What's six billion dollars amongst friends?

Rupert Murdoch now claims that MySpace is worth $6 billion (Techdirt), on the basis of 130 million (many inactive) registered accounts, the $900 million four-year Google deal (on condition, remember, that "certain traffic and other commitments" (TechCrunch) are met, which they may never be) and growth of eight million accounts per month (Mashable). It's down a bit on Jordan Rohan's self-publicising $10-$20 billion estimate of last month, but hey, what's $6 billion amongst friends?

Taking a tenfold profit of $5.4 billion looks pretty sensible at this stage, especially since News Corp has added so little value to the site itself and may well have tarnished a lot of what makes MySpace special to its users.

With Fox Interactive Media as a whole - therefore including IGN, Scout, RottenTomatoes as well as MySpace - pegged to turn over $500 million (MercuryNews) for its 2006/7 financial year, it could take a decade for MySpace to make just in revenues the $6 billion that Murdoch imagines the site is worth right now. And that's without the risk that the users simply migrate elsewhere as (with the odd exception of Singapore) they originally deserted Friendster when something better came along or as in the UK they are moving to Bebo and in France to SkyBlog.

Which just leaves one question. If you were a global consumer media suddenly finding yourself $6 billion richer, what would you rather spend it on than MySpace? Or, to put it another way, what could Murdoch possibly want with the money?