Rupert Murdoch

• 1. Introduction

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  Rupert Murdoch kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford. The young man from Melbourne who would one day own hundreds of newspapers, television channels, and publishing houses across more than fifty countries arrived at Worcester College in the late 1940s as a card-carrying member of the Labour Club, known to his peers as "Red Rupert". That detail sits uncomfortably alongside what came later: the decades of alliance with Margaret Thatcher, the founding of Fox News, the tabloids that alternately made and destroyed careers in three countries. How does a boy shaped by a war correspondent father, a Presbyterian grandfather, and an Oxford education in philosophy, politics, and economics become one of the most polarising media owners of the modern era? And what does it mean that in September 2025, the court battle over his empire ended not with the state, but with his own children?

• 2. The Inheritance

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  Keith Arthur Murdoch died of cancer in 1952, leaving his son a modest inheritance. The great Herald and Weekly Times empire that the elder Murdoch had chaired was not passed down; its stake had to be liquidated to pay taxes. What remained was News Limited, founded in 1923, and its main asset: The News, a small Adelaide daily. Rupert was 21 years old.

  Before returning to Australia, he had spent two years as a sub-editor at the Daily Express in London. That apprenticeship sharpened instincts his father had already begun to cultivate, grooming his son at the Melbourne Herald for precisely this succession. What followed was swift. He turned The News into a commercial success, then looked outward. The Sunday Times in Perth came first, in 1956. Over the next several years, suburban and provincial papers in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, and the Northern Territory followed. The Sydney afternoon tabloid The Daily Mirror arrived in 1960.

  The Economist later described Murdoch as "inventing the modern tabloid", pointing to his editorial formula: heavier sports coverage, scandal, and headlines built to arrest the eye. Whether that is a compliment depends on who is reading it. By 1964, he had launched The Australian, the country's first national daily newspaper, initially based in Canberra and later moved to Sydney. The same year, on a touring trip to New Zealand with friends in a rented Morris Minor, he read about a takeover bid for the Wellington daily The Dominion by the British-based Canadian magnate Lord Thomson of Fleet. On impulse, the 32-year-old launched a counter-bid. After a four-way battle, he won.

• 3. The British Campaign

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  In 1968, Murdoch entered the British newspaper market by acquiring the News of the World, a populist Sunday paper. The following year he purchased The Sun from IPC and converted it to tabloid format, running both papers off the same printing press to cut costs. To the new editor, Albert "Larry" Lamb, Murdoch's instructions were direct: he wanted, as Lamb later recalled, "a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it". By 1997, The Sun attracted ten million daily readers.

  The Times came in 1981, bought from Lord Thomson, who had grown exhausted by years of financial losses driven by prolonged industrial action. Harold Evans, who had edited the Sunday Times from 1967, was moved across to the daily Times but lasted only a year before leaving over editorial conflicts with Murdoch. That same year, Murdoch's bid for The Times and The Sunday Times passed through the government without referral to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, the standard practice at the time. Documents discovered in Margaret Thatcher's archives in 2012 revealed that a secret meeting had taken place a month before the bid, at which Murdoch had briefed Thatcher on his plans, including his intentions regarding the print unions.

  Those unions became the defining confrontation of Murdoch's British decade. In 1986, he introduced electronic production processes and moved his newspaper operations to a new purpose-built facility in Wapping, a London docklands warehouse. Six thousand employees who went on strike were dismissed. The dispute that followed involved street battles and demonstrations. Many on the political left alleged collusion between Thatcher's government and Murdoch as a means of weakening the trade union movement. In 1987, the dismissed workers accepted a settlement of £60 million.

  In 1990, Murdoch's struggling Sky Television, which had been subsidised by profits from his other holdings, convinced its rival British Satellite Broadcasting to accept a merger on his terms. The resulting company, BSkyB, came to dominate the British pay-television market. By 1996, it had more than 3.6 million subscribers, triple the number of cable customers in the UK. In 1998, Murdoch made a bid of £625 million to acquire Manchester United, described at the time as the largest amount ever offered for a sports club. The UK's Competition Commission blocked it, concluding the purchase would have hurt competition in the broadcast industry and the quality of British football.

• 4. Building the American Empire

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  Murdoch's first American acquisition was the San Antonio Express-News, purchased in 1973. He moved to New York City in 1974 and soon founded Star, a supermarket tabloid. In 1976 he purchased the New York Post, and on the 3rd of January 1977, he and columnist James Brady co-founded Page Six, the paper's gossip column.

  The pivot into television required a sacrifice. On the 4th of September 1985, Murdoch became a naturalised American citizen, formally giving up his Australian citizenship, because federal law required American television station owners to be citizens. The path to that moment had begun in March 1984, when he purchased Marvin Davis's interest in 20th Century Fox for $250 million. He then bought the six Metromedia television stations that Davis had declined to pursue jointly, and later bought out Davis's remaining stake in Fox for $325 million. Those six stations formed the nucleus of the Fox Broadcasting Company, founded on the 9th of October 1986, which later found broad commercial success with programs including The Simpsons and The X-Files.

  Fox News Channel launched in 1996, Murdoch's entry into the cable news market. Ratings studies from 2009 showed the network was responsible for nine of the top ten programs in the cable news category at that time. The rivalry between Murdoch and Ted Turner, founder and former owner of CNN, became one of the defining business feuds of the era.

