Rupert Murdoch isn’t going anywhere just yet

As “chairman emeritus” the Fox and News Corp boss will still wield plenty of clout

This article was originally published by The Economist on 22 September, 2023.

 

“To walk away and retire, it’s a pretty dismal prospect,” Rupert Murdoch told an interviewer in 1998, when he was already well into pensionable age. If he ever did stop working, he added, he would “die pretty quickly”.

 

So the announcement on September 21st that the 92-year-old is stepping down as chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp, the television and newspaper empires he has built up over more than 70 years, should be treated with some scepticism. Mr Murdoch will stay on as “chairman emeritus” and says he will remain “involved every day in the contest of ideas”. This week he advised staff: “When I visit your countries and companies, you can expect to see me in the office late on a Friday.” It was both a promise and a warning.

 

The handover of Mr Murdoch’s empire has been a gradual process. He has shied away from earnings calls since the sale of 21st Century Fox, the bulk of his film and tv assets, to Disney in 2019. The question of succession was in effect settled the following year, when James Murdoch, the younger son and sometime heir apparent, left the News Corp board, citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions”. This left the path clear for Mr Murdoch’s elder son, Lachlan, who will take over from his father at the two family firms.

 

Why the change in titles now? Mr Murdoch said in his letter to staff this week that he was in robust health. But investors have recently begun to question those assurances. Vanity Fair reported in April that he had quietly suffered a series of health problems including a broken back, seizures and two bouts of pneumonia. His testimony in a recent legal case against Fox brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which accused the company of damaging its reputation, seemed to lack some of the mogul’s old sharpness.

 

These concerns have coincided with a series of missteps. Fox pursued a calamitous legal strategy in the Dominion case, eventually paying up nearly $800m to settle it. (A related case brought by another voting-technology company, Smartmatic, is expected to go to trial in 2025; Smartmatic is seeking $2.7bn.) It has suffered public spats with some of its anchors, including Tucker Carlson, who was jettisoned in April and has since set himself up on the social network formerly known as Twitter. And an attempt by Mr Murdoch to unify his two companies earlier this year was shot down by shareholders.

 

Those investors may be reassured by Mr Murdoch’s more modest new title. In recent years analysts have come to speak of a “Murdoch discount” applied to Fox and News Corp. Mr Murdoch’s new title means that “his interface with the public markets is over,” says Claire Enders, a media analyst. “But it is obvious that he is the ultimate decision-maker as long as he is alive.”

 

That is reflected nowhere so clearly as his choice of successor. Mr Murdoch set up a decades-long audition between three of his children: Elisabeth, Lachlan and James (his eldest child, Prudence, has mostly stayed away from the company; his two youngest children by another marriage, Grace and Chloe, are still in their early 20s). Though it was James who set up the auction of 21st Century Fox, selling to Disney at the top of the market for $71bn, the job has gone to Lachlan, the child who gets on best with his father. Whereas James and Elisabeth have both criticised the political positions of their father’s companies, Lachlan appears to share the elder Murdoch’s politics. Any changes are likely to be minor: perhaps a little more focus on streaming (Tubi, Fox’s advertising-supported streamer, is performing well) and less on British news media (Talktv, a recent venture there, has not been a big hit so far).

 

When Murdoch père eventually dies, things may change more. Control of the family trust, which ultimately holds sway over both companies, will pass to the four eldest siblings. The newspaper and television industries are both going through a bumpy digital transition, opening up new possibilities. Assets such as Fox News could be changed, or sold off, when the next generation takes control. But it may be a while before that happens. Mr Murdoch’s mother lived to be 103. One person close to the family, asked what will happen when Mr Murdoch passes, reports simply: “He insists he won’t.”