Secret family battle for Murdoch empire revealed in sealed court documents: NYT

[FakeNoose]

8. Interesting passage from the original NYT article here...

The basic contours of the trust date back to Murdoch’s divorce from his second wife, Anna Murdoch Mann, mother to James, Elisabeth and Lachlan, whom Mr. Murdoch divorced before marrying Ms. Deng in 1999.

Concerned about the destructive potential of a dynastic succession fight, Ms. Mann insisted that the divorce settlement give the four children equal control over the empire, people close to the family have said. As part of their agreement, Mr. Murdoch locked this provision in place permanently through an irrevocable trust.

But Mr. Murdoch came to see that provision as untenable after he placed Lachlan in charge of Fox and News Corp in 2019. A primary source of the problem was his younger son, James, who had been passed over in favor of Lachlan. In recent years, people close to James and his wife Kathryn have said that after Mr. Murdoch’s death they would consider joining with Elisabeth and Prudence to wrest control from Lachlan and tame the companies’ wilder right wing instincts.

James and Lachlan shared operating responsibility for the companies from 2015 to 2019, a relationship that frayed during the Trump administration, as the two split over Fox’s fawning treatment of Mr. Trump. Lachlan and his father dismissed James’s concerns, pointing to the network’s record ratings. James left the business following Lachlan’s ascension to chairman and chief executive in 2019, and stepped down from the News Corp board in 2020, citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets.”

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Archived (no paywall) link: https://archive.ph/HwCWv