The Murdochs are feuding but their empire is thriving

The Age

03-06-2025

Nothing in Fox's television schedules last year was quite as exciting – or, at times, as profane – as the drama that played out in a closed probate court in Reno, Nevada.
Rupert Murdoch, the 94-year-old founder and controlling shareholder of Fox Corporation and its sister company News Corp, was trying to change the terms of a family trust to block three of his children from inheriting control of the companies upon his death. The high-stakes legal manoeuvre was rejected. An appeal – and thus a new season of morbid entertainment for media watchers – is in the works.
As the Murdochs continue their decades-long, multibillion-dollar family feud, the empire they are fighting over is flourishing.
This is doubly surprising. For one thing, succession crises and legal uncertainty tend not to bolster investors' confidence in a company. What's more, the Murdoch firms are giants in linear television and print journalism, declining industries that markets have not been kind to.
Why is a pair of legacy media companies controlled by a dysfunctional dynasty so popular with investors?
Start with Fox, the larger of the two, with a market value of $US24 billion ($37 billion). Its business is concentrated in American broadcast and cable television, which in recent years have witnessed a bloodbath.
As the Murdochs continue their decades-long, multibillion-dollar family feud, the empire they are fighting over is flourishing.
Over the past decade-and-a-half, the share of homes with pay TV has fallen from nearly 90 per cent to barely 50 per cent as viewers have defected to streaming services such as Netflix. As for broadcast television, Americans today spend half as much time watching it as they do streaming, according to Nielsen, a data company.
While other legacy media companies' values have stagnated or worse, Fox's has soared. The difference lies in its content mix. In 2019 Fox sold its general-entertainment assets to Disney for $US71 billion at what turned out to be the top of the market, deciding to focus on news and sport. It was the right call: streamers like Netflix have since grabbed the audience for general entertainment, while news and sport have mostly stayed on linear TV, and thus with Fox.