Rupert Murdoch’s £14.9 billion Media Empire and Family Trust Enters a Court Battle

As Rupert Murdoch’s oldest children fight over who should run News Corp and Fox News, the court system is looking closely at his plan for what to do next.

In the US, a court case has begun to decide what will happen to Rupert Murdoch’s media business and a £14.9 billion family trust. The 93-year-old billionaire is battling with three of his eldest children over who will get the most voting shares and control over News Corp and Fox News after he dies.

Reports say that Murdoch wanted to change a family trust that was set up in 1999 so that his son Lachlan could take over without his siblings Prudence, Elisabeth, and James “interfering.”

The famous family was one of the ideas behind the incredibly popular TV show Succession. The Murdochs have never said anything about this.

Murdoch has been married five times. He also has two younger children, Grace and Chloe. According to BBC News, the trust deal says that Grace and Chloe cannot vote.

Walt Marsh, an Australian journalist and author of the biography Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire, said, “From what we know, this plan basically wants to put Prudence, James, and Elisabeth on the same level as Murdoch’s two younger daughters.”

He also said that Lachlan could be given “all voting power.”

Murdoch had seven children: Prudence (66), Elisabeth (56), Lachlan (53), James (51), Grace (22) and Chloe (21). He started building his media company in the 1960s and it has grown into a global giant with a lot of power in politics and the public eye.

His two companies are News Corporation and Fox. News Corporation owns newspapers like the Times and the Sun in the UK and the Wall Street Journal in the US. Fox also airs Fox News.

Murdoch had been getting his two boys ready to follow in his footsteps since they were teens, according to a 2020 BBC documentary called The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty.

“For Mr. Murdoch, family has always been very important, especially when it comes to building a dynasty,” the former editor of the Sunday Times said.

Alice Enders, who is in charge of research at Enders Analysis, told the BBC that the court case was “really about business interests.”

“Either the siblings would have agreed to the change or, more likely than not, they would have been bought out in some way,” she said. “But the price of buying them out is through the roof, and Lachlan would have had to pay it, just like Rupert did with his siblings many years ago.”

The Murdoch Family Trust, which owns the media companies, was meant to make most of the plans for who would take over in 1999. Because of this, Murdoch gave his oldest children different jobs in his businesses.

The family has eight votes through the trust, which it can use to have a say on the boards of News Corp and Fox News. At the moment, Mr. Murdoch has four of those votes, and each of his oldest children has one.

In the trust deal, it was written that Mr. Murdoch’s four oldest children would each get one vote after he died. There was a family split, though, because of different political and moral ideas.

In favor of Lachlan, the media mogul gave up his jobs as head of Fox and News Corp. Lachlan is said to have the same conservative views as his father. It is said that this made James, Elisabeth, and Prudence work together to “fight back.”

It is being held at the Washoe County Courthouse in Reno, Nevada.

The media have been banned from the proceedings, which are set to begin next week with testimony from the media mogul and the four children named in the trust, according to the New York Times, which broke the story by getting copies of secret court documents.

Settlements are often reached in these kinds of family fights. News from BBC said that the case could also go on for longer if one side decides to appeal the ruling.

Prudence is Mr. Murdoch’s oldest child from his first marriage to Patricia Booker. The children he had with his second wife, Anna Mann, were named Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James. They were born between 1967 and 1999.

She is the mother of Grace and Chloe. Her name is Wendi Deng, and she was married to the billionaire from 1999 to 2013.

Murdoch married model Jerry Hall for the fourth time in 2016, and the two split up in 2022. In June of this year, he married his fifth wife, Elena Zhukova.