Rupert Murdoch and his family control the most influential conservative media empire in the world. For more than a year, they’ve been locked in a secret legal battle over who controls it. Rupert and his oldest son, Lachlan, tried to hand Lachlan full control of the companies. His siblings blocked the move.
The New York Times obtained the bulk of the trial record, totaling more than 3,000 pages: most of the briefs, all of the rulings and the full transcript of the trial itself, including extensive exchanges among family members that were entered as evidence.
Here are six takeaways from those documents.
A conservative empire
Throughout his career, Rupert has been dogged by a question: Is he an ideological warrior intent on tilting the English-speaking world to the right or a pragmatic businessman catering to conservative audiences for profit?
The evidence presented at trial shows that — in his twilight years, at least — his ideological legacy is paramount. “Fox and our papers are the only faintly conservative voices against the monolithic liberal media,” he wrote to his ex-wife Anna in 2023. “I believe maintaining this is vital to the future of the English-speaking world.” He also testified that keeping his news outlets on their conservative course long after his death — by giving Lachlan full control — was more important to him than any profit he could realize by selling them to others.
The divided Murdochs
The fight over the Murdoch family trust has deepened old fault lines. Lachlan was convinced that his three oldest siblings, led by James, were plotting to overthrow him when their father dies. Elisabeth, who has historically seen herself as the family’s Switzerland, said that she felt “violated and forsaken” by her father’s plan to change the trust. “You’ve blown a hole in the family,” she told him. Rupert’s oldest child, Prudence, accused him of treating her and Elisabeth like “his assistants.” James’s representative to the family trust, his best friend, Jesse Angelo, called the plan “Orwellian” and compared it to the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the Jim Crow South.
Lachlan’s predicament
The fight is also about money — and specifically about how much Lachlan will be willing to pay for his siblings’ shares of the trust. Without those shares, he could lose control of the companies. Both he and Rupert have approached Prudence, Elisabeth and James about buyouts in the past, but Lachlan has never been willing to offer them more than 60 percent of the market value of their shares.
Expiration date
For many years, the Murdoch succession battle was framed as a fight over which Murdoch child would control the empire after Rupert dies: the more conservative Lachlan or the more liberal James. But there’s another very real possibility: The Murdoch family may lose control altogether in a few years. Rupert has no one to blame but himself. In 2006, he created the trust that holds the voting shares for Fox Corporation and News Corp. But the trust expires in 2030, at which point its beneficiaries can sell their shares as they please, potentially realizing billions of dollars but releasing their hold on the businesses that their father built over the course of more than 70 years.
Rupert’s sharpness
Rupert, who is 93, receded from public view many years ago. He never gives interviews to the press and rarely speaks publicly. Speculation has been rife: Is he still with it? The answer, definitively, is yes. The Nevada probate commissioner presiding over the family’s trust case, Edmund J. Gorman Jr., was impressed enough by Rupert’s mental acuity to compliment him for it — even as he ruled against him. In his final decision, Gorman wrote that Murdoch “showed himself at trial to be neither a victim of his infirmities nor lacking in mental vigor.” Rather, Gorman wrote, Murdoch testified with “appropriate recall and, at times, sharp wit.”
The ‘Succession’ memo
It’s no secret that “Succession” was inspired by the Murdoch family. But when it comes to the Murdochs, art hasn’t just imitated life; life has imitated art. When Elisabeth’s personal representative to the family trust, Mark Devereux, watched the episode in which the family patriarch, Logan Roy, dies unexpectedly, sending the fictional Roy family into chaos, he panicked. He called Elisabeth to tell her to watch the episode. She had already seen it twice and was very upset about it. Devereux wrote a memo for the Murdoch siblings — the “Succession” memo, he called it — intended to prevent a real-life repeat by encouraging them to consider a variety of difficult questions, including whether it would be possible to move Fox News to the center after Rupert’s death.
There are dozens of other revelations about this very secretive family in the full story, which you can read here.
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