Rupert Murdoch is in a “secret” battle to wrestle control of his vast media empire from three of his politically moderate children, and grant it to his eldest son Lachlan, who will preserve its conservative bent, according to the New York Times.
Murdoch went to court late last year in a bid to increase Lachlan’s voting power in the Murdoch Family Trust – which is thought to hold the family’s $19.5 billion assets – at the expense of his three other children, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence, who are uncomfortable with the media empire’s rightward shift, the Times reported.
Murdoch’s three other children have reportedly hired their own legal team to contest their father’s plans, “blindsided” by the move. It’s the latest ‘Succession-style’ drama to unfold among parental benefactors and their nepo-babies, who have undergone intensive cultural scrutiny in recent years.
In fact, Murdoch’s family is said to be the inspiration for the HBO-produced drama, which focuses on the intrigue involving a family that controls an international media conglomerate.
So, who are the real Succession nepo-babies? Murdoch, who has been married five times, has six children, but only four are relevant to this case. Murdoch’s trust currently hands control of the family business to the four oldest children. His two youngest daughters are only 21 and 23, while the rest of the children are at least 50 years old.
The Murdoch family – through its trust – controls two similar-sounding corporations that are actually separate: Fox Corporation and News Corporation. Fox Corporation owns Fox News, all 29 of the Fox television stations, Fox sports, and other Fox subsidiaries. News Corporation is another media conglomerate that owns the Wall Street Journal, The Times in the U.K., the New York Post, and many other local papers that lean right.
Lachlan Murdoch
Lachlan Murdoch, at 52, is Murdoch’s oldest son, and the media-mogul is hoping Lachlan will inherit the entirety of his empire.
He is currently the CEO and chairman of the Fox Corporation. He assumed the role in 2019, following Disney’s $71 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox, where he was executive chairman. Before the merger, he served as executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, starting in 2015— while his brother, James, was CEO of what was then Fox’s entertainment business. The two had a kind of “competitive collaboration” until James quit in 2017, the Associated Press reported.
Lachlan wasn’t always part of the family business, however. In 2005, 33-year-old Lachlan abruptly resigned from his executive position in the News Corporation—the media conglomerate that includes the Wall Street Journal, The Times in the U.K., and the New York Post—after a feud with then-boss of Fox News, Roger Ailes. He thought his father should’ve backed him in the dispute, and vowed never to return to the patriarch’s company again.
That changed in 2014, amidst a phone-hacking scandal and a divorce that wreaked havoc on the eldest Murdoch’s life. Lachlan returned to chair 21st Century Fox, to “help his dad,” Paddy Manning, an Australian journalist who wrote The Successor, a biography of Lachlan, told BBC.
Lachlan is married to Australian actress and model Sarah O’Hare, and the couple has three children. According to Manning, it is “no secret,” , that Lachlan and his father are wary of U.S. Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump, but both feel they have “no choice” but to rally behind him.
James Murdoch
James is Lachlan’s younger brother, and, like Lachlan, was born from their father’s second marriage to Scottish-born journalist Anna Maria Torv. Unlike Lachlan, James is known as the “liberal” of the family, and has thus had a harder time accepting responsibility over his father’s conservative empire.
He resigned from the board of News Corp. in 2020, due to “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions,” James wrote in his resignation letter, without elaborating on the differences.
James and his wife Kathryn have publicly criticized the media operations of various News Corp.-owned publications that they believed expressed doubts about climate change. The issue is dear to the couple—Kathryn is a noted climate change activist who once served as director of strategy and communications for the Clinton Climate Initiative, a nonprofit established by former President Bill Clinton.
James and Kathryn Murdoch reportedly donated $615,000 each to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden during the 2020 election.
James also founded the private investment firm Lupa Systems in 2019. The firm has invested in various companies, including liberal media outlet Vice Media and research firm Morning Consult.
He also serves as a board member of Elon Musk’s company, Tesla.
Elisabeth Murdoch
Like her brothers, Elisabeth was a product of her father’s second marriage. However, she faced challenges receiving the same leadership roles and responsibilities her siblings were granted.
In the late ’90s, Elisabeth served as managing director of Sky Networks for British Sky Broadcasting, but left the company in the 2000s after reports that she was being overlooked for the position of chief executive.
She founded Vertical Networks in 2015, a media company that produces mini-shows to air on Snapchat. In 2018, Vertical Networks averaged 50 million monthly active viewers and 2.3 billion monthly views across its content including its 10 Snapchat and Facebook shows.
In 2o19, Whistle, a digital sports and entertainment media company, acquired Vertical Networks.
She started another production company in 2017, Sister, which has been behind hit television series Broadchurch and Chernobyl.
She is said to be the inspiration for the character Shiv in Succession, which her daughter, Charlotte Freud, said is a very accurate representation. (Freud is the product of Elisabeth’s marriage to public relations specialist Matthew Freud, who is the great-grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. The couple married in 2001 and divorced 13 years later.)
Prudence Murdoch Macleod
Prudence Murdoch MacLeod is Murdoch’s oldest child, and was born from his marriage from his first wife, Patricia.
Prudence has been described as “the only one of [Rupert Murdoch’s] children not directly competing for his business affections.”
However, Prudence didn’t completely distance herself from News Corp. and has held several roles within the company over the years. She recently sat on the board of Times Newspapers, Ltd. from December 2010 to March 2022, according to the U.K. publisher’s website. Times Newspapers is a subsidiary of News UK, which is owned by News Corp.
In 1989, Prue married Alasdair MacLeod, an Eton-educated businessman who began working for his father-in-law. They have three children.
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