Robert Thomson, CEO of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which was sued by Donald Trump last month over a Wall Street Journal story about his ties with Jeffrey Epstein, hit back at Trump on different grounds.
The feisty and self-consciously waggish exec, whose signature communiqués often include alliteration and high-flown references, took aim at Trump in the company’s fiscal fourth quarter earnings report. His attack was clever also for avoiding any direct reference to Epstein or the lawsuit but making it clear that the standoff continues, despite some recent signs of a thaw in suddenly icy relations between Murdoch and Trump.
In the company’s earnings release and in prepared remarks on a subsequent conference call with investors, Thomson jabbed Trump for his emphatic backing of AI technology. Trump has made several moves to indicate support of major tech players in their spending on AI, including hosting OpenAI chief Sam Altman, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and others at the White House to announce Project Stargate. The initiative will target $500 billion in AI infrastructure spending in the U.S.
Publishers and media companies like News Corp have selectively made deals with AI firms in an effort to wring revenue from the incursion of the technology. They also have been willing to explore their legal options to fight against what they consider to be theft of their property, as in News Corp’s lawsuit last fall against major AI firm Perplexity. The suit claims that the Jeff Bezos-backed purveyor of chatbots and large-language models was trained in part on News Corp properties like the Journal, the New York Post and works published by its HarperCollins book division.
“The AI age must cherish the value of intellectual property if we are collectively to realize our potential,” Thomson said in the earnings release. “Much is made of the competition with China, but America’s advantage is ingenuity and creativity, not bits and bytes, not watts but wit. To undermine that comparative advantage by stripping away IP rights is to vandalize our virtuosity.
“Even the President of the United States is not immune to this blatant theft. The President’s books are still reporting healthy sales, but are being consumed by AI engines which profit from his thoughts by cannibalizing his concepts, thus undermining future sales of his books. Suddenly, The Art of the Deal has become The Art of the Steal.”
MORE to come …
