not comment on his firm’s clients. A 737, stripped, starts at $34.2 million, about $4 million less than a fully equipped but smaller and faster Gulfstream V corporate jet. It has three bathrooms, two full showers, a living room, an office-conference room, a bedroom, and kitchen facilities. With eight passengers, it can fly from New York to Beijing non-stop.

“The jet signifies that he has a worldwide organization,” said his former business partner. “This is his Air Force One. But his organization is really one man.”

Some see Murdoch’s itinerant ways as the wave of the future.

“These masters of time and space can hopscotch to any place in the world, almost as a matter of pride,” Kotkin said. “They are not tied to a place as the old elite was. When you think about the Rockefellers, you think about New York. The Mellons had a commitment to Pittsburgh and the Chandlers had one to Los Angeles. You don’t see that anymore.”

But globe trotting has its personal price. Many Murdoch watchers maintain that his non-stop schedule, which often finds him on the phone to subordinates at all hours and in different time zones, may have been at the root of his pending divorce.

“I think she had one too many 4 a.m. conference calls,” a former colleague said. “Rupert is just not a man who likes to come home on the weekend and mow the lawn or work on his wood sculpture. He likes his finger in the pie.” The impact of this rootless existence is significant, especially to a city like Los Angeles. Business leaders who are truly involved in their communities like an Eli Broad of SunAmerica Inc., who moved from the Midwest, made hundreds of millions in Los Angeles and became an integral part of the city’s present and future are becoming less and less visible.

To the new mobile elite, cities become pawns in an overall corporate plan. The Los Angeles Dodgers, which Murdoch bought earlier this year to bolster his regional cable sports network, could wind up playing in New Orleans if there were a compelling corporate reason for the switch. Fox Studios could move to Phoenix or Mexico City, where production costs might be lower.

Richard Reeves, a political biographer and a professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, said there are global ramifications to this nomadic approach to business.

“This is an attack on the sovereignty of nations,” he said. “These guys are like Liberian flag tankers. They move around to avoid taxes and hunt for the best accounting laws.”

Some also feel threatened by Murdoch’s political impact on sovereign nations. News Corp. opted not to publish a book critical of Hong Kong’s future that was written by Chris Patten, the last British governor of the crown colony. The volume, which went to another publisher, might have proven offensive to Beijing’s rulers, who could veto Murdoch’s expansion into China.

“What Murdoch wants is money and political power,” said his former business colleague, “and nothing will stop him. He has a political agenda, but he will compromise it for a deal.”