Eric got off the plane and was about to leave the airport with a few entourages when he saw Elizabeth in a khaki windbreaker pulling a simple suitcase and beckoning to him, then walked over quickly.
After News Corporation's business center was transferred to the United States, the Murdoch family settled in New York, and Elizabeth returned to New York to spend the festival with her family during the festival. Eric didn't expect to meet Elizabeth at the airport and return to Los Angeles by such a coincidence.
Eric asked the bodyguard to help Elizabeth pick up the luggage before asking, "You're back so soon, why don't you stay in New York for a while?"
"It's not interesting to stay in New York. I'm going to parties all day long. I'm so bored. I might as well go back to work," Elizabeth said, looking at Eric: "Speaking of which, I've heard a lot at parties these days There are a lot of things about firefly investment, what are you doing?"
"I plan to hide my family property in pieces, so that no one can easily guess how much money I have," Eric said frankly, even if he didn't admit it, anyone with a heart would definitely be able to guess it.
Firefly Pictures has no way to hide it for the time being. Fortunately, the value of the entertainment industry has a lot of room for manipulation, not to mention that Firefly Pictures has not yet been listed. It is not so easy to find out the family background of Firefly Pictures☆▽, the situation . However, some of the assets held by Firefly Investment are clearly exposed. For example, Cisco, the public can easily find out that the largest shareholder of Cisco is Firefly Investment as long as they pay attention.
Now Cisco's market value is only more than two billion, which is not too conspicuous, but Cisco's development has not deviated from the historical track. The current Cisco CEO has confirmed John Chambers as his next successor. And John Chambers is the biggest contributor to Cisco in the original time and space. So. If the market value of Cisco still expands to hundreds of billions of dollars in the future, then the wealth held by Firefly Investment will be too dazzling. What's more, Eric has more than just Cisco's investment in his hands. After the Forbes ranking incident, Eric had to make plans for the future in advance.
After discussing with Chris, Firefly Investment Company began to deal with Cisco's shares first.
Firefly Investment Company uses this method by injecting funds into several selected unlisted funds, and then reversely acquires some Cisco shares in the hands of Firefly Investment. Firefly Investment quickly dispersed its Cisco shares to these funds. However, because of the signing of a comprehensive agreement, after the transfer of shares, Firefly Investment's control over Cisco has not changed, but there is an extra node in the middle. The most intuitive performance is that the directors of Cisco's board of directors who originally represented Firefly Investment have not changed, and they are still those few people.
This method of indirect shareholding is very common in North America. Even for behemoths such as General Electric, Exxon Mobil, or Bell Telephone and Telegraph, their shareholder lists are basically a series of well-known and unknown foundations and trusts. , capital management and other various investment companies, but the real owners behind the shares held by these companies are often unknown.
Not only Cisco, but three companies, ie, Yahoo and hotmail. Firefly Investment will no longer invest directly in it in the future, but indirectly through foundations and other means such as development funds.
Elizabeth heard Eric's answer. He couldn't help laughing and said, "Compared to Firefly Pictures, that... Cisco's shares are nothing, right? Why don't you think of a way to hide Firefly Pictures as well?"
Eric spread his hands: "This goal is too big, and it can only take time to come slowly."
"I don't know why you are so troublesome, it seems that you are afraid that others will steal your things."
Having said that, the two came a few times together, Elizabeth waved to the driver who came to pick her up, let him leave, and got into his car with Eric.
Eric got into the car from the other side, and continued the topic just now: "I'm not afraid of being robbed by others, but don't I always take care of other people's fragile hearts? I don't want people to see that I have too much money and be stimulated, and then another Three long and two short."
Elizabeth obviously took Eric's words as nonsense, raised her small fist and hammered Eric's shoulder, and said with a smile: "You arrogant."
Eric also didn't dodge the girl's innocuous little fist, and said, "I'm going back to Angle Manor now, and you're going to my place too?"
Elizabeth blinked her eyes a few times before she seemed to remember it: "Yes, I forgot about it. Hey, Carter, turn around and take me back to Beverly Hills first."
Carter Moen looked at Eric questioningly through the rearview mirror. As a bodyguard who had followed Eric for a long time, he certainly knew the relationship between Eric and Elizabeth.
"Keep driving, go back to Malibu," Eric waved his hand at Carter, and then said to Elizabeth: "I remember that Julia also brought the little one back to her parents. Your house hasn't been cleaned for a long time. Stay with me tonight."
Seeing Eric speak so bluntly, Elizabeth's pretty face flushed slightly, she gave a hum in a feigned ease, turned her head, and put one hand on the car window, pretending to look at the scenery outside the window.
…
Wearing a thick bathrobe and walking out of the bathroom, Elizabeth remembered that her suitcase had been casually left at the door of the villa. Her cheeks were slightly warm and she pushed all the urgency a few hours ago onto a certain guy.
I got off the plane at four o'clock in the afternoon, and took a nap after finishing some things. It was already past nine o'clock in the evening, and Elizabeth came downstairs with some hesitation when she felt hungry.
The light in the small living room was on, and when he walked in, the sound of the TV was turned on very low, Eric leaned casually on the sofa, a black laptop was placed on the delicate aluminum alloy stand in front of him, and with his fingers The provocation made a slight clicking sound from time to time.
Seeing Elizabeth walking in, Eric pointed to the food on the glass table: "I made someone make a supper, and I just went upstairs to call you to see that you are already taking a shower."
"What are you doing?" Elizabeth didn't rush to eat, she walked behind Eric and lay down on the back of the sofa, looking at the laptop screen.
"The script of "Interview with the Vampire". Some time ago, the box office and word-of-mouth of "Four Hundred Years" were very good. The production department also negotiated a cooperation agreement with David Geffen. The film will be released at the end of the year. Your side How's your preparations for Buffy the Vampire Slayer going?"
