Rupert Murdoch loses bid to alter irrevocable trust
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Should have listened to Tony Soprano’s accountant, I guess:
A Nevada commissioner ruled resoundingly against Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to change his family’s trust to consolidate his eldest son Lachlan’s control of his media empire and lock in Fox News’s right-wing editorial slant, according to a sealed court document obtained by The New York Times.
The commissioner, Edmund J. Gorman Jr., concluded in a decision filed on Saturday that the father and son, who is the head of Fox News and News Corp., had acted in “bad faith” in their effort to amend the irrevocable trust, which divides control of the company equally among Mr. Murdoch’s four oldest children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence — after his death.
The ruling was at times scathing. At one point in his 96-page opinion, Mr. Gorman characterizes the plan to change the trust as a “carefully crafted charade” to “permanently cement Lachlan Murdoch’s executive roles” inside the empire “regardless of the impacts such control would have over the companies or the beneficiaries” of the family trust.
A lawyer for Mr. Murdoch, Adam Streisand, said that they were disappointed with the ruling and intended to appeal. A lawyer for James, Elisabeth and Prudence did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The battle over the family trust is not about money — Mr. Murdoch is not seeking to diminish any of his children’s financial stakes in the company — but rather about future control of the world’s most powerful conservative media empire, which includes Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and major newspapers and television outlets in Australia and Britain.
Mr. Murdoch, now 93, has long intended to bequeath these sprawling media conglomerates to his children, much as his own father had passed on his vastly smaller media company to Mr. Murdoch and his sisters. But he is also determined to preserve the right-wing bent of his empire, and reconciling these two desires has become a growing challenge for him.
Over his long career, Mr. Murdoch has made a point of fusing his family and his business affairs, with Lachlan, James and Elisabeth all at one point in consideration to succeed him. (His eldest daughter, Prudence, has been the least involved in the family business.) By 2019, though, it was clear that he wanted Lachlan to lead the company after his death. The problem was the structure of the family trust.
James and Elisabeth are both known to have less-conservative political views than their father or brother. If Mr. Murdoch fails to lock in Lachlan’s leadership of the company, he will be unable to ensure that Fox News will remain a right-wing news outlet after his death, putting in jeopardy the legacy of the conservative empire he had spent his life building. In seeking to consolidate Lachlan’s control over this empire, Mr. Murdoch has argued that maintaining the political bent of his outlets — and stripping the voting power of three of his children — is in the financial interest of all his beneficiaries.
How much is really at stake here is unclear — the audience for reactionary propaganda is so well-established that even if Fox News stopped being what it was some other outlet would presumably fill the vacuum completely — but I’ll still root for dysfunction.