Rupert Murdoch Holds Private CES Meeting With Apple And Snapchat

Whilst tens of thousands of conference goers and exhibitors strutted their stuff in Las Vegas this week for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES), one such gathering of great technological minds was held behind closed doors.

New Corp and 21^st Century Fox executive chairman Rupert Murdoch played host to meetings in his private hotel suite from January 6-7, a meeting in which some of News Corp’s and 21^st Century Fox’s leaders attended to hear the words of technology giants such as Google’s Sundar Pichai, Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel, and Apple’s cloud services boss Eddy Cue, according to Quartz.

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This is also not the first time such a meeting has been held. Last year, Murdoch himself puclicly tweeted about the event at CES 2015. “Next CES in Vegas. Almost full Fox and News exec teams here to receive 20 smart presentations from very big to small software companies,” he wrote.

Others tech leaders who spoke to Murdoch’s top business folks behind closed doors were reportedly the founders of a news startup called TheSkimm, Slack boss Stewart Butterfield, actress Jessica Alba, and venture capitalists Benedict Evans and Mary Meeker.

Quartz reported that the event, outlined as being for an internal audience of Murdoch’s News Corp and 21^st Century Fox’s deputies, was organised by News Corp CTO Paul Cheesbrough.

The topics discussed at the meeting are not known, but it’s clear as the media industry undergoes a disruptive time, Murdoch and his crew are keen to keep up the pace with rivals. Whilst Apple is notoriously ever-absent from publicly attending CES, it’s interesting to note Cue’s presence here with Murdoch. Apple pushes out reams of News Corp and Fox content on its App Store and iTunes, and it’s not too farfetched to imagine Murdoch wanting to continue a cosy relationship between his news and iOS.

It was also this week when the Wall Street Journal, owned by News Corp, launched a new service on Snapchat’s Discover mobile-video platform.

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