  The acquisitions continued at scale. News Corporation purchased Intermix Media, which held Myspace, in July 2005 for $580 million, making Murdoch a significant force in online media. Myspace was sold in June 2011 for $35 million. In 2007, Murdoch made a $5 billion offer for Dow Jones and Company, which owned The Wall Street Journal and Barron's Magazine. The Bancroft family, who had controlled Dow Jones for 105 years, initially declined before eventually agreeing to sell. By 2000, News Corporation owned more than 800 companies in more than 50 countries, with a net worth exceeding $5 billion. In 2023, during a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, Murdoch acknowledged that some Fox News commentators had endorsed election fraud claims they knew to be false. Fox and Dominion settled on the 18th of April 2023 for $787.5 million.

• 5. Politics as Business

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  Murdoch identifies himself as a libertarian. Asked to define the term, he said: "As much individual responsibility as possible, as little government as possible, as few rules as possible. But I'm not saying it should be taken to the absolute limit."

  That stated philosophy has not always predicted his political alignments. During the 1980s and early 1990s, his British publications supported Margaret Thatcher. The Sun credited itself with helping John Major win an unexpected election victory in the 1992 general election. Then Murdoch switched, and in the general elections of 1997, 2001, and 2005, his papers were either neutral or supported Tony Blair's Labour. The closeness of that relationship, including secret meetings to discuss national policy, became a political controversy in Britain. Later still, The Sun switched again to support David Cameron's Conservative Party.

  In the United States, according to The New York Times, Ronald Reagan's campaign team credited Murdoch and the New York Post for Reagan's victory in New York in the 1980 presidential election. Reagan later waived a prohibition against owning both a television station and a newspaper in the same market, which allowed Murdoch to keep the New York Post and The Boston Herald while expanding into television. In 2010, News Corporation gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association and $1 million to the US Chamber of Commerce. Murdoch also served on the board of directors of the Cato Institute.

  In June 2016, The Sun supported Vote Leave in the UK's European Union membership referendum. Murdoch called the Brexit result "wonderful", comparing it to "a prison break". Anthony Hilton, economics editor for the Evening Standard, quoted Murdoch as justifying his Euroscepticism: "When I go into Downing Street, they do what I say; when I go to Brussels, they take no notice." Murdoch later denied saying this in a letter to the publication.

  The researcher McKnight identified four characteristics of Murdoch's media operations: a free-market ideology; unified positions on matters of public policy; global editorial meetings; and opposition to what he characterised as liberal bias in other public media.

• 6. The Phone Hacking Crisis

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  On the 14th of July 2011, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons served summonses on Murdoch, his son James, and former chief executive Rebekah Brooks to testify before the committee. The summons came after allegations emerged that journalists at the News of the World had hacked the phones of celebrities, members of the royal family, and ordinary members of the public.

  Murdoch described the day of the parliamentary committee as "the most humble day of my life". He argued that because he ran a global business of 53,000 employees and the News of the World represented "just 1%" of that business, he bore no ultimate responsibility for what had occurred there. The day before the committee met, the website of The Sun was hacked and a false story was posted claiming Murdoch had died.

  On the 15th of July, Murdoch attended a private meeting in London with the family of Milly Dowler, whose voicemail had been hacked by a journalist at a company he owned. He personally apologised. News International then published two full-page apologies in national British newspapers on the 16th and the 17th of July. The first, signed by Murdoch, expressed regret for the "serious wrongdoing" that occurred. The second, titled "Putting right what's gone wrong", set out steps being taken to address public concerns.

  Murdoch accepted the resignations of Brooks and Les Hinton, the head of Dow Jones who had chaired his British newspaper division when some of the abuses occurred. On the 21st of July 2012, Murdoch resigned as a director of News International. The Culture, Media and Sport Committee issued a report on the 1st of May 2012 stating that Murdoch was "not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company".

  A secret recording emerged in July 2013, in which Murdoch can be heard telling Sun journalists that the investigation was "the biggest inquiry ever, over next to nothing", and that he or his successors would take care of any journalists who went to prison. A former editor of The Sunday Times, Harold Evans, had attributed to Murdoch the statement "I give instructions to my editors all round the world, why shouldn't I in London?" In his April 2012 testimony, Murdoch did not deny the quote.

• 7. The Succession Battle

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  The family trust that holds the Murdoch family's 28.5% stake in News Corp was established after Rupert and Anna Murdoch's divorce in 1999. Its terms were described as "irrevocable": equal say for the children born of his first two marriages. His children with third wife Wendi Deng, Grace and Chloe, would share stock proceeds but have no voting rights.

  In 2023, Murdoch attempted to amend the trust so that his eldest son Lachlan would retain control of News Corp and Fox Corp after Rupert's death, rather than the control being shared equally among the older children as the existing terms specified. According to The New York Times, Murdoch's reasoning was that his companies should remain politically conservative, and he viewed his other children as too politically liberal. The case was heard in Reno, Nevada. A Nevada probate commissioner found that Murdoch was permitted to seek an amendment if he could show he was acting in good faith and for the sole benefit of his heirs.

  James, Elisabeth, and Prudence challenged the bid. The case led to the three becoming estranged from their father. None attended his wedding to his fifth wife, Elena Zhukova, held in June 2024 at his California estate. Murdoch was 93 and Zhukova 67 at the time of their marriage.

  On the 9th of September 2025, News Corp announced a settlement. Prudence MacLeod, Elisabeth Murdoch, and James Murdoch would sell their shares in a transaction reported to be worth $3.3 billion. All three would cease to be beneficiaries of any holdings in News Corp and Fox and would relinquish their voting rights. Lachlan Murdoch assumed full control of the family trust and full voting rights over both companies. Grace and Chloe Murdoch were added as beneficiaries with no voting rights. A media empire that had been built across seven decades of acquisition, alliance, and conflict passed, in its entirety, to one son.