Lachlan Murdoch named heir to media empire: How the battle for Rupert’s successor ended

Lachlan is the current chair of News Corp, the parent company of several publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and The Times in the UK, as well as the executive chairman of Fox, which owns Fox News.

The deal ensures that his oldest siblings, James, Elisabeth and Prudence, get $1.1 billion each for their shares in the business, while preserving the conservative bent of the media conglomerate – Lachlan is regarded as the most conservative of Murdoch’s oldest children.

Here is everything to know about the succession saga, which reportedly inspired the hit HBO show Succession.

The massive Murdoch media empire

Keith Rupert Murdoch is an Australian-born American businessman who controlled News Corporation (News Corp) and Fox Corporation (Fox Corp), among other media organisations worldwide.

Rupert was born in 1931 to journalist-turned-media magnate Keith Murdoch and Elisabeth. He inherited News Corp Australia after his father died in 1952. The Oxford graduate built on this legacy, acquiring newspapers in trouble in Australia and the United Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s, and establishing what we know today as tabloid culture. He made inroads into the United States in 1973, moving to New York City a year later and purchasing The New York Post in 1976. He became a US citizen in 1985 and founded Fox Broadcasting Company in 1986.

Over the years, Murdoch has presided over scandals, including the 2005 phone-tapping scandal in the UK. In 2023, Fox settled a lawsuit with voting machine maker Dominion Systems for about $800 million for spreading misinformation about the company and damaging its reputation during the 2020 presidential elections.

This July, his close friend and long-time ally, Donald Trump, filed $10 billion defamation suit against The Wall Street Journal for carrying a story detailing the President’s alleged links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Murdoch’s companies have influenced public opinion, with The Sun and The Daily Mail notably influencing anti-EU sentiment with their reportage.

The Murdoch Family Trust at the centre of the battle

The current succession battle began with the 94-year-old media mogul wanting to revise the Murdoch trust, formed in 1999 during his divorce from his second wife, Anna de Peyster (nee Anna Murdoch Mann). The trust ensured that Rupert’s four eldest children — Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James — would equally inherit his voting shares across his various media businesses.

While it was designed to be ‘irrevocable,’ making it difficult to change, it included a provision allowing Rupert to make changes provided he acted solely in the best interest of his beneficiaries.

Over the past decade, Rupert Murdoch has become most ideologically aligned with his son Lachlan, especially during Trump’s first presidency. During this period, Fox News shifted towards far-right rhetoric and endorsed Trump’s claims of “stolen elections” in 2020, despite knowing they were untrue.

These developments had happened to the consternation of the other Murdochs, who have been known for their centrist sensibilities. James had long been primed to succeed Rupert and ended up resigning from the board of News Corp in July 2020. He had shared operating responsibility of Fox Corp and News Corp with Lachlan until then.

The New York Times reported that Rupert and Lachlan had been working for months to amend the trust to reduce the influence that the other three siblings could have on the business. The two feared that the trust could present a situation where the other three heirs would overrule Lachlan and set up a battle for the future of the companies.

Things came to a head last September when James, Elisabeth and Prudence took Rupert and Lachlan to court in Nevada, where the Murdoch trust is registered. The Nevada probate commissioner ruled in December that Murdoch had acted in “bad faith” to empower only Lachlan to run the company without sibling interference.

What the settlement entails

The new agreement announced on Monday will ensure that Lachlan controls a new trust, which also lists among its beneficiaries Chloe and Grace, Rupert Murdoch’s children with his third wife, Wendy Deng. This new trust holds controlling stakes in Fox Corporation and News Corp.

The other siblings, Prudence, Elisabeth and James, will be named the beneficiaries of a separate trust that will receive cash from the sale of about 14.2 million shares of News Corp and 16.9 million shares of Fox Corp. The sale of these shares would add to the existing inheritance of the three siblings, but prevent them from having any influence over the political bent of the family’s media conglomerate, the BBC reported.

This is an updated version of an explainer first published on September 17, 2024.