MySpace Is For “Stalking”, Says Owner Of MySpace

Media mogul and grumpy old man Rupert Murdoch has developed a “personal antipathy to the Internet”, biographer Michael Wolff writes. Murdoch even thinks MySpace, which he himself paid $US580 million for, is kind of a criminal piece of garbage:

In 2005, not long after News Corp. bought MySpace, when it still seemed like a brilliant purchase… I congratulated him on the acquisition. “Now,” he said, “we’re in the stalking business.”

Later in his Vanity Fair column, Wolff recounts how Murdoch asked the founders of Google “Why don’t you read newspapers?”, gave “a walleyed stare” during all conversations about Web news and tried to beat Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to death with his cane.

Kidding; even after buying MySpace, Murdoch was over the moon for Zuckerberg. He invited the founder to speak at a News Corp. executive retreat, huddled with him throughout dinner—sparking obvious jealousy in MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe—and soon declared people were “all going to Facebook at the moment” rather than MySpace. All this according to Julia Angwin’s Stealing MySpace.

The point is, Rupert Murdoch has always kind of hated on MySpace, cruelly, in public.

(Pic: Murdoch and MySpace CEO DeWolfe at the opening of MySpace’s San Francisco office in Oct. 2007. Getty Images.)