Murdoch Family Media Empire and Succession Fight

The Murdoch family’s media succession fight was both a family struggle and a fight over the rules of a trust. Rupert Murdoch built a trust to protect his interests, then discovered that its protections also constrained him. The settlement secured Lachlan Murdoch’s control through a costly buyout, showing that the structure could determine who governed the empire but not what the excluded heirs did next.

Why the Murdoch succession fight was structurally inevitable, not a family accident

The family-soap-opera account emphasizes rival siblings and an aging patriarch, but the court record shows a legal arrangement behaving as designed. The trust gave people with different views enforceable claims to future control. Those claims still held when it became clear whom Rupert wanted to succeed him. When he tried to give Lachlan sole control in place of shared voting power, the trust’s rules stood in his way.

The unsealed Nevada court record exposes that mechanism, while the four-episode Netflix documentary series Dynasty: The Murdochs brings the conflict to a general audience. Personality helps explain why the family split, but to understand why Rupert could not simply choose who would take over requires more. That requires tracing the trust from its origins through its amendment clause to the financial terms that finally displaced it.

How the trust was originally built and why — the 1970 origins and the later divorce settlement

The unsealed Nevada court document dates the original Murdoch trust to 1970, when it was created to avoid high Australian death taxes. The trust held ownership under rules that reached beyond how Rupert ran the business at the time. The later succession dispute grew from that distinction between building an empire and setting the rules under which others would inherit power over it.

The later divorce settlement with Anna Torv added the decisive constraint. Her insistence on the children’s voting rights made power-sharing a condition of the divorce rather than a preference Rupert could later reconsider. The arrangement gave the four eldest children equal voting positions after his death. The trust held shares controlling roughly forty percent of both Fox Corp. and News Corp., which gave those children control together over the empire’s future.

Grace and Chloe Murdoch were later added as financial beneficiaries, but Anna Torv insisted that they be excluded from voting rights. The trust could provide for children without giving each of them a say over the companies. Its distribution of control was specific, and changing Rupert’s view of the best successor did not change that distribution.

What "irrevocable" actually means — the narrow amendment clause Rupert tried to exploit

The trust, described as “irrevocable”, contained a clause allowing Rupert to amend the children’s sub-trusts if he acted in the “best interests” of the beneficiaries. That was a narrow good-faith exception to the limits on rewriting succession.

Rupert’s legal argument was that concentrating control in Lachlan would protect the financial interests of all beneficiaries. Under that reasoning, children who lost a voice in the companies could still benefit if a single leader preserved the value of their holdings.

Nevada offered an unusually private setting for the proceedings, where family trust cases can take place behind closed doors and remain off public dockets entirely. The court still had to examine whether the stated benefit justified the change under the trust’s terms. Rupert found an opening in the instrument, but the opening required a justification that the court rejected.

How Project Family Harmony became a "carefully crafted charade" in court

The unsealed court documents place the origins of Project Family Harmony with Lachlan Murdoch and Siobhan McKenna in mid-2023. Rupert entered the plan only later that year. That chronology mattered because the proposed amendment was presented as a measure for the beneficiaries’ welfare, while its preparation began within the intended successor’s circle. The ninety-six-page ruling examined the distance between that stated purpose and the conduct behind it.

The court record describes McKenna, then chair of Australia Post and Lachlan’s trusted lieutenant and close adviser, as central to the preparations. She organized meetings, prepared agendas, dealt with attorneys and drafted talking points for Rupert to use with all four of his daughters. She also had Fox security staff vet people for key roles in the trust. The vetting treated any association with or like for any other Murdoch person as a disqualifying factor. That detail made the selection process evidence of allegiance rather than an abstract dispute about future company value.

Commissioner Edmund J. Gorman Jr. called the scheme a “carefully crafted charade” and found that Rupert and Lachlan had acted in “bad faith”. The court concluded that the effort sought to “permanently cement Lachlan Murdoch's executive roles,” regardless of the effects on the companies or beneficiaries. Rupert’s claim that his other children’s more centrist politics would damage company value did not satisfy the good-faith requirement. The ruling treated the proposed amendment as a political and personal objective presented in the language of beneficiary protection.

Why each of the four eldest children fought or stood down the way they did

The equal-vote arrangement gave each of the four eldest children a position worth defending, whether or not they wanted to run the businesses. Associates had discussed a scenario in which James, Elisabeth and Prudence could together remove him after Rupert’s death. Their combined votes made that possible, so Lachlan’s concern was embedded in the trust rather than dependent on a single sibling’s influence.

