Success Quote by Sumner Redstone

Redstone’s jab lands because it pretends to be a simple valuation critique while quietly indicting Murdoch’s entire theory of media power. “Paid too much” is the language of boardrooms and bankers, a phrase that sounds prudential and bloodless. But the kicker - “even when he didn’t have any competition” - makes it a character sketch. It implies Murdoch wasn’t bargaining; he was buying a trophy, or buying leverage, and he was willing to overpay because the asset wasn’t just a business. It was a megaphone with a masthead.

The line carries Redstone’s own corporate subtext: in old-media empires, price is never only about cash flow. Owning the Wall Street Journal meant owning a high-trust signal read by elites who move markets and make policy. Redstone is suggesting Murdoch’s real ROI was influence, agenda-setting, and respectability - the kind that can launder partisan power through institutional prestige.

Context sharpens the insult. Murdoch’s 2007 purchase of Dow Jones was controversial precisely because it looked like an ideological acquisition dressed up as a synergistic one. Redstone, a rival mogul with his own reputation for hard-nosed dealmaking, frames Murdoch as irrationally acquisitive, almost romantic: a man so hungry for a particular kind of legitimacy that he bid against an imaginary opponent. It’s a businessman’s burn with a political aftertaste: the market didn’t force this; ego and ambition did.