"If it wasn't for this, I would have come back at the beginning of the month," Elizabeth replied, "I also had an audition for a leading actress in New York. According to your suggestion, we planned to select girls with dancing skills. The training time can be shortened, and the action scenes can be shot relatively easily. And the pilot episode can be produced before May."
"Are you selected?" Eric typed a line of comments on the script document and asked casually.
"Well, a few girls have been selected, and they will come to Los Angeles in a few days to conduct the final audition with the candidates here." Elizabeth stared at the laptop for a while, then sat down opposite Eric in a bored manner , put the tray of food on his knees and ate.
Eric hummed lightly and continued typing on the document.
"Hey, do you want to come over for the final audition? They are all very beautiful girls." After a while, Elizabeth said again.
Eric smiled and said: "This step is skipped. You know my taste, and after you choose it, just send it to my bed."
Elizabeth spat lightly, grabbed a piece of bread crumbs and threw it towards Eric.
"Hey, I almost forgot, why did you show up at the airport today?"
"I thought you were full of bad things and ignored this problem," Eric joked, and quickly reached out to catch a piece of small bread that flew over, took a bite and replied: "I'm going to San Francisco, Pixar's The new animation has been preliminarily completed, I will go to see the samples, and discuss with John and the others about the Super Bowl trailer."
"What is it this time, the sequel to "Toy Story"?" Elizabeth asked curiously. When Firefly disclosed information about Pixar's latest 3D animation to the outside world, it always used "untitled Pixar's new animation" as the pronoun. I didn't pay much attention to it, but I became interested when I heard that Pixar's new 3D animation was almost completed.
"No, the new animation is tentatively named "A Bug Story". It is a story about an ant family living in an oasis fighting against the enslavement of locusts," Eric said succinctly.
Elizabeth looked at Eric, waited patiently for a few seconds, and then asked, "That's all, nothing more?"
"It's boring to tell you all the plot now, you can go to the cinema to watch it when it's released."
"I'm not going, it's something for children," Elizabeth pouted.
After eating supper, Elizabeth came to the kitchen to pack up the tableware, and returned to the small living room again. Because of sleeping all afternoon, although it was already ten o'clock at night, the girl didn't have any pajamas, picked up the TV remote control on the glass table, sat down beside Eric, pulled a pillow and hugged her in her arms , randomly selected a midnight talk show.
After watching the host's tongue-in-cheek comments on the latest current events for a while, Elizabeth said to the man next to her, "Eric, is Firefly's next step to develop its own TV network?"
"Your old man guessed it?" Eric turned his head and asked.
Elizabeth nodded.
"Now the integration of media groups has become an inevitable trend. Firefly's industrial chain in the film sector has expanded to the limit. The next step is definitely to develop towards a comprehensive media group. Not only TV networks, but also music, publishing, etc. The business will expand." Speaking of this, Eric smiled and said: "But you can rest assured that Firefly will not set foot in print media, so it will not compete with News Corporation on this point."
With the rise of the Internet, the decline of paper media has become an inevitable trend. Eric remembers that after entering the new century, even the most famous newspapers in the United States have frequently encountered bankruptcy crises. Make useless layouts in industries that are about to decline.
"Don't think that I don't know what you're thinking. I heard that the Yahoo website you established at the end of last year has recently been in contact with several print media groups. The editor-in-chief of the "New York Post" told my father last time Speaking of which, you must be planning to build an online news site."
Eric temporarily stopped typing on the keyboard, turned his head to look at Elizabeth, and asked curiously: "Then what does your father think about this matter?"
Elizabeth snorted a few times with a little pride, but didn't answer, and looked like I didn't tell you that I didn't want to hurt you.
Eric shrugged, and understood that Murdoch must not have a high opinion of the prospect of this kind of idea. Having been in the media for most of his life, Murdoch can certainly see that there is no large-scale development of online news in the current Internet environment. The Internet user base at this stage has not yet reached the level of ordinary people, and most of them are concentrated in college students and professional and technical personnel. However, it is obviously impossible for him to predict how terrifying the explosive growth of Internet users will be in the next few years.
"Hey, Liz, you said if one day I got into a fight with your old man, who would you help?"
There was strong contempt in Elizabeth's eyes: "Of course help my father. How dare you fight with an old man in his sixties? It's really shameless."
"Um, wrong, I mean on the company side?"
"Then make as much trouble as you like," Eliza said lazily as she lay down on the sofa with her arms around a pillow. The current scale of the development of Firefly and News Corp. is certain to ebb and flow within a certain period of time. , but unless there is a huge change in the industry, it will be difficult to have a life-and-death struggle again, not to mention the future, even now, 20th Century Fox and Firefly have already competed in the film business, but the two companies are in peace Nothing, there are even some partnerships. The same is true of several other major film companies in Hollywood.
Eric smiled and didn't say anything else. He spent another hour reading the script of "Interview with the Vampire", closed his notebook, and patted the girl's clean calf on his lap: "Are you sleepy?"
There was no response, Eric turned his head and looked over, the girl squinted her eyes and fell asleep.
…
The new year’s awards season doesn’t seem to have much to do with Firefly Pictures. Last year, the films released by Firefly were basically commercial films. Even in the highly operable Golden Globe Awards, you can only swipe for nominations. , There are basically no movies with the ability to win awards. Coupled with the miracle that the company created a 27% share of the box office last year, Firefly's inaction in the awards will inevitably become the target of ridicule by some media with a sour grape mentality.
Eric saw several related reports in the newspaper of the new day early in the morning, but he didn't pay much attention to it. He always thought that the function of movie awards was icing on the cake, but Elizabeth took advantage of this and teased Eric. After a while. (To be continued..)