“Succession,” but irl

Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old media mogul, is stepping down from his chairman roles at both Fox and News Corp., he announced yesterday, ending a nearly seven-decade career in the media industry.

📰📺 How it all started: Murdoch inherited an Australian newspaper business from his father in the 1950s.

In 1968, Murdoch acquired the UK-based News of the World tabloid. He then added The Sun (also UK-based).

And, much like Fun with Dick and Jane, once the acquisition spree was rolling it was hard to stop. Murdoch bought the New York Post, making his way into the US, as well as the UK-based Times, London’s storied paper of record.

The budding multi-continental empire rolled into Hollywood in the 1980s, when Murdoch acquired the Twentieth Century Fox movie studio (plus a group of TV stations). This paved the way for him to launch Fox, a US broadcast network intended as a rival to incumbents ABC, CBS, and NBC.

Fox took off with edgy shows aimed at young folks like The Simpsons, and paid $1.6 billion to grab the NFL media rights away from CBS. Off the back of sports, Fox launched local and national cable networks. Fox News came into existence in 1996 as a counter to CNN.

• When all was said and done, Murdoch had compiled a personal fortune in the ballpark of $17 billion, and a company worth ~$27 billion (though he sold some Twentieth Century Fox assets to Disney for $71 billion in 2019).

👀 Looking ahead… Rupert’s eldest son, Lachlan Murdoch, 52, will now be the sole executive in charge of Fox and News Corp.