"Who owns Euronews" is one of the quietest good questions in media. The channel's whole brand is being Europe's neutral, multilingual voice — the one playing in every airport lounge on the continent. The ownership answer is more colorful than the brand. * Euronews was created in 1993 by Europe's public broadcasters as a kind of shared European CNN. That's the origin story the name still trades on. But the majority owner today isn't a broadcaster, a government, or anything European-institutional: since early 2022, 88% of Euronews belongs to Alpac Capital, a Portuguese private investment fund, which bought the stake from Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris's Media Globe Networks for a reported €170 million. * Here's the detail that made media watchers sit up, first reported by RFE/RL: Alpac's chief executive, Pedro Vargas David, is the son of Mário David — a Portuguese politician who spent years as a close adviser to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, the EU's most enthusiastic collector of media outlets. Nobody has shown Orbán holds a stake or dictates a headline, and we're not claiming otherwise. But when the channel branded as Europe's referee gets bought by a fund whose CEO grew up one dinner table away from Budapest's inner circle, that's a fact worth knowing while you watch. * And the 12% nobody mentions: a consortium of European public broadcasters and authorities — including France Télévisions, Italy's RAI and Abu Dhabi's ADMIC — still holds the rest. The public-service DNA is real; it's just a minority shareholder now. * Why does this matter more for Euronews than for, say, a tabloid? Because neutrality is Euronews's entire product. A paper with a loud owner and a loud opinion page is at least legible. A channel whose product is "no angle" asks for more trust — which means its ownership deserves more scrutiny, not less. Watch it, enjoy the airport-lounge calm, and remember: "European" is in the name, not on the shareholder register.