How the Murdoch family ended up in a legal fight over the future of Fox (2024)

But even in unofficial exile, James remained a lurking potential threat to his father’s plans to tie the company’s future to eldest son and ideological soul mate Lachlan, the chair of News Corp and executive chair and chief executive of Fox Corporation.

Now, their effort to guarantee that James’s more liberal politics do not interfere with the rightward market position of company jewel Fox News has blown up into a larger Murdoch family feud.

The revelation of a secret legal battle pitting James and his two older sisters against their father and brother in a Nevada probate court, first reported by the New York Times, has raised widespread speculation about what the siblings would do with greater leverage over the company. Would they try to push Fox News and their other media enterprises closer to the center?

But people close to James say that he and his sisters, Elisabeth and Prudence, are mostly concerned with challenging what they see as a power move by their brother and father.

“It has forced them to take a position that they didn’t really want to take,” said Paddy Manning, a biographer of Lachlan Murdoch.

The feud is due to go to trial in September in Nevada, after attempts at previously unreported settlement discussions went off the rails, according to two people familiar with the dispute who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak about sensitive family matters.

Similar discussions fell through years ago, when Lachlan made an attempt to buy out his brother and sisters.

Now 93, Rupert Murdoch launched his business with a newspaper in Australia and has now built a global juggernaut that has influenced politics and culture on three continents — encompassing Fox as well as the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Britain’s Sun tabloid, and an array of television stations and other properties.

Yet in some ways, the dispute relates to the same questions and tensions surrounding any family business:

Who takes over? How much can the founder rule from the grave? And perhaps most important: How do multiple heirs agree on what to do with their legacy?

“A lot of the very difficult drama in family-controlled enterprises is within a generation — laterally, across siblings,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management.

Though Murdoch has long expressed that he wants one of his children to succeed him, it was never a foregone conclusion that it would be his eldest son.

Lachlan, now 52, actually left the family business for nearly a decade after he felt undercut in a 2005 corporate dispute with some of his father’s more seasoned executives. In the interim, James Murdoch, now 51, rose through the ranks to become chief executive of the family’s European and Asian operations, often seeking to expand the company. But his ambitions took a hit when a phone-hacking scandal implicating the family’s London tabloids kept them from acquiring Britain’s largest pay-TV provider.

Eventually, Rupert gave roles atop the company to both sons — James as CEO and Lachlan as his co-executive chairman — in 2015. When he realized the brothers were increasingly at odds, he resolved this by selling 21st Century Fox to Disney — leaving no role for James, setting in motion his eventual departure.

But although he officially left the company, James has equal voting rights as Lachlan over the Murdoch family trust that controls the business — as do their sisters: Elisabeth, 55, who briefly worked for the company, and Prudence, 65, who never did.

The sole Murdoch child who still works in the family business, Lachlan was also the only one of the four oldest children to attend their father’s wedding to his fifth wife, retired molecular biologist Elena Zhukova, in June. (Murdoch also has two daughters in their early 20s from third wife Wendi Deng, who have equal financial stakes in the trust but no voting rights.)

And he is the one who most closely shares his father’s conservative politics.

According to three people familiar with the family dispute, Rupert Murdoch is attempting to change the structure of the trust — making the argument in sealed court records that the only way to preserve the company’s value for his heirs is if Lachlan becomes its sole overseer.

One of these people told The Washington Post that the billionaire has explicitly stated in court filings that maintaining the company’s conservative stance is essential.

His worry, according to all three, was that, once he dies, the three other grown children could align to outvote their brother.

The Times cited a sealed court document it had obtained, describing Rupert Murdoch’s concern that a “lack of consensus” among the siblings “would impact the strategic direction at both companies including a potential reorientation of editorial policy and content.”

Last month, the Nevada probate commissioner said that, if Rupert Murdoch were able to show that he is acting for the sole benefit of his heirs, he could amend the trust, according to two of the people familiar with the family discussion.

But changing the trust language is a highly emotional issue for the Murdoch children, these people said — though it would affect only voting rights and not their financial stakes — which has prompted their vigorous pushback in court.

When her father told Elisabeth Murdoch about his plans to adjust the trust, she responded in colorful language to express her displeasure, according to a person familiar with the exchange, which was first reported by the Times.

“There was never a conspiracy to overthrow Lachlan,” said one of the people close to the Murdoch family. “But [Lachlan and Rupert], by filing the lawsuit, have created what they were afraid of.”

A spokesperson for Elisabeth Murdoch, who runs a London-based production firm, declined to comment.

She does not share her brother Lachlan’s conservative politics, two people who have spoken with her in recent months said — but she also had little interest in re-engaging with the family business.

She finds the politics of some of the Murdoch properties “obscene,” one of them said, “but she’s managed to draw a line and disassociate herself from it.”

“Liz had been trying to get Rupert to focus on his legacy,” said Manning, the biographer. He added that she had been trying to “be the peacemaker” and “to build bridges between the siblings, and now this.”

Less is publicly known about the political leanings of Prudence, who tends to remain in the background of family disagreements but is close to her sister.

James, while espousing environmental causes, has also raised concerns about the role of conservative media in promoting false claims of voting fraud in the 2020 election.

“The sacking of the Capitol is proof positive that what we thought was dangerous is indeed very, very much so,” he said in a 2021 interview. Without naming Fox News — which has faced major defamation suits from voting-technology companies, and last year paid $787.5 million to settle one — he added that “those outlets that propagate lies to their audience have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces that will be with us for years.”

A spokesperson for James Murdoch declined to comment.

But it’s unclear whether the siblings are particularly motivated by politics in their challenge to their father and brother.

People close to James note that he was running the Murdoch business in Europe when it threw its weight behind Tory candidate David Cameron over Labour’s Gordon Brown. Today, he and his wife, Kathryn, are major funders of the Bulwark, a conservative anti-Donald Trump publication.

Meanwhile, he has told associates in recent years that he was disappointed by the strategic decisions his brother has overseen at Fox Corp and News Corp.

And media experts say that any effort to move Fox News, in particular, toward a center-right positioning could ultimately shrink the audience and hurt the company’s bottom line.

Fox News experienced such an audience revolt when its political analysts correctly called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in 2020 and some viewers temporarily ditched it for channels they viewed as being more aligned with Trump. Emails and text communications revealed as a part of one of the defamation lawsuits showed that top executives — including Rupert Murdoch — noted the trend with alarm.

“At a certain point, you become afraid of doing anything that will offend your audience,” said Charlie Sykes, a former conservative radio host who is now a contributor to the liberal-leaning cable news network MSNBC. “If you deviate from what the audience wants, there is this massive blowback, and there will be consequences. And if the audience demands that Fox News become a MAGA safe space, then there’s going to be tremendous pressure.”

Columbia University journalism professor Bill Grueskin, who served as deputy managing editor for the Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal, said he could see a path forward for Fox that reemphasizes news from a conservative point of view.

“It does strike me that there’s a way for there to be a conservative news channel that doesn’t slide into the fever swamps that have already cost Fox $787.5 million in claims,” he said.

But, he added, “it’s all up to who is running the company. It sounds like, if it’s Lachlan, things won’t change very much, but if it’s James, things would change a lot.”