Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch: The Tabloid That Became an Empire

He kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford and was known there as "Red Rupert" for his leftist sympathies. Within two decades, the same man had built a global media empire on a formula almost nobody in serious journalism admitted to admiring: sports, scandal, and headlines built to be read from across a newsroom. The Economist later credited him with inventing the modern tabloid. He would go on to reinvent cable news, take a $787.5 million defamation settlement on the chin, and still hand a functioning empire to his chosen son.

Inheriting a Newspaper, Building an Instinct

Keith Rupert Murdoch was born March 11, 1931, in Melbourne, Australia, to Sir Keith Murdoch, a war correspondent and newspaper proprietor, and Dame Elisabeth Greene. He was educated at Geelong Grammar School and read philosophy, politics and economics at Worcester College, Oxford. When his father died in 1952, the 21-year-old returned from Oxford to take over what remained of the family newspaper business after estate taxes forced a liquidation, inheriting the modest News Limited and its flagship, the Adelaide News. He rebuilt it into a commercial success and then spent the 1950s and 1960s systematically buying newspapers across Australia and New Zealand, launching The Australian in 1964 as the country's first national daily.

The Fleet Street Takeover

Murdoch entered the British market in 1968 by acquiring the News of the World, then bought The Sun from IPC Media in 1969, converting it into a tabloid under editor Larry Lamb and turning it into the country's biggest-selling paper. By 1981 he had added The Times and Sunday Times, buying them from Lord Thomson of Fleet — placing broadsheet institutions of record under the same ownership as his tabloids. He backed Margaret Thatcher through the 1980s and switched allegiance to Tony Blair's Labour Party in the 1990s, a pattern of political flexibility tied consistently to whichever government could serve his commercial interests.

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Building an American Empire

Murdoch's first American purchase was the San Antonio Express-News in 1973; he relocated to New York the following year and bought the New York Post in 1976, co-founding its Page Six gossip column in 1977. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985 specifically to satisfy federal broadcast-ownership rules, giving up his Australian citizenship in the process. That same decade he bought a controlling stake in 20th Century Fox and, combined with six acquired Metromedia television stations, founded the Fox Broadcasting Company in 1986, which broke through with The Simpsons and The X-Files. In 1996 he launched Fox News Channel, and in 2007 he bought Dow Jones & Company for $5 billion, acquiring The Wall Street Journal. A 2014 bid to buy Time Warner for $80 billion failed.

The Phone Hacking Scandal

Murdoch's most serious crisis began with revelations, escalating dramatically in July 2011, that News of the World reporters had hacked the voicemail of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, along with phones belonging to relatives of dead soldiers and victims of the 7/7 London bombings. Advertisers fled, and the 168-year-old paper closed on July 10, 2011, costing roughly 200 jobs. News Corporation abandoned a proposed £7.8 billion takeover of BSkyB, editor Andy Coulson was convicted of conspiracy to intercept voicemails, and CEO Rebekah Brooks was arrested, though later acquitted. Testifying before Parliament, Murdoch called it "the most humble day of my life," while downplaying the paper's significance as just 1 percent of his global operations — a characterization contradicted by a secretly recorded 2013 remark in which he described the entire investigation as "the biggest inquiry ever, over next to nothing." A parliamentary committee concluded he was "not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company."

Dominion and the Fox News Reckoning

Murdoch took direct control of Fox News as acting CEO from 2016 to 2018 after Roger Ailes resigned amid sexual harassment allegations. In 2023, during Dominion Voting Systems' defamation suit over Fox's coverage of false 2020 election-fraud claims, Murdoch acknowledged under oath that Fox commentators had endorsed claims "they knew were false." Fox settled with Dominion for $787.5 million on the eve of trial — one of the largest defamation settlements in American media history.

The Succession Fight

In September 2023, Murdoch announced his retirement, handing operational control to his eldest son, Lachlan. That transition triggered a bitter family trust dispute: his other three children from his second marriage — Elisabeth, Prudence, and James — challenged his attempt to amend an irrevocable family trust that had guaranteed all six children equal control after his death, so that Lachlan alone would hold it. The dispute settled on September 9, 2025, with the three challenging siblings receiving $3.3 billion for their News Corp and Fox shares and giving up voting rights, while Lachlan secured full control of the trust.

Why Rupert Is Called a Genius

Murdoch's genius, such as it is called, is almost never framed as journalistic or intellectual — it is deal-making, timing, and an unmatched instinct for reading what an audience wants before that audience knows it wants it, then buying or building the outlet to deliver it at scale. He read the commercial appetite for tabloid sensationalism in 1960s Australia and Britain before rivals did, correctly bet that cable news could be built around ideological identity rather than neutrality with Fox News in 1996, and repeatedly restructured his empire — becoming a U.S. citizen purely to clear a regulatory hurdle, engineering the Dow Jones and Fox Broadcasting deals — with a discipline about ownership structure that outlasted scandals that would have ended most media careers. The succession settlement itself, securing his chosen heir sole control while paying off the other claimants, was a final demonstration of that same instinct for structuring outcomes in advance.

The honest counter-case is substantial and well documented by Murdoch's own institutions and courts. The phone-hacking scandal established systemic, sustained criminal conduct across his British tabloids, and his own sworn Dominion testimony established that his flagship American news network knowingly broadcast false election-fraud claims rather than lose audience to a more extreme rival — conduct a court valued at $787.5 million. Critics and media scholars have long argued his outlets' political flexibility, from backing Thatcher to Blair to Trump, tracked commercial and regulatory self-interest more than any coherent editorial conviction, and his reach into three countries' media and political systems at once raises exactly the concentration-of-power concerns any democracy should be uneasy about.

Legacy

With a net worth estimated at $21.7 billion as of March 2022 and an empire now formally consolidated under Lachlan following the 2025 trust settlement, Murdoch built the most politically consequential media conglomerate of his era from a single inherited Adelaide newspaper — a legacy inseparable from both the modern tabloid he is credited with inventing and the scandals that formula ultimately produced.