Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch turned out to be the “shadow” co-owner of Uber taxi service

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Australian media mogul and billionaire Rupert Murdoch turned out to be the “shadow” co-owner of Uber taxi service. About this newspaper writes the Re / code. He controls News Corp. (She is the publisher of The Wall Street Journal) and 21st Century Fox Studio (it includes Fox News), which together cost more than $ 60 billion on the stock exchange.

Uber is considered the most expensive startup in the world - in the last round of financing, investors valued the company at $ 62.5 billion. If a businessman owns 0.5% of the service, this asset is worth more than $ 300 million.

His own fortune, Forbes magazine estimates almost $ 12 billion. The entrepreneur’s family owns 120 newspapers in five countries (including The Wall Street Journal , The New York Post , The Sun ), a cable television network, with offices in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Murdoch himself does not appear in the list of shareholders of Uber, since he owns a minority stake through one of the investment funds, sources say.
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According to one of the former employees of Uber, the founder and CEO of the service, Travis Kalanik, in personal conversations with subordinates did not hide the fact that Murdoch is an investor of Uber.

For an Australian billionaire, investing in a share capital of a startup looks unconventional, says Recode. His previous attempt to diversify the business at the expense of technology companies was, according to the entrepreneur himself, a “huge mistake”: in 2005, the media mogul spent $ 580 million to buy the popular social network MySpace at that time, and after six years sold the failed project for only $ 35 million.

Arianna Huffington, the chief editor of The Huffington Post portal and at the same time a close friend of the founder of Uber, recently joined the Uber board of directors. Her publication once even accused of trying to silence a story that could adversely affect the business reputation of Uber, recalls Recode.

In February, LetterOne holding of Mikhail Fridman, German Khan and Alexey Kuz'michev became co-owner of Uber. The company invested $ 200 million in a startup. Prior to that, Russian businessmen Alisher Usmanov and Ziyavudin Magomedov invested in Uber.

In January 2016, it became known that several tens of millions of dollars in a startup were invested by the main shareholder of USM Holdings, Alisher Usmanov and his partners. In September 2015, Ziyavudin Magomedov, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Summa Group, invested $ 300 million in Uber.