• Deadline Hollywood Daily, Wednesday, June 27, 2007 11:15 AM

MySpace founders Chris De Wolfe and Tom Anderson plan to hold Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation hostage once their current contracts expire in October. According to the blog, the pair seeks $25 million over two years each, plus a development fund of $15 million to invest in Internet companies.

Not that News Corp. is blinking. MySpace and its Fox Interactive Media siblings may be the key to the media giant's future, but it's also one of the cheapest companies on earth when it comes to executive compensation." However, the company is understood to have made a counter offer of $15 million each for the two years, which would make De Wolfe and Anderson the second-highest paid executives at News Corp. behind Roger Ailes, chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group.

They two already have equity stakes in MySpace China, which means the chances of them getting what they want are highly unlikely, despite MySpace's dominant position in social networking, where its market share is near 80 percent. A relatively new phenomenon over the last few years, social networking has already proved to be fickle in nature; Friendster, the former king of the pile, was later usurped by MySpace, which today faces stern competition from Facebook, which now has 12% of the market.

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