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When Sirs David and Frederick Barclay, twin brothers, paid £665 million for the Daily Telegraph in 2004, they were privacy-conscious individuals, skilled at avoiding scrutiny. The few substantive stories about them relayed a rags-to-riches rise, from a near bread-and-water start in a London tenement flat in 1934 to the heights of British society, after decades of daring gambles in property and retail.
That was how the telling, laden with anecdotes that sometimes seemed apocryphal, went. Their loss of the Telegraph, which their lender Lloyds placed into receivership last year after family squabbles and debts called in after years of nonpayment and stalling, shattered the mystique. It also revealed a network of offshore companies and the use of tax avoidance and circuitous accounting that Archimedes would struggle to decipher. The brothers—Sir David died in 2021—are no longer cloaked in PR-massaged glory, but have become symbols of why powerful people often prize secrecy and hide their wealth until inheritance—or divorce—forces them to acknowledge it.
Part of that has been the forced sale of the Telegraph Media Group, including the eponymous daily, which may finally end this month. Seeking to become a press baron in a digital age is Dovid Efune, the thirty-nine-year-old British-born publisher of the online-only New York Sun. The process has gotten rocky, with the Telegraph starting to slide from a prized asset to something its seller desperately wants rid of. The British government, after an outcry from Parliament, passed a ban on foreign ownership of newspapers earlier this year, ending an attempted acquisition by the RedBird IMI investment group. The company—75 percent owned by state-backed investors in the United Arab Emirates—had taken control of the Telegraph and The Spectator magazine, also part of TMG, when it repaid £1.1 billion that the Barclays owed to Lloyds. But the foreign ownership ban has left RedBird IMI—whose front man, the former CNN boss Jeff Zucker, had big plans to make the Telegraph a global brand—in shtook, as they say in London. Zucker is holding the bag on what is starting to look like a distressed sale.
Were that not enough to comprehend, whoever ends up owning the Telegraph—first published in 1855—may have more than their stake money at risk; such is the state of an industry where the prestige of newspaper ownership is falling down the list of things with which rich people can buy access. Jeff Bezos’s public battles at the Washington Post have underlined the black-box drama that can come with a trophy asset. Ultimately, the Telegraph has become a test case of just how much a newspaper is worth.
“It’s been a mess for years,” said Alice Enders, director of research at Enders Analysis, a media and entertainment consultancy, noting that for all the problems, the Telegraph remains a profitable business. “But without an owner, the management cannot implement a strategy. For the staff, whose salaries and promotions are frozen, it’s an ongoing challenge.”
RedBird IMI’s deal with Lloyds struck many as an opportunistic effort to expand the UAE’s “soft power” abroad, though Zucker denied this. Yet, having parted with such a huge sum to bail out the Barclays, the British government has made him and the Gulf state look closer to foolish. RedBird IMI ultimately attached a price tag of £600 million to the Telegraph, since reduced by the successful £100 million sale of The Spectator to Sir Paul Marshall, the right-wing hedge fund manager and part owner of the conservative broadcaster GB News. Initial suitors included DMGT, the owner of the Daily Mail; National World, a local and regional publisher that runs The Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post; and Sir Paul.
But the designated preferred bidder, who has fewer than the days until Christmas to close a deal, is Efune, who unlike the Barclays has never been a billionaire. A highly conservative and vocal supporter of Israel, he offered £550 million for the Telegraph in October, prompting conspicuously agreeable story choices by London editors as Israel bombed Gaza and Lebanon in the run-up to the US presidential election. But Efune has so far failed to come up with the money, prompting alarm that the sale will fall apart. Potential buyers are not stepping forward this time. They are instead eyeing a knock-down price. “The only reason he is the preferred bidder is because he offered so much more money than anyone else,” said Enders, noting that the reserve price was £500 million.
The price is the problem: Efune’s offer was £100 million more than anyone else put up, according to sources with knowledge of the bids. It may have struck him as reasonable—market reports from two years ago put estimates for TMG as high as £700 million, on account of strong annual profits, a well-known conservative brand, and a successful, if somewhat delayed, shift to digital. A global expansion could have added growth.
But analysts and newspaper executives now put the group’s effective worth at more like £375 million to £400 million at best, because of a changing market.
“They’ve bulked up the numbers in readiness for sale, but almost two years on print revenue has dropped another 15 percent, and with no deal in sight the value is evaporating,” said one experienced London-based newspaper executive.
The bulking-up was a reference to the bolt-on acquisition of another publisher, Chelsea Magazine Company, in March 2023, months before TMG fell into receivership. That sale instantly gave the Telegraph an extra two hundred thousand subscriptions, which took it past one million customers for the first time and jump-started its digital-subscription business. The company’s latest circulation and revenue figures are unknown.
Whatever those numbers are, beneath the digital math is a legacy reality that more than 60 percent of the Telegraph’s revenue continues to come from print. Any serious buyer should bargain on the physical newspaper being phased out within five years, the newspaper executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to frankly discuss proprietary numbers, told me.
On that basis, Efune’s offer makes little financial sense. The lenders he has thus far dealt with seem to share that view, with three potential backers ending talks. Private equity deals typically demand a 20 to 25 percent premium on their money, with an exit and the principal sum often being repaid within seven years. As a mature business, the Telegraph seems an unlikely candidate for private equity, as a future market flotation or sale to another trade buyer is unlikely. Meanwhile, sources at the company are fuming that the British government hobbled their plans. “As somebody put it, the Telegraph could have been the Man City of Fleet Street,” one source said, referring to the acclaimed soccer club.
