The court battle to determine the fate of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and its estimated $20.3 billion family trust began in the United States on Monday, September 16th.
The case puts Murdoch against his three eldest children, Prudence, James, and Elisabeth, over who will claim the most voting shares and overall power to control News Corp and Fox News once Murdoch passes away.
It had been previously reported that Rupert Murdoch wanted to amend a family trust fund he had created in 1999 so that his son Lachlan could take over without interference from his siblings.
This case and the Murdoch family were the inspiration behind the award-winning HBO series Succession.
Not all of Rupert Murdoch’s children have voting rights in the family trust
Rupert Murdoch is 93 years old and has been married five times. He has two young children, Grace, 22, and Chloe, 21, who do not have any voting rights in the 1999 family trust agreement.
Walter Marsh, who is the author of the biography Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire, analyzed the situation for the BBC and said, “From what we know, this plan essentially seeks to put Prudence, James, and Elisabeth on the same footing as Murdoch’s two younger daughters.”
Rupert Murdoch has been building this media empire since the 1960s and has turned it into one of the main media conglomerates in the world, gaining major political and public influence in the process.
Murdoch’s two main media companies are News Corporation, which owns newspapers like The Times and The Sun in the United Kingdom, and The Wall Street Journal. Perhaps more notable is Murdoch’s ownership of Fox and Fox News which is one of the most-viewed TV networks in the US.
Murdoch had been preparing his sons to take over since they were teens
Journalist Andrew Neil said in the BBC documentary, The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty in 2020, that Rupert Murdoch had been preparing his sons to take over since they were teens. “Family has always been very important to Rupert Murdoch, particularly from the point of view of forming a dynasty,” Neil said.
Legal experts have speculated that this legal family face-off is actually about commercial interests. This is because to avoid the legal battle in the first place, the siblings would have had to agree to the change or buy the others out of the trust fund.
The latter is not a viable option as the buy-out cost would be astronomical.
However, this is a legal battle that in theory should not be taking place. The whole purpose behind the 1999 Murdoch Family Trust was to settle Murdoch’s succession plans. The trust itself led Rupert Murdoch to give his eldest children jobs within his companies.
Notably, however, the trust also gave the family eight votes, which could be used to have a say on the board of the main two companies, News Corp and Fox News.
The trust had initially said that once Rupert Murdoch died, his four votes would be split among his four older children equally, but differences in opinions and political views are credited as the catalyst for this succession battle.
