Rupert's World

As he settles into an easy chair in his offices on the 20th Century Fox film lot, a genial Rupert Murdoch has plenty on his mind. Not only has he unveiled a dazzling array of media deals in recent weeks, but his daughter Elisabeth is to be married the following day. "It's the main item of business these days around my house," he says.

Perhaps so, but it's clear that Murdoch has been devoting great gobs of time to business marriages as well. Just two years after he was nearly buried beneath a mountain of debt, Murdoch, 62, is expanding his global empire more rapidly and restlessly than ever before. For starters, he paid $525 million in July for 63.6% of Hong Kong-based star tv and its potential to reach 3 billion viewers from Tokyo to Tel Aviv. This month Murdoch upgraded his 50%-owned British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) from six channels to 14, and agreed to acquire Delphi Internet Service, a Massachusetts-based computer network whose gateway to the worldwide Internet system provides access to 20 million computer users.

Such deals, though substantial, barely hint at the ultimate scope of Murdoch's latest thrust: to cover the earth with his own digital superhighway. To increase his market penetration, the media baron is developing a digital compression system to enable TV satellites to beam down 180 channels, thereby allowing most of the world to watch everything from news and sports to such Fox shows as The Simpsons and Beverly Hills 90210. As the capstone of these Napoleonic visions, Murdoch and British Telecommunications, which operates Britain's largest phone system, are developing interactive links that will let viewers call up movies and other forms of entertainment and information on demand. "Murdoch now has a better global position than anyone else," says John Reidy, who follows the media industry for the investment firm Smith, Barney. "He has a lot of pieces of the puzzle, but we do not know how it's going to play out."

The burst of activity makes Murdoch a formidable force in the fast-evolving world of media alliances and the race to develop an electronic superhighway into the home. It pits the Australian-born mogul and his partners against such giants as Time Warner, AT&T and cable-firm Viacom International, which are rushing to build interactive systems of their own. At the same time, the star tv and BSkyB deals enable Murdoch to bestride the television world. When asked whether he intends to build a global TV network, Murdoch booms out, "Oh, absolutely!"

Such a network and its affiliated stations would provide a worldwide outlet for Murdoch's Fox Broadcasting television programs and his 20th Century Fox films, which include a library of more than 2,000 titles ranging from All About Eve and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to the Star Wars trilogy and Home Alone. The satellite system would also help Murdoch, whose Fox Network is planning to launch a hip cable channel called FX next year, muscle his way into what he sees as the entrenched world of American cable TV, dominated by operators like Denver-based Tele-Communications Inc. and Time Warner, whose magazine and book division publishes TIME. He could offer such firms slots on star tv or BSkyB, for example, in exchange for carrying his new cable channel. "That's how this world lives," Murdoch says. "The big people who have access to 2, 3, 4, 8 million homes are all playing leverage against each other."