Instead, a heavy debt load on top of an inflated purchase price would explain Efune’s funding delays and the uncertainty for all involved, including the Telegraph staff. “We know we’re overvalued,” one senior member of staff told me, outlining the need to move on from “the terrible ownership” of the Barclays.
In a move that has more than a hint of Ted Lasso about it, Efune is now in talks with another American, the billionaire businessman Todd Boehly, a co-owner of Chelsea Football Club in London, to finance the purchase, sources at RedBird IMI, and close to Efune, confirmed on December 16.
Efune, born in Manchester, has no experience in British newspapers. Some scrutiny has centered on his vocal support, expressed on X, for Israel, where his regular posts have grown louder since the murderous October 7, 2023, assault by Hamas. But why the Telegraph? And what would he do with it?
“He is an ambitious guy and he wants to be a press baron, like a Murdoch,” said a member of staff at the New York Sun, on condition of anonymity, talking up how Efune has improved the publication.
The Sun, itself an old title that dates back to 1833, was revived as a broadsheet in 2002 but ended its print edition in 2008 and was out of business entirely for seven months before resuming life online. It stumbled along with big-name columnists at irregular intervals for more than a decade until Efune—then the editor in chief of the Algemeiner Journal, covering American and international Jewish and Israel-related news, for a largely Hasidic audience—took over in 2021. He relaunched the Sun the following year. Similarweb, the digital-analytics company, says traffic has since grown from 134,200 monthly visitors to 785,100 in the most recent quarter for which data is available—an almost fivefold increase. The Telegraph, by comparison, had 75 million visits in November, from 29 million unique users. Scale and influence appear to be Efune’s primary motivations.
“I think we have a great online newspaper,” the Sun staffer said. “The one thing we don’t have is readers.”
(In an email after this article was first published, Efune said that the growth in digital audience has been actually much higher—around thirty-fold—since he took over the Sun and that the publication now has 1.5 million newsletter subscribers.)
Efune’s existing media investments mean he is very likely to face examination under the British government’s public-interest test regarding newspaper ownership. Such an inquiry could delay a sale from anything between four months and a year. The need for accurate presentation of news is one requirement, as is the need for a “sufficient plurality” of views, where doubts exist.
“For Efune, this is purely an attempt to influence the political voice of the Telegraph,” said one media executive I spoke with. “He has no clear synergies, no U.K. national media brand management experience, no understanding of how to stem the long-term structural decline of print and no chance of paying down what would be heavy debt.”
Few people have studied the Telegraph more closely in recent years than the journalist Jane Martinson, author of You May Never See Us Again—The Barclay Dynasty: A Story of Survival, Secrecy, and Succession, published last year by Penguin UK.
“The economics of newspaper prices has long defied gravity and a great deal of financial sense,” said Martinson, a former media editor of The Guardian. “The last set of accounts under the Barclays suggest the net asset value was not much more than £125 million, but of course the value of owning a prestige media brand at a highly politically charged time is often invaluable for those who want influence and the power that comes with it. Just look at Elon Musk and X.”
What allowed the Barclays to buy the Telegraph was cash confetti lending and handshake deals before the global financial crash. The economics now seem harder-edged.
While Efune may lose out, it is RedBird IMI—who remain the owners, though in legal limbo—that could take a bigger hit if the company is forced to go back to the drawing board and find a new buyer—via a third auction.
For the Barclays, a divorce rather than a succession lifted the lid on the family’s finances—once estimated at £6 billion—with sons and daughters also seeking to finalize their inheritance. Sir Frederick, whose best-known hobby is ballroom dancing, no longer had a partner. Accompanied only by lawyers, he told a judge in London’s Royal Courts of Justice in 2022 that he had no money to pay his wife’s settlement.
For all the notoriety—and profits—the Telegraph brought them over the years, it was the deal that ultimately broke their business. The Barclays had eventually paid £400 million more than they originally offered in a backdoor negotiation with Sir Conrad Black, the Canadian British media mogul who later served federal prison time for fraud and was pardoned by President Donald J. Trump in 2019. A Delaware judge blocked that initial deal in 2004, precipitating the auction that the Barclays won months later, but at a much higher price. Black had warded off other approaches by the brothers years earlier, but when he got into financial difficulty they were the logical first call, as they had been so desperate to buy it. It was Sir David Barclay, rather than his brother, who was most besotted by the newspaper, according to Martinson.
Efune, who declined to be interviewed for this article, seems to have the same desire to run a big newspaper. What it would look like and how he would do so depend on his raising a great deal of money quickly. A spokeswoman for Efune said the consortium he put together remained confident that a deal would be concluded. A representative for Boehly did not respond to a request for comment.
Whatever the motivations of Efune, the Barclay brothers are a reminder that ambition is one thing, success is another. They were Knights of the Realm, but for all their status the Barclays wanted more—and borrowed other people’s money to clinch a prize. The cachet of owning the Telegraph was eclipsed by the unhappiest of endings. Whoever owns it next—and their lenders—would do well to realize that more than money is needed to run a great newspaper, especially in an era less beholden to eccentric press barons than to digital influence and audience choice.
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