What was Murdoch really thinking as he joined Trump’s stage?

Rupert Murdoch and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, two of the world’s industrial titans of media and technology, were relegated to a new role on Monday – Donald Trump’s stage props.

What must they have been thinking as Trump signed an executive order to establish a US sovereign wealth fund, whose first investment may be a large chunk of Chinese social media platform Tiktok?

True to form for Trump, this detail-lite and execution-uncertain major policy announcement came out of left field. It was made simultaneously with Trump walking back America’s imminent imposition of tariffs on Mexico and Canada – a move that averted a world stock market meltdown.

President Donald Trump speaks as Rupert Murdoch is among those looking on.Credit: AP

In Trump’s only previous reference to a US sovereign wealth fund, he said it would be financed by the imposition of  “tariffs and other intelligent things”.

Why billionaires Murdoch and Ellison were cast as bit players in Trump’s latest piece of policy theatre is unknown, but Trump branded their attendance as “appropriate”.

It didn’t look accidental.

Trump noted that the pair had nothing to do with his announcement, but the optics were curious.

Was their presence designed to imply that Trump had their seal of approval for a plan to potentially buy a stake in TikTok – a company which is worth north of $US100 billion ($160 billion)?

Were their poker faces disguising their curiosity or bewilderment about how the US would fund such a sovereign wealth fund when it was running an astronomical deficit?

Or were they pondering the risk associated with such a fund providing the unpredictable US President with access to a large and raidable cookie jar?

Remember, emails and texts unearthed as part of a major US defamation case in 2023 against Fox Corporation revealed Murdoch labelling the Trump campaign’s false claims about election fraud as “really crazy stuff” and “damaging”.

So it wasn’t so long ago that Murdoch’s private opinion of Trump was one of derision.

What is clear enough is Trump’s desire to stage a charm offensive aimed at Murdoch and the billionaire tech broligarchy, which is publicly reciprocated.

“The legendary Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison,” Mr Trump raved. “So there are two legends in business and publishing. Larry is pretty much in a class by himself, right? You may have a couple of bucks more, I don’t know, and Rupert is in a class by himself. He’s an amazing guy.”

Former critics including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and the President’s new best friend Elon Musk are now paid-up members of Trump’s fan club.

So you probably won’t hear these captains of industry musing out loud about how such a fund may work.

But Trump will.

“We have tremendous potential,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Monday afternoon. “I think in a short period of time, we’d have one of the biggest funds.”

Most sovereign wealth funds were created by governments whose countries have had large endowments of fossil fuels. Some of the largest of them are Middle Eastern countries, and the daddy of them all in size is Norway’s government pension fund with total assets of $US1.7 trillion.

Oil-rich Alaska has the largest US state-run sovereign fund with $US80 billion under its belt.

Of Western democracies to have established sovereign wealth funds, Australia’s Future Fund ranks among the largest with assets under management of almost $300 billion.

The Future Fund, however, is scrupulously governed. It is not politicised, has no history of chasing risky assets and has a diverse portfolio of investments and a long-time performance horizon, aimed at outperforming a set annual benchmark with its returns.

How Trump would source and potentially spend the sovereign funds makes the mind boggle.

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