FB Roundup Pony Ma, Murdoch family, Crown family
Crown family sells Miracapo Pizza
The Chicago-based Crown family, descendants of Chicago financier Henry Crown, has sold Miracapo Pizza Company to private equity firm Brynwood Partners.
Headquartered in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, Miracapo is a contract manufacturer of frozen pizzas for convenience stores and branded customers serving the retail channel. The company owns three manufacturing facilities located in the Chicagoland area totalling 175,000 square feet. It employs 385 employees.
Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, though Miracapo has annual sales of about $250 million.
“We are thrilled to announce the acquisition of Miracapo,” said Henk Hartong III, Chairman and chief executive of Brynwood Partners.
“We look forward to the prospect of adding to our successful track record in the pizza space, with our prior portfolio company, Richelieu Foods and our current investment in the space, Great Kitchens Food Company, which primarily serves private label retail customers in the take-and-bake pizza space. We are impressed by what the Company has achieved since its founding in 1984 and plan to build Miracapo’s commercial capability.”
Miracapo had been held by CCI which owns and operates the assets of the Crown Family. It includes a diversified group of industrial manufacturing companies, including leading businesses in the transportation and process equipment industries.
Forbes estimates that the Crown family has a net worth of around $14.7 billion. Founded by Henry Crown in 1919 the family fortune comes from a building supplies company which merged with General Dynamics in 1959. The family still owns 10% of General Dynamics.
Murdoch family starts court battle
The court battle for the future of Rupert Murdoch’s family empire started last week at Washoe County Courthouse in Reno, Nevada.
In the battle for the control of the family trust, his eldest son and chairman of News Corp Lachlan Murdoch is lined up against Murdoch’s three other children Prudence, Elisabeth and James.
An original trust in 1999 was supposed to settle the issue. The trust gives the family eight votes, which it can use to have a say on the board of News Corp and Fox News. Murdoch himself controls four of those votes at the moment, with his four eldest children holding one each.
Although Murdoch has been married five times, the original trust excluded his two younger children Grace and Chloe.
Murdoch had wanted to amend the trust documentation so that Lachlan could take control of the trust. An added frisson of politics comes into the mix with suggestions that 93-year-old Murdoch has been motivated to make changes to maintain the conservative editorial stance of his outlets like Fox News.
“From what we know, this plan essentially seeks to put Prudence, James and Elisabeth on the same footing as Murdoch’s two younger daughters,” Walter Marsh, an Australian journalist and author of the biography Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire, told the BBC.
As we reported in September last year, Lachlan is already in pole position to take control of the group. At the time, Murdoch stepped down as chair of Fox and News Corp and handed control to Lachlan who became sole Chair of News Corp and continued as executive Chair and Chief Executive of Fox Corporation, while his father assumed a new role as Chairman Emeritus.
According to Forbes, Murdoch is worth an estimated $20.5 billion. After his father's death in 1952, Rupert Murdoch took over the running of Adelaide newspaper The News, before going on to acquire further Australian periodicals throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1969, he expanded into the United Kingdom, taking over the News of The World, The Sun and The Times newspapers.
In 1974, he moved to the US where he became a naturalised citizen and, over the years, grew his media empire with the acquisition of Twentieth Century Fox, Fox News, HarperCollins, Sky and The Wall Street Journal.
Now, through his company News Corp, he is the owner of hundreds of local, national and international publishing outlets around the world.
Pony Ma becomes richest person in China
Ma Huateng, more widely known as Pony Ma, has made it to the top of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The co-founder and chairman of Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings is estimated to have a net worth of $44 billion.
Thanks to challenging economic data from China, Ma has overtaken Zhang Yiming, the main co-founder of Chinese tech giant ByteDance, best known for its popular app TikTok, and Zhong Shanshan, the founder and chairman of Nongfu Spring, a bottled water company, both of whom are now in second and third place.
Ma represents “a new generation of Chinese billionaires” whose business is aimed at satisfying customers’ “psychological” rather than physical needs, Hao Gao, director of the Research Centre for Global Family Business at Tsinghua University, told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Ma’s wealth has grown as government attention focused on tech rivals Alibaba Group and Didi Global. The leaders of both have been quite outspoken which has allowed Ma, who has long shunned the press, to pass them quietly.
Born in Guangdong province in the south of the country, Ma studied computer science at Shenzhen University and worked as a software developer before he set up Tencent in 1998 with only the equivalent of $100,000.
The world’s most popular games publisher, Tencent has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in gaming, notably via its blockbuster titles Honor of Kings and, more recently, Black Myth: Wukong.
