And he heads a business empire that includes vastly more than just his three television channels.
A successful sub-label in the Lauren empire, Polo peddles preppy classics to men but this was the first time the brand has created the equivalent wardrobe for its female customer.
Targaryen manages to repeatedly outmanoeuvre and outwit scheming men who dominate the world of Game of Thrones and dismiss the idea that a woman might have the wherewithal to establish an empire.
But such niceties over which part of the empire rules what never seem to make much difference to Murdoch game plans.
Coulson, because of his links with the Murdoch empire and his tabloid experience, was given the benefit of the doubt, a privilege once reserved by the establishment for chaps of impeccably upper-class background.
The Man Booker prize may be one of the last shadows of that empire, evoking as it does an imagined community unchanged since 1921, when Irish independence began its demise.
Writers from the wider empire, as well as from the "wrong" parts of Britain, could have written the same.
BBC Production, in contrast, is "humming along very nicely", and Bannister clearly relishes the vast sweep of the empire he now presides over as chief executive.
As the British empire was gradually dissolved after the second world war and its industrial base attacked by younger, nimbler economies, the cohesion of the British state weakened.
Since joining the Murdoch empire in 1991, the 56-year old has risen through the ranks from Foxtel to Star TV and most recently running Sky Italia, which he joined as launch chief executive in 2002.
In a way one can see what went on as a replay of what happened to the Austrians when the Czechs and others in 1918 left their "union", the Austro-Hungarian empire.
