The succession is finally official. On Thursday, 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch announced that he would step down from his position as chairman of News Corp. and the Fox Corporation and hand the reins over to his oldest son, Lachlan. If the timing of the handoff was a surprise, its big winner wasn’t. For years, Murdoch had been training his preferred successor to eventually run his multibillion-dollar media empire and its key holdings, including Fox News and The Wall Street Journal. As Lachlan, 52, prepares to step into his father’s shoes, here are some key details to know about the new chairman in town.
Aside from being Murdoch’s son, what is Lachlan’s background?
Born in London and raised in New York after his father bought the New York Post in 1976, Lachlan Murdoch attended the high-society schools one might expect for a budding media mogul: the Trinity School on the Upper West Side, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and Princeton to polish things off. Rupert Murdoch brought him in after college to run some of his holdings in Australia, where he capably handled their newspaper operation in the country. In 1996 Lachlan rose to the C-suite at News Corp., but nine years later, he wanted out — purportedly in order to spend more time in Australia with his family. At the request of Rupert, he returned to the business fold in 2014 as a co-chairman of News Corp. After the sale of 21st Century Fox to Walt Disney Company in 2019, Lachlan was able to focus more closely on the operations at Fox News when he became the CEO of the Fox Corporation.
How Lachlan won the succession plot
Aside from being the eldest son, Lachlan is also the most politically similar to his populist father. Reporters on the Murdoch beat attest that he actually leans further to the right than Rupert; critics say that his decision-making at Fox News helped push the network toward anti-vaccine information and election-fraud conspiracies.
But ideology wasn’t the only factor, and Lachlan did not always have a clear path to the top job. For years, his younger (and more politically centrist) brother, James, was considered the favorite to take over; outsiders hoped he could moderate the conservative media empire. But in 2020, James resigned from his position at News Corp., citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” Later, James would say that his father’s companies (which made him a billionaire) helped “legitimize disinformation.” Since then, Lachlan has been the crown prince.
Has there been any tension between Rupert and Lachlan?
According to reporting from Michael Wolff, Rupert Murdoch blamed Lachlan for failing to control former Fox News host Tucker Carlson as he ventured further into the realm of far-right conspiracies and open racism. The elder Murdoch even reportedly told his friends that he thought that Lachlan wanted Carlson to run for president. Eventually, Fox fired Carlson amid allegations of workplace sexism against him, plus the damaging Dominion lawsuit. But clearly, Lachlan’s affinity for Carlson wasn’t enough to change Rupert’s succession plans.
How is he expected to reign?
Media reporters don’t anticipate a softer hand from above now that Lachlan is in charge — though he does share Rupert’s belief that Donald Trump is bad for the country. The bigger question revolves around his managerial style and level of competence. While he has decades of executive experience at the family firm, some experts still think he will need to prove himself. “Investors were willing to give a Rupert discount for years — but that was Rupert,” David Folkenflik, the author of Murdoch’s World, told The Guardian. “Nobody puts that degree of faith in Lachlan, even as he’s made some decent bets.”
