Elisabeth Murdoch (businesswoman)

For other people named Elisabeth Murdoch, see Elisabeth Murdoch (disambiguation).

Elisabeth Murdoch (born 22 August 1968) is a British American television industry and international media executive. She is the Chairman and CEO of Shine Limited, a television production company with offices in London and Manchester. She was born in Sydney, Australia.

Named after her philanthropist grandmother, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, she is Rupert Murdoch's second daughter and the eldest of three children born of his second marriage in 1967 to former employee Anna Torv, a Roman Catholic native of Glasgow, Scotland. She attended schools in New York City, at one of which she set up an on-campus television station as a student project.^{[citation needed]}

Career

After graduating from Vassar College, she became manager of program acquisitions at her father's FX Networks, a cable television service based in Los Angeles. Operating as EP Communications, on 22 September 1994 Murdoch and her then husband, Elkin Kwesi Pianim, purchased a pair of NBC-affiliate television stations, KSBW and KSBY, in California on a US$35 million loan secured by her father. Within 18 months, the couple re-organised and re-sold the stations at a $12 million profit.^{[citation needed]}

She moved with her first husband to England where Rupert Murdoch was running BSkyB after forcing a 1990 merger with BSB. The early years of BSkyB saw a haemorrhage of cash from Murdoch's News Corporation funds. To help turn around the financial fortunes of the company, the respected New Zealand television executive Sam Chisholm was brought on board to manage the day-to-day operations and build the subscriber base, with Elisabeth Murdoch as his second-in-command and de facto apprentice. By the time Chisholm left the company BSkyB was the most profitable company in the UK. As Managing Director, she oversaw BSkyB's £12 million sponsorship of the troubled Millennium Dome, to the relief of its Cabinet overseer, Peter Mandelson. But she earned opprobrium after brokering her father's £623.4 million bid for England's champion Manchester United team.^{[citation needed]}

After quarreling publicly with Chisholm, she veered out on her own as a television and film producer in London. She advocated Sky setting up a film and production unit that is similar to BBC Films and Film4 Productions. However, due to lack of success, this unit closed down, and she founded Shine Limited in March 2001, with 80 percent ownership retained by herself, 15 percent by Lord Alli, and five percent by BSkyB. BSkyB signed a deal guaranteeing to buy an agreed amount of Shine programming for two years. An agreement in principle has been reached to sell Shine to News Corporation. Shine Limited is also a supplier of franchise television to broadcasters internationally, including the BBC, Channel 4, HBO and the RTL Group. Her firm has worked closely with Freud Communications on a number of media deals.^{[citation needed]}

Lachlan Murdoch, formerly the deputy chief operating officer at the News Corporation and the publisher of the New York Post, was deemed Murdoch's heir presumptive before resigning from his executive posts at his father's company at the end of July 2005. That surprise departure left James Murdoch, chief executive of the satellite television service British Sky Broadcasting since November 2003, as the only Murdoch scion still directly involved with the company's operations, though Lachlan agreed to remain on the News Corporation's board.

In 2011, Elisabeth sold Shine to News Corporation.

In February 2013 she was assessed as the 5th most powerful woman in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4.

Private life

Elisabeth Murdoch's first marriage was to fellow Vassar graduate, Elkin Kwesi Pianim, an associate in the New York corporate finance department of the Rothschild investment bank. He is the son of economist and financier Andrews Kwame Pianim (a native of Ghana) and Cornelia Pianim (a native of the Netherlands). The wedding was held on 10 September 1993 at St. Timothy Roman Catholic Church near the Beverly Hills residence of the bride's parents. Murdoch and Pianim had two children, Cornelia (born 1994 in New York), and Anna (born 1997 in London), but divorced in 1998.

She later married public relations man Matthew Freud, the son of former MP Sir Clement Freud, and great-grandson of Sigmund Freud. They have two children: Charlotte Emma Freud, born 17 November 2000 and Samson Murdoch Freud, born 13 January 2007. The couple wed on 18 August 2001 in a ceremony at Blenheim Palace.

Elisabeth Murdoch's parents, Anna and Rupert Murdoch, separated in 1998. Anna Murdoch received a settlement of some reported $1.7 billion in assets, to which her own three children were the primary heirs, in addition to whatever share each might eventually receive from Rupert Murdoch's estate. Seventeen days after the divorce, on 25 June 1999, Rupert Murdoch, then 68, married Wendi Deng, then 30, a newly appointed vice-president of Murdoch's STAR TV. Anna Murdoch was also remarried, in October 1999, to banker William Mann. Elisabeth Murdoch, while her own first marriage was dissolving, made jocular reference to familial divorce in a speech at the time.

In 2008 Elisabeth Murdoch and Matthew Freud moved into Burford Priory in Oxfordshire, where they are key members of the Chipping Norton set.

External links

• Shine Group
• Elisabeth Murdoch at the Internet Movie Database
• Elisabeth Murdoch collected news and commentary at Bloomberg News
• Elisabeth Murdoch collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Elisabeth Murdoch: The savvy, skill and style to head up the empire, Ian Burrell, The Independent, 22 February 2011
• 'The Heiress,' Ken Auletta, The New Yorker, 10 December 2012 [1]