Dear News Corp. Boss No. 2: You Were Joking, Riiiighht?!?
by Kara Swisher
Posted on October 8, 2007 at 12:04 AM PT
News Corp. President and COO Peter Chernin made a funny last week in a video interview on FT.com.
At first, it was all business when Chernin said while he had a “healthy” level of respect and paranoia for Facebook–which is the hot-on-its-heels-second social network breathing down the neck of News Corp.-owned MySpace–that in most countries MySpace continued to set the growth pace.
And then Chernin, who is quite a bit sassier in person, showed a little bit of that humor when he noted: “Assuming we’re [MySpace] worth significantly more than they are, I think they’re worth at least $15 billion.”
That’s right, MySpace, You’re No. 1 and don’t let that Harvard/Silicon Valley geek make that look like No. 23!
Sounds like Chernin has joined the Mark Zuckerberg School of Pick-a-Silly-Number-out-of-the-Air Mathematics Club, which we at BoomTown look upon with such respect!
OK, using that logic, let me sharpen up my pencil here and make an estimate of the worth of this News Corp.-owned site, AllThingsD.com.
Hmm. Hmmm. Throwing in a few free subscriptions to the print Wall Street Journal, a stale box of Walt Mossberg’s Cohibas and noodling over Henry Blodget’s latest riff on someone else’s asinine analysis that TechCrunch is worth $100 million, we are prepared to declare that ATD is worth $654 and some change John Paczkowski has in his pocket.
Why so low? You might say lack of self-esteem. We’d say it’s our lack of lack of shame.
In any case, if you want to hear him talk more, I got to interview Chernin at D5 this year, where we talked about MySpace and the social-networking business, as well as other issues like the then-still-undone deal to buy Dow Jones.
See here:
