What’s it worth to Rupert Murdoch to ensure that the conservative media empire he built stays that way for at least another generation? Try $3.3 billion, which is what his three more politically liberal children, James, Elisabeth and Prudence, will split, in a classic case of take the money and run.
After years of family drama worthy of HBO’s “Succession,” which it inspired, the 94-year-old Murdoch demonstrated just how prescient one of the often-quoted lines from that Emmy-winning series was: “Money wins.”
By giving up a fight that might have forced Murdoch’s Fox News Channel and News Corp. in a less conservative direction, his grown kids have become the latest privileged heirs to indicate they don’t relish boardroom brawls quite as much as the generation that put those silver spoons in their mouths.
With Monday’s announcement, they have essentially thrown in the towel on a Hollywood-worthy struggle for the future of Fox, and dashed any hope of using their power to counteract the toxicity the network has injected into the American body politic.
The settlement announced Monday will not only pay the litigants more than $1 billion each, but leaves Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch, 54, who shares his father’s politics and vision for the company, firmly in command. (His 20-something sisters Grace and Chloe, Murdoch’s children with the third of his five wives, Wendi Deng, join him in the new trust.)
Unlike “Succession,” in this case “the eldest boy” makes good — although sorting out what that means for the company and, not incidentally, the future of democracy will require a bit more time.
Granted, Rupert Murdoch had to endure a protracted legal battle in order to achieve this victory, which despite his attempts to keep it private included lengthy pieces in The Atlantic and New York Times laying out the family’s dirty laundry.
As that coverage exposed, Murdoch desperately feared that allowing his other children to vote equally in the family trust would wrest control from Lachlan and have devastating consequences for the enterprise he built out of a much smaller inheritance from his father.
“It would be a disaster for at least the U.S. and Australia if these assets fell into the wrong hands,” Murdoch wrote to one of his directors in a 2022 email as reported by The Atlantic, characterizing his holdings as a foundational part of the conservative movement. The New York Times reported that Murdoch saw preserving Fox as a counterweight to “the monolithic liberal media” was nothing less than “vital to the future of the English-speaking world.”
The irony, of course, is that Murdoch’s recent legacy has also included standing up to Donald Trump. The conservative editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post have leveled unexpected criticism at the president and, in particular, the WSJ has repeatedly stood up to Trump in reporting on the “birthday book” entry he provided to longtime friend and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Evidence released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday appeared to validate the Journal’s reporting, though Trump and his apologists continued to claim the material was fake, so the matter drags on. But again on Monday, the Journal leaned into the story and published the letter itself despite being embroiled in a Trump lawsuit.
Strictly in terms of influence over the media business, Murdoch stands almost unrivaled, from building the fourth broadcast network with Fox to with the help of the late Roger Ailes establishing Fox News as a kingmaker in conservative politics as well as a hugely lucrative enterprise.
Notably, the fallout after the 2020 election, and the Dominion and Smartmatic lawsuits over Fox amplifying Trump’s “stolen election” lies, demonstrated to the Murdochs that even Fox News has vulnerabilities when it comes to antagonizing Trump’s supporters, as internal texts, emails and documents revealed. Small wonder Fox News continues to slavishly toe the Trump line, despite the confusing rifts between those Murdoch-controlled newspapers and the Murdoch-controlled network.
The most intriguing player here, in some respects, remains James, who worked for his father in various capacities before resigning in July 2020, citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.”
Six months later, James and his wife Kathryn criticized media outlets whose disinformation played a role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, saying they were as much to blame as “elected officials who know the truth but choose instead to propagate lies.”
The disenfranchised Murdochs still have ample options, and plenty of cash with which to pursue them. Yet with Monday’s announcement, they have essentially thrown in the towel on a Hollywood-worthy struggle for the soul of Fox, and dashed any hope of using their inheritance to counteract the toxicity the network has injected into the body politic.
Corporate heirs have been much in the news lately, from the Murdochs to Shari Redstone passing the keys to Paramount, the company for which her father waged many a battle, to David Ellison, whose father Larry Ellison helped get Skydance’s merger with Paramount over the finish line.
Long before that, the Chandler dynasty jousted over control of the Los Angeles Times, in what in many ways previewed the Murdochs. As “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong noted, the Murdochs weren’t his sole inspiration, the many parallels notwithstanding.
In October 2020, James Murdoch told the New York Times he had long argued with his dad about politics, and expressed support for Joe Biden, citing his concerns about “callousness and a level of cruelty” exhibited by the first Trump administration.
Whatever aspirations he and his siblings might have harbored about seeking to address that from within Fox, however, disappeared in the blink of a press release. And when (or if) he ever leaves this mortal coil, Rupert Murdoch can do so with the comfort of knowing his empire will stay safely cradled, for the foreseeable future, in what he considers the right hands.
