How Rupert Murdoch Outfoxed American Media
Badria Jabali
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As the 92-year-old billionaire steps down as chairman of his empire, a look back at how he changed the landscape of newspapers, TV, movies and politics—and the coming fight over, yes, succession.
“I can think of more important things than being loved by everybody,” then- 58-year-old Rupert Murdoch told Forbes of his approach to business in 1989. And in the three decades that preceded it—and the three that followed—he lived up to that ethos with unflinching ferocity.
Now 92, Murdoch announced this week that he is stepping down from the media empire he began building from a lone Australian newspaper he inherited at 21 and that his 52-year-old son Lachlan would inherit the Fox media throne. Lachlan inherits a legacy built on powerful global brands—including Fox News, Sky Television, The Wall Street Journal, the Times of London and the New York Post—bought, swapped or sold during a swashbuckling 70 years of global dealmaking.
n 2019, Murdoch downsized some of those prized media assets by selling off his entertainment properties, including 20th Century Fox (rebranded for the new century) to the Walt Disney Co. in 2019 for $71.3 billion. The move may have shrunk his kingdom but it didn’t lower the volume.
The past few years have been filled with Fox scandals—the company has been in the news as much as it has set the conservative agenda for news. Following the 2016 resignation of Roger Ailes, the firebrand architect of Fox News, the Murdoch empire endured the loss of some of its marquee talent, including Bill O’Reilly in 2017 and the ouster of Tucker Carlson earlier this year after Fox settled a defamation suit with Dominion Voting Systems for a staggering $787 billion.
The big question for Lachlan now is like a funhouse mirror of the saga on Succession, which was partially based on the Murdoch family. Will his closest siblings—55-year-old Elisabeth Murdoch and 50-year-old James—fight him for control of the empire or force him to sell? The Murdochs hold shares in the two main parts of the empire, Fox Corporation and News Corp. worth a combined $5 billion, part of a fortune Forbes values at $17.5 billion.
Wealth of that magnitude was hardly guaranteed, given Rupert Murdoch’s propensity for dealmaking and his voracious appetite for acquisitions. “Sure, it could be argued that we’re caught up in too many new operations,” Murdoch told Forbes in 1998. “Sometimes you have to pay a high price for opportunities.”
At the time, he was struggling to turn StarTV, a satellite venture in India, into a win, having paid a high price for an asset that was also being chased by his main rivals at the time, Disney and Time Warner, reportedly without ever having examined the books. A decade earlier, when he paid $3 billion to buy TV Guide, Daily Racing Form, Seventeen and other magazines, Murdoch learned a harsh lesson about operating dying media properties.
While the acquisitions gave Murdoch a bigger megaphone—amplifying the loudest of all, Fox News, his conservative counterpart to Ted Turner’s CNN, which launched in 1996—the deal forced him to spend countless hours on the phone with bankers who were demanding he deleverage, which he did by unloading his magazine division and retreating from his newspapers in New York and Chicago.
It was hallmark Murdoch, whose constant dealmaking drove the company across multiple media lanes. He purchased the New York Post twice, once in 1976 and again in 1993, having been force to sell it because his empire violated federal rules about cross-ownership of newspapers and TV stations in the same U.S. market.
The Rupert Factor
A brief history of Murdoch’s career.
1952 – At 21, takes control of Australian newspaper The News, after his father dies.
1973 – Enters U.S. media markey with purchase of two newspapers: the San Antonio Express and San Antonio News.
1974 – Founds tabloid magazine Star.
1976 – Buys the New York Post for $30 million.
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1979 – Forms News Corporation in Australia.
1981 – Buys the Times of London for $28 million.
1985 – Purchases 20th Century Fox from oilman Marvin Davis for $600 million
1986 – Launches Fox Broadcasting Company after buying Metromedia for more than $2 billion.
1987 – Buys U.S. publishing house Harper & Row for $300 million.
1996 – Launches Fox News.
1998 – Buys the Los Angeles Dodgers for $311 million, the most ever paid for a sports franchise at the time; Fox Entertainment Group goes public this same year.
2004 – Sells the Dodgers for $430 million; Moves News Corp. from Australia to the U.S.
2005 – Purchases Intermix Media, owner of MySpace.com, for $580 million.
2007 – Buys Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal publisher, for $5.6 billion
2013 – News Corporation splits assets into News Corp. (newspaper and book publishing) and 21st Century Fox (film and TV).
2017 – Sells most of 21st Century Fox to Disney for $52.4 billion in stock.
2023 – Fox News settles Dominion’s lawsuit for $787.5 million.
September 2023 – Steps down as chairman of Fox and News Corp.
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