What’s going to happen to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire when he dies?
The last time we asked this question, in late 2024, we didn’t know.
Now, after the warring tribes of the Murdoch family have brokered a reported $3.3 billion peace treaty … we still don’t know.
What the new settlement, announced Monday afternoon, does resolve is the near-term future of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, which includes Fox News and The Wall Street Journal. It’s going to stay under his control, guided by his son Lachlan.
That had recently been an open question, due to a messy court fight between Lachlan and his siblings James, Elisabeth, and Prudence. One outcome of that fight could have given James and his two sisters the ability to outvote Lachlan about the family business when Rupert, 94, died.
That possibility increased in December, when the James Murdoch wing of the family won the first round of the fight in a Nevada courtroom.
Instead, Lachlan Murdoch is buying his three siblings out, in what The New York Times reports is a $3.3 billion deal.
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Once it’s completed, the three Murdochs will no longer have any say about what happens at Fox Corp. or News Corp, the two holding companies that control all of Rupert Murdoch’s assets. The settlement also ensures that Lachlan Murdoch will control all of the family’s assets via a trust that won’t expire until 2050.
Still! Just because Lachlan Murdoch now officially controls the empire his father built — yes, this is all very “Succession”-coded, for a reason — doesn’t mean we know what that will mean.
As I wrote back in December:
Rupert Murdoch has argued that it was important to make sure Lachlan Murdoch ran the family business the way Rupert Murdoch ran it. But that doesn’t mean that Lachlan Murdoch would keep things untouched once his father died. Maybe Lachlan would sell some assets that his father didn’t want to sell for whatever reason. Maybe he wouldn’t run Fox News — a core asset for the family business, in terms of both financial and political power — exactly the way his father did.
Again, not to be rude about it, but Rupert Murdoch is 94. Unlike Sumner Redstone, the media mogul who built what is now known as Paramount, Murdoch has not boasted about plans to live forever (Redstone died at 97).
The new settlement means that when Rupert Murdoch does die, there will be fewer Murdochs fighting over his estate. Everything after that remains a question mark.
