A years-long succession battle within Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media empire has drawn to a close, with his son Lachlan set to control the news group.
The deal, which the family announced on Monday, will ensure the ongoing conservative leaning of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post after 94-year-old Rupert’s death.
Under the agreement Lachlan will control a new trust while siblings Prudence MacLeod, Elisabeth Murdoch and James Murdoch will cease being beneficiaries of any trust with shares in Fox or News Corp.
It follows years of tension between the media mogul and three of his children over the future of the family-owned newspapers and television networks.
The Murdoch family’s internal turmoil served as inspiration for the hit television drama Succession. The deal announced on Monday – the finale of the real-life saga – ends all litigation over the family’s trust.
Lachlan’s more politically moderate oldest siblings are poised to sell their holdings in Fox and News Corp in the coming months.
They will also be named as beneficiaries of a new trust, which will receive cash from the sale of about 14.2 million shares of News Corp and 16.9 million shares of Fox Corp.
According to the New York Times, Prudence, Elisabeth and James will receive $1.1bn (£810m) each.
The sale of their shares will add to the three siblings’ existing inheritance, but prevent them from having any influence over the political bent of the family’s media conglomerate.
Andrew Neil, the former editor of the Sunday Times and the founding chair of Sky TV, said the outcome was a success for Rupert Murdoch, though “an expensive success”.
Describing Lachlan as a “chip off the old block”, Neil said Rupert’s fear was that “when he went to the great newsroom in the sky Lachlan would be outvoted” by his three oldest siblings “who are of a small ‘l’ liberal bent”.
“That won’t happen now because they’ve been bought out… Lachlan Murdoch is now king of the hill in a new trust that will have control of the organisation and he runs that without fear of interference from his siblings,” he told the BBC.
James has in recent years distanced himself from his family’s business, citing disagreements over editorial content.
Lachlan is currently the chair of News Corp, which counts The Wall Street Journal and The Times among its publications. He is widely seen as the most politically conservative of Rupert’s oldest children.
Matthew Ricketson, professor of communication at Deakin University in Melbourne, said the bitter legal battle had been over family control of a vast empire that Rupert has always described as a “family business”.
“He seems to have torn apart his family in the process,” he told the BBC’s Today programme.
“It is now resolved but you can’t see them all being very happy about it and the bitter irony is Rupert Murdoch has always said that he has built this business, it is a family business, he wants his family to take it over when he eventually passes on.”
News Corp said: “The leadership, vision and management by the company’s chair, Lachlan Murdoch, will continue to be important to guiding the company’s strategy and success.”
Of Rupert’s six children, the oldest four have been implicated in the legal turmoil over the company’s future. His younger children from his marriage to Wendi Deng Murdoch, Chloe and Grace, are also named as beneficiaries in the new family trust.
Lachlan has been running the media empire since Rupert stepped back in September 2023 though Murdoch senior has remained as chairman emeritus of both Fox Corporation and News Corp.
Prof Ricketson said that James, Elisabeth and Prudence, in particular James, have “been opposed to the way in which News Corporation and Fox Corporation have been going about their work”.
He said that James has disagreed with reporting on climate change and on the 2020 US election “which Donald Trump said he hadn’t lost but everybody else said and knew that he had lost it”.
“Fox News gave him an enormous platform,” to promote that theory, Prof Ricketson said. “That was something that James disagreed with.”
The battle over control of the media empire played out largely behind closed doors in Nevada, a state that offers unusual privacy for family trust disputes, after Rupert took the surprising step of attempting to alter the terms of the family’s trust.
He wanted to ensure his empire would fall solely into Lachlan’s hands rather than to all four of the oldest children, but in December last year a Reno court rejected that bid saying Rupert and Lachlan had acted in “bad faith” in trying to amend the trust.
Monday’s deal was a “mutual resolution of the legal proceedings”, according to the companies.