James had already made his differences with the family’s media direction public. He resigned from the News Corp board in 2020, citing disagreements over editorial content, donated to Democrats and criticized Fox’s coverage of the January 2021 Capitol siege and its treatment of climate change. His voting rights gave him a way to act on those disagreements through control of the companies. Removing them would therefore do more than settle a question of management continuity. It would remove a means by which an alternative editorial outlook might influence the companies.

Elisabeth also held different political views from Lachlan and had served as managing director at the Murdoch-owned Sky Networks. Dynasty: The Murdochs presents her as a capable executive who was nevertheless viewed as a less formidable heir in part because of her gender. Prudence, the eldest child and the only one from Rupert’s first marriage, had little involvement in the family business in later years, although she had worked at News of the World early in her career. The trust gave both women voting authority whatever role they now had in running the businesses.

Rupert informed the three dissenting siblings of the proposed change over a Zoom call without prior conversation. The manner of the announcement placed their protected rights in direct conflict with his decision. Their resistance was consequently not just a response to being passed over. They were fighting to keep the power the trust already promised them.

What the settlement actually changed — and what it cost

Fox Corp. and News Corp. announced the settlement on September 8, 2025. Rather than establish a legal right to strip the dissenting siblings of control, the agreement paid for their departure. Prudence MacLeod, Elisabeth Murdoch and James Murdoch, described in filings as the “departing members”, each received approximately $1.1 billion for their shares. The resolution was a financial workaround to the constraint the court had upheld.

The original Murdoch Family Trust was dissolved and replaced with a new trust under Lachlan’s full control, structured to run until 2050. Grace and Chloe stayed on as equal financial beneficiaries but had no voting authority. Rupert, 94 at the settlement, retained a ceremonial position as chairman emeritus but no direct voting control.

The price also changed the family’s position within the companies. To fund the buyout, the Murdoch companies sold shares worth billions of dollars, diluting the new trust’s voting stake in both Fox Corp. and News Corp. Lachlan gained more absolute authority over the family’s votes, but the family trust held a smaller percentage of the companies’ voting power.

That trade-off prevents the settlement from being reduced to an uncomplicated victory. Lachlan no longer faced the risk that his siblings would vote together against him, while the departing members gave up their claims to control for large payments. Their joint statement to the Dynasty: The Murdochs filmmakers said they were “pleased that the matter is now behind them”.

What Lachlan's position actually looks like now — Fox Corp's financial footing and the Smartmatic exposure

The smaller voting stake has not, so far, weakened Lachlan’s grip on either company. A holding of roughly one-third of the voting shares in both Fox Corp. and News Corp. remains more than sufficient to prevent activist intervention or a hostile takeover.

Fox’s financial footing also gives substance to the authority Lachlan secured. Fox’s 2026 annual report says it returned money to shareholders through share repurchases and dividend distributions during fiscal year 2026. Those distributions show a business supporting shareholder returns rather than a succession settlement centered on a financially exhausted asset. They do not, however, resolve the legal exposure attached to its editorial record.

Smartmatic’s defamation suit remained without a trial date as of the settlement. The election software company’s claim arose from Fox’s amplification of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Fox had previously paid $787.5 million to settle a similar suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems in 2023. That earlier payment establishes the significance of such litigation, but it does not determine the Smartmatic outcome. The unresolved claim remains the principal open legal question accompanying Lachlan’s secured control.

James Murdoch's move into independent media — and what it says about what the trust protected

The settlement removed James’s ability to influence the family empire through the trust, but it did not remove his interest in media ownership. In 2026, James announced the acquisition of approximately half of Vox Media, including New York magazine and Vox.com, in a deal valued at more than $300 million. The move gave his disagreement with the family’s editorial direction an external platform.

James described his aim as creating “longer-form, thoughtful journalism that can really speak to the culture,” consistent with his criticism of his father’s outlets. He has accused those outlets of deliberate misinformation about climate change and support for right-wing conspiracy theories. His new position gives him a means to pursue a different direction without securing agreement from the family trust.

That is the settlement’s structural irony. Buying James out removed an internal dissenter whose leverage depended on shared votes and left an external competitor with his own platform and capital. The trust could regulate succession within the Murdoch empire, but it had no mechanism to determine what an excluded heir would build elsewhere. The replacement arrangement achieved the narrow goal of protecting Lachlan’s control while helping create the independent media presence that control could not contain.