Rupert Murdoch: The Man Who Bought the News and Rewrote the Rules of Power

On July 10, 2011, Rupert Murdoch did something he had never done in six decades of running newspapers: he killed one. The News of the World — Britain’s bestselling Sunday tabloid, founded in 1843, read by nearly 3 million people every week — was shut down overnight. Not because it was losing money. Because its journalists had been caught hacking into the voicemail of a murdered 13-year-old girl named Milly Dowler, giving her parents false hope that she was still alive.

The scandal should have ended Murdoch. It ended dozens of careers around him. It led to criminal trials, parliamentary inquiries, and the closure of a 168-year-old institution. But Murdoch himself survived. He always survives. That is the most important thing to understand about the most powerful media mogul in history: not what he built, but what he endured — and what he was willing to destroy — to keep building.

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🗞️ Chapter 1: The Inheritance

Keith Rupert Murdoch was born on March 11, 1931, in Melbourne, Australia. His father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was a celebrated war correspondent who had become one of Australia’s most influential newspaper publishers, running the Herald and Weekly Times group. Young Rupert grew up in a world of ink and deadlines, absorbing the rhythms of the newsroom the way other children absorbed bedtime stories.

When Keith Murdoch died in 1952, Rupert was 21 years old and studying at Oxford. He returned to Australia to claim his inheritance — but the inheritance was smaller than expected. Estate taxes and the structure of his father’s holdings meant that Rupert ended up with just two small newspapers: the Adelaide News and the Sunday Mail, both in South Australia.

Most heirs would have managed the papers conservatively and lived comfortably. Murdoch looked at his two modest papers and saw a launchpad.

Within a year, he was cutting costs, redesigning front pages, and pushing sensationalist stories that drove newsstand sales. He understood instinctively what would take media academics decades to articulate: people don’t buy newspapers for information. They buy them for sensation, outrage, and entertainment. Information is the excuse. Emotion is the product.

By the early 1960s, Murdoch was buying up papers across Australia. In 1964, he launched The Australian, the country’s first national newspaper. It lost money for years — but it gave Murdoch political influence at a national level. He was learning the trade he would practice for the rest of his life: trading media reach for political access, and political access for regulatory favors that enabled more media reach.

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🌍 Chapter 2: The Invasion of Fleet Street

In 1969, Murdoch made his first move into the United Kingdom by acquiring the News of the World, followed quickly by The Sun. The Sun was a struggling broadsheet. Murdoch turned it into a tabloid, splashed it with sex, scandal, and sports, and introduced the infamous Page 3 feature — a daily photograph of a topless woman. Circulation tripled within a year.

British media elites were horrified. Murdoch didn’t care. He was building an audience, and the audience was buying. By the mid-1970s, The Sun was the bestselling daily newspaper in Britain.

But the real power play came in 1981, when Murdoch acquired The Times and The Sunday Times — the crown jewels of British journalism. The establishment papers. The serious papers. And he got them without a referral to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, despite already owning The Sun and the News of the World. The ruling Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher waved the deal through.

The transaction set a pattern that would repeat across continents: Murdoch would support a political candidate or party through his media outlets, and in return, that candidate or party would smooth the regulatory path for his acquisitions. It wasn’t bribery. It was something more sophisticated — a mutual dependency between media power and political power that benefited both sides and was almost impossible to prosecute.

In 1986, Murdoch broke the print unions by moving his entire London newspaper operation from Fleet Street to a new, automated printing plant in Wapping, East London. The move was planned in military secrecy. On the night of January 24, 1986, hundreds of print workers showed up for their shifts at the old plants and found the doors locked. Their jobs were gone. The papers