Few people understand life's travails as the son of a conservative-voting, want to-live-forever, media-owning billionaire.
James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch are the exception, which may be why they have, for the second time in their lives, bet and lost millions on a looks-like-blue-sky business opportunity that was predictably defeated by entrenched incumbents.
The Network Ten board met Wednesday morning and placed the broadcaster into administration, a step short of bankruptcy.
Masterchef Australia won't disappear. But the equity in Ten has.
Packer and Murdoch younger have lost a combined $350 million, by one calculation, on a network that never even looked like catching up to Seven and Nine, let alone fending off the new media titans of Facebook, Google and Netflix.
Call it One.Tel Mark II.
These sons-of-moguls thought they could achieve a miracle: turn a perennially third-placed television channel into a cash-generating machine. Packer bought 18 per cent of Ten in 2010, and later sold half to Murdoch.
"Ten's turnaround strategy is well under way," Chairman Murdoch assured shareholders in 2012 when he convinced them to cough up $200 million.
Those investors discovered they had arrived at a historical inflection point: the end of network television as a commercial powerhouse.
They weren't alone. Other members of the billionaire club piled in, including iron ore baroness Gina Rinehart, who would have been kingmaker in the takeover battle for Fairfax Media (publisher of The Australian Financial Review) if she hadn't sold out before the company turned itself around.
One.Tel
In the case of One.Tel, James Packer was seduced by a evanganlist-like former computer salesman, Jodee Rich, in the mid 1990s.
Rich and Packer were so tight they wrestled on the floor. Their business, One.Tel, used the cheap capital of the dot-com boom to sell cut-price mobile phone calls on the Optus network.
Packer brought in his friend Lachlan, and the ironically named Rich convinced them that One.Tel could buy enough mobile-phone spectrum and use vendor-finance to build a mobile-phone network capable of taking on Telstra, Optus and Vodafone.
The company was financially overextended, paying more for its product than it could sell it for, and unable to beat more sophisticated and popular rivals.
One.Tel went broke on July 24, 2001. You can't accuse Packer and Murdoch of lacking ambition. Perhaps their memories aren't so great, though.
