At long last, it is time for the eldest boy to take the throne of the Murdoch empire, capping years of media speculation over the future of one of the most powerful families in media.
Here's the deal: On Thursday, 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch said he would step down as chairman of Fox News' parent company, Fox Corporation, and News Corporation, owner of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and other newspapers.
His 52-year-old son, Lachlan, will assume control of the companies as the sole chairman.
The news is a milestone for the family's decades-long succession battle that has played out primarily among three of Rupert's six children. The Murdochs' seemingly boundless wealth — Forbes estimates the family is worth nearly $18 billion — and their at times messy behind-the-scenes feuding made them a source of intrigue in elite media and business circles. Writers for the HBO series Succession drew heavily on the Murdochs' lives in their creation of the fictional Roys. (Full disclosure: HBO and CNN are owned by the same parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.)
Some background...
Rupert Murdoch grew his business from relatively modest roots, inheriting an Australian newspaper business from his father in 1952. Over the next seven decades, Murdoch pushed aggressively into British and American markets, buying up newspapers, launching the Fox network, acquiring the 20th Century Fox film studio and upending the cable news scene with the debut of Fox News in 1996.
With his second wife, Rupert welcomed three children: Elisabeth, Lachlan and James.
The two brothers, just 15 months apart in age, were deeply competitive as kids, and over the years they traded the roles of "heir apparent and jilted son," according to a 2019 New York Times Magazine article on the family.
"It was no secret to those close to the family that Murdoch had always favored Lachlan," according to the magazine.
Succession planning for the Murdoch media behemoth appeared to begin in earnest in 2015, when Rupert named Lachlan and James as co-chairmen of 21st Century Fox.
But in 2020, James, who backed Joe Biden's 2020 campaign and has donated to Democratic-leaning causes, dramatically broke with the company, citing "disagreements over certain editorial content," among other reasons.
Elisabeth, who has been in and out of the family business while building her own career as a television producer, often felt she was being overshadowed by her brothers, according to a 2012 profile of her in the New Yorker. A family friend who was quoted in the profile compared Elisabeth to Cordelia, the devoted daughter in Shakespeare's King Lear.
"She loves her father," the friend told the magazine, "but she's the wrong sex."
(For Succession fans playing along at home: You can think of Lachlan and James' hyper-competitive, complicated relationship as parallel to that of Kendall and Roman Roy. Elisabeth has shades of Shiv, having struck out on her own but finding herself constantly pulled back into the family's orbit.)
Lachlan's takeover
The eldest son shares his father's conservative politics, and has overseen an era of rampant misinformation and right-wing propaganda at Fox News.
Although he has privately criticized Trump, people familiar with the matter told CNN last year, Rupert signaled Thursday that Lachlan would maintain the network's editorial bent.
"My father firmly believed in freedom, and Lachlan is absolutely committed to the cause," Rupert said in a memo to staff.
It was Lachlan, after all, who ultimately approved Fox's extraordinary decision not to air the first live hearings conducted by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. (The network opted instead to run commentary on the hearing from far-right presenters Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.)
At the time those hearings aired, Lachlan and his wife, Sarah, were relaxing on their $30 million yacht in the Sydney Harbour, according to a 2022 biography.
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