As Rupert Murdoch stepped into the Grand Ballroom of San Francisco's Palace Hotel at the Web 2.0 conference in October 2007, the developers and engineers who packed the room fell into a respectful hush. It was the sort of greeting usually reserved for one of their own tech heroes, not a 76-year-old media mogul.
Sitting cross-legged on a red leather couch, Murdoch looked relaxed in an open-necked shirt. Next to him sat Chris De Wolfe, the co-founder of Myspace, the social network that News Corp's chairman had acquired for $580 million two years earlier.
De Wolfe had spent weeks trying to sell Murdoch's advisers on the conference, which he saw as a kind of digital coming out party for his boss. But those close to the News Corp chairman worried he might embarrass himself in front of the technorati. Murdoch wasn't concerned. "I'll do whatever we need to do for Myspace," he told associates.
After the conference, Murdoch and De Wolfe ambled across the road to a party hosted by Myspace inside San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. At one point, 20-odd people stood in line for a chance to speak with him. "He was like a rock star," De Wolfe later told a friend.
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