“Day to day adult supervision no longer needed!” tweeted Eric Schmidt last week as he announced that he was stepping down as chief executive of Google in favour of 37-year-old Larry Page. Rupert Murdoch this week delivered the opposite message as he cancelled a planned trip to Davos to stay in London to try to quell the storm over phone hacking at the News of the World.

Mr Murdoch, who will be 80 in March, had until then left it to his 38-year-old son James, who runs News Corp’s operations in Europe and Asia, to handle the affair, which has set back its efforts to take full ownership of British Sky Broadcasting. But he decided that things were too serious to leave it to his ambitious, sometimes abrasive, younger son to sort out alone.

Mr Murdoch thrives on jetting in to bang heads together as the irreplaceable boss of a far-flung empire – that is how he has always run things. News Corp lacks the order and predictability of more bureaucratic companies. One man’s word has ruled for the past 58 years, which has allowed it to act quicker and take bigger risks, such as its 1989 launch of Sky Television.