Days before final bids were due for the Telegraph Media Group, frontrunner Dovid Efune interviewed former US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr live on stage on subjects from why disaffected Democrats should vote for Donald Trump to the conflict in Israel.
Staff at the UK newspaper say the event helped cement views gleaned from Efune’s activity on social media that he was likely to be a much more outspoken — and potentially divisive — owner than the media-shy Barclay family.
The British-born media executive is poised to enter a roughly six-week exclusivity period to acquire the storied conservative title, the Financial Times reported on Sunday — long enough for him and his wealthy, mainly US-based backers to scrutinise its books after two decades of Barclay ownership and to secure funding for the deal.
Efune is the publisher of The New York Sun, which he revived in 2021 as an online publication 13 years after it closed, promising journalism that would be “values-based, principled and constitutionalist”. He was previously editor-in-chief of US conservative Jewish community paper The Algemeiner Journal, overseeing its switch from Yiddish to English.
But the much larger Telegraph would mark a considerable step up in ambitions for Efune, whose low profile in the UK has left executives and staff scrutinising his frequent tweets and editorials for clues on the newspaper’s future direction.
Efune has become known for his fierce support for Israel and Jewish causes, interviewing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and writing columns as far back as 2011 advocating for a second Jewish state and for the arming of rabbis to deter violence against Jewish communities.
Last week he said on X that he expected the Iranian “ayatollah himself would be in the crosshairs” when “Israel turns its full fury directly on the Iranian regime” — a moment when “the Jewish state will have secured a better future for Iranians and the region, and a safer world for all our children”.
Efune, who is yet to speak publicly about his bid or intentions for The Telegraph, did not respond to requests for comment.
The newspaper’s roots go deep into the conservative heartlands of Britain, where readers will be suspicious of any owner who moves sharply from a 169-year diet of British politics and society interlaced with English sports such as cricket and football.
The strategy sketched out for The Telegraph by many potential owners has been based on growth in the US — where some see the chance to expand its franchise as a counterpoint to the left-leaning New York Times.
However, media analyst Claire Enders said the chances of establishing the Telegraph as a dominant media brand in the US appeared remote and that the strength of its brand was in England, where it still wielded considerable influence.
Efune has strong links to Britain. His grandfather was Peter Kalms, a businessman and philanthropist who was on the board of Dixons, the UK electrical goods retailer run by his cousin and former Conservative party treasurer Lord Kalms.
Efune, who has said he had “no formal secular education beyond the age of 11”, now lives with his artist wife Mushka in New York, where alongside his media roles he has previously acted as publicist for Israeli boxer Yuri Foreman.
He wrote in 2021 of the antisemitism his family faced walking around near his neighbourhood on the Upper West Side, saying: “Growing up in England, encounters along these lines weren’t all that rare, but I didn’t expect to find them in the United States.”
Efune has brought Jewish values to the forefront of his editorship of The New York Sun, saying when he announced its revival that rather than cynicism, “we prefer the teaching of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, that darkness is best countered with light, falsehood with truth”.
The newspaper has a strong pedigree in culture and arts coverage, and features right-wing columnists such as Larry Kudlow and Conrad Black, who sold The Telegraph to the Barclay family in 2004.
But the Telegraph dwarfs the US title in terms of online readership.
The UK newspaper had about 90mn average monthly page views between July and September with 33mn unique viewers, according to data analytics firm SimilarWeb, against roughly 860,000 and 510,000 for The New York Sun.
Efune has been active on social media supporting conservative-leaning politicians and commentators. On a recent podcast he appeared to endorse Donald Trump as president, saying a second Trump administration “would be very supportive of Israel’s efforts now to re-establish security on its borders”, while a “Kamala Harris administration would wildly meddle”.
Responding to the UK government’s 2009 decision to ban rightwing US radio host Michael Savage from entering the country for fear he would incite hatred, Efune said in a tweet: “Michael Savage being banned from the UK, epitomises intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice!!”
Efune has also strongly advocated for the power of the press. In a “letter from the publisher” in The New York Sun this year, he decried newspapers that “have come to serve . . . masters” other than readers such as advertisers, while arguing that some had been “acquired as status symbols by billionaires and deployed as ideological playthings”.
In a swipe at RedBird IMI, the Abu Dhabi-backed group that is selling the Telegraph after the British government blocked overseas state ownership of such media assets, he said some titles had “been designed or repurposed as government organs . . . the Telegraph in Britain, a fine newspaper, is now at risk of being swallowed up by the United Arab Emirates”.
During the period of exclusivity, Efune will be under pressure to reveal more about his plans for the title as well as the identity of his wealthy backers.
In the meantime, staff at the Telegraph will continue to sweat over their future. “No one knows if they will be needing to write different things by the end of the year,” said one person close to the staff’s thinking. “It is completely freaking them out.”
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