Who Is Lachlan Murdoch, the Media Prince Who Would Be King

The question of succession has hung over Lachlan Murdoch his entire life. It has finally, definitively been answered.

The family’s empire, built over more than 70 years by his father, Rupert, is his to control for probably decades to come. Thanks to a $3.3 billion deal he reached with his three oldest siblings, Mr. Murdoch will be able to oversee the family’s media business until at least 2050.

The agreement immediately cements Mr. Murdoch, 54, as one of the world’s most powerful men. And it means that his companies — which own Fox News, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, among other properties — are likely to maintain their firm conservative tilt. Keeping that ideological bent has been a top priority for his father, who has preferred his elder son as his permanent successor over the three less politically conservative siblings.

Now the global Murdoch kingdom will fall under the control of an intensely private former philosophy student, a New Yorker turned proud Australian who transplanted his family to Sydney, and a digital enthusiast who has pushed his father’s analog media business into the realms of podcasts and streaming platforms.

“It means security for the common-sense worldview critical to not only the businesses but the audiences they serve,” said Col Allan, a former New York Post editor and a Rupert Murdoch confidant. “I’m delighted for Rupert and Lachlan the family dispute has been resolved.”

Rupert Murdoch handed much of the oversight of his business to Lachlan in 2023 when he stepped down from his chairman role. Since then, the younger Mr. Murdoch has been the executive chair and chief executive of Fox Corporation, which operates Fox News, the Fox broadcast network and Tubi. He is also the chair of News Corp, the parent company of news outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London and The New York Post and the book publisher HarperCollins.

Under Mr. Murdoch, Fox has acquired Red Seat Ventures, a digital media company that counts top podcasters among its clients, and introduced the Fox One streaming app. In July, Fox took a one-third stake in Penske Entertainment, which owns IndyCar. Fox’s stock price has doubled since the end of 2023, and News Corp stock is also up.

But Mr. Murdoch and the family business continue to face legal fallout from Fox News’s support for baseless conspiracy theories of vote rigging in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, including a defamation lawsuit from Smartmatic, an election technology company. Fox settled a similar lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems in April 2023 for $787.5 million.

A representative for Mr. Murdoch, who rarely gives interviews, declined to make him available for this article. But court documents obtained by The New York Times from a recent battle over the family trust have shed more light on the immense faith placed in him by his father and his role in consolidating power.

For more than a year, Mr. Murdoch and his father pushed to change the family trust to ensure that his leadership would survive Rupert’s eventual death. The arrangement at the time would have allowed the three oldest siblings — Prue, Liz and James — to vote against Mr. Murdoch as a bloc. The effort to change the trust, which Mr. Murdoch and his father called Project Family Harmony, devolved into a court battle that put a wedge between Rupert Murdoch and the other three children.

The deal announcement on Monday “removes an uncertainty,” said Doug Arthur, a media analyst for Huber Research Partners. And with Fox’s stock at a high, he added, “if you’re not aligned with the direction of the company and you have a significant voting position and it’s going to lead to conflict, this is a pretty elegant solution to that.”

As far back as the 1990s, Rupert Murdoch had signaled that Mr. Murdoch, then in his 20s, might be his heir. But the decades since then had been rocky, marked by turmoil between Mr. Murdoch and his siblings.

The third of Rupert Murdoch’s six children, Mr. Murdoch was born in London in 1971. He grew up in New York and studied philosophy at Princeton, writing his thesis on “A Study of Freedom and Morality in Kant’s Practical Philosophy.”

He left for Australia, his father’s native country, to work in the family newspaper business. There, he notched some failures (an investment in the telecommunications business One.Tel that collapsed) and notable wins (a stake in the real estate business REA Group that is now worth billions of dollars).

After returning to New York as the deputy chief operating officer of News Corp, Mr. Murdoch began clashing with Roger E. Ailes, who was the powerful head of Fox News. When his father sided with Mr. Ailes, Mr. Murdoch severed his ties with News Corp and went back to Australia in 2005.

Mr. Murdoch spent the next decade investing in media businesses in Australia through his company Illyria, while his younger brother, James, took on larger roles at News Corp. But by 2014, Mr. Murdoch was back in the succession mix, returning to the family fold at News Corp and what was then 21st Century Fox.

Mr. Murdoch was a critical part of the sale of 21st Century Fox’s assets to Disney in a $72 billion deal in 2019. That catapulted him to chief executive of the new Fox Corporation, which operated Fox News, and co-executive chairman of Fox and News Corp, locking in his position as Rupert’s most likely successor.

James Murdoch, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with Fox News’s editorial positions and resigned from the News Corp board in 2020.

“I think James is embarrassed by Fox News. I don’t think Lachlan is embarrassed by Fox News,” James Packer, an Australian billionaire and longtime friend of Mr. Murdoch’s, said in a 2024 Australian Broadcasting Corporation documentary. “I think Lachlan is proud of Fox News, and, you know, I think that’s probably one of the reasons why Lachlan is where he is and James isn’t.”

James Murdoch told The Atlantic this year that he had expected his brother would balk at President Trump’s stances during his campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016, but he “immediately went to this nasty, knee-jerk, anti-Hillary stance. I was sort of taken aback.”

Lachlan Murdoch’s willingness to let Fox News opinion hosts push false claims of election interference in 2020 to appease Mr. Trump was revealed in court documents from the Dominion case. Emails from Mr. Murdoch to Fox executives showed he was closely watching the channel in the days after that election and felt that one correspondent was being too critical of Mr. Trump, calling the correspondent’s coverage “smug and obnoxious.” He said in his deposition that he had suggested content and guests for Fox shows.

Mr. Murdoch showed signs of his conservatism early. At his private high school in Manhattan, he helped form the Trinity Conservative Society.

“The damage done to the American psyche through unrelenting attacks on its core values and via the destructive rewriting of history is very real,” Mr. Murdoch said in a speech at the Institute of Public Affairs, a conservative think tank, in 2022.

Mr. Murdoch has frequently talked of Australia as his spiritual home. He now lives there, having moved his wife, the model Sarah Murdoch, and his three children to Sydney in 2021 during the coronavirus pandemic.

When in Sydney, Mr. Murdoch works out of News Corp’s Holt Street offices while often sticking to American hours. He also ordered that the company’s budget meetings for 2024 be held in Sydney, bringing in executives from all over the world, reported The Australian, the flagship broadsheet of News Corp’s Australian media empire.

“I’m Australian,” Mr. Murdoch told The Australian in July 2024. “That’s how I see myself.”

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