But it’s the far larger and profitable Fox Corp., which Rupert built from scratch into a broadcasting behemoth, including Fox News Media, Fox Broadcasting Co., and Fox Sports Media Group, that powers the Murdoch empire.
No one believes Lachlan Murdoch loves the newspaper business. Newspapers are yesterday. Like most of his peers, he thinks of himself as a modern mogul building the brave new media world.
The company Lachlan Murdoch now leads is swimming in cash, has little debt, and has a strong stock price. His fortunes are bound to Fox News Channel, now the most watched cable news network in the United States and responsible for more than 70 percent of the Fox Corp.’s pre-tax profit. He can’t live without it. But cable TV is old media, and the median age of the Fox News audience is 68.
As chair of News Corp and continuing as CEO of Fox Corp., Lachlan doesn’t have to worry about money. He can make splashy acquisitions, but will he? He’s made some smart buys, like the streaming service Tubi, for which the family paid $440 million.
Before it became clear that he was the anointed one, he helped navigate the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney for $52 billion in 2019. He helped resolve some of Fox’s messiest messes — the firing of Fox News founder Roger Ailes, the sacking of Fox host Tucker Carlson, and the settlement, for $787 million, of the Dominion Voting lawsuit, experiences that tested his leadership.
While he is conservative like his father, it’s uncertain whether he’ll enjoy the elder’s political clout. Rupert Murdoch loved his newspapers precisely because they gave him political influence.
It will be Lachlan Murdoch who must repair relations with President Trump. He doesn’t have the decades-long friendship his father has with Trump, with whom he frequently exchanges political gossip. Lachlan Murdoch did attend a White House dinner in 2019 for the Australian prime minister, but it’s telling that when the president wanted to kill a Wall Street Journal scoop about Jeffrey Epstein, he called Rupert Murdoch, who is technically retired. The story, about Epstein’s birthday book with a lewd drawing, reportedly by Trump, was published anyway. The president has filed a $20 billion defamation lawsuit against the Journal.
What Lachlan Murdoch must worry about is competition. It’s new media, the big tech companies, that are invading the Murdoch realm. Amazon is competing for football rights and is a huge player in entertainment. Meta owns Instagram, which is reshaping the entertainment sector. You can watch practically anything on YouTube TV, including broadcasts from Fox TV, Fox News, and Fox Sports.
But the rival to watch is David Ellison, 42, who, like Lachlan Murdoch, is a princeling with a fortune (a much bigger one). He is the son of Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who last week passed Elon Musk as the richest person in the world, with a net worth of almost $400 billion. At a youthful 81 compared to Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison is a tech giant, and David is a digital native clearly ready to confront the media world of the future. Larry Ellison already owns 12.5 percent of TikTok.
David Ellison recently took over Paramount Global and is preparing a bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, according to The Wall Street Journal, making a heavy bet that entertainment will continue to be king. The sale, if completed, would make David Ellison a big figure in Hollywood.
He also seems to be steering CBS to the right, hiring last week a Republican ombudsman, Kenneth Weinstein, to keep liberal bias out of CBS News. (Surely, David Ellison wants no repeat of Trump’s lawsuit against “60 Minutes,” which resulted in a $16 million payment to the president.)
In February, Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch were both in the White House standing by the president when he signed an executive order creating a sovereign wealth fund.
Like Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison has been a top donor to the GOP and is known to be one of Trump’s favorite tech billionaires. David Ellison made a surprise and, in retrospect, perhaps ill-considered $1 million donation to a Biden fund-raising group.
It’s been reported that he’s interested in buying The Free Press, the news site founded by Bari Weiss in 2022 that leans right. Weiss left The New York Times because of its reflexive leftism, she said. Ellison is willing to pay handsomely — $150 million — for Weiss’s creation, and he wants Weiss for a top CBS position. Owning The Free Press and elevating Weiss would probably please the White House.
Lachlan Murdoch will probably chart a different course. But no one is yet sure where he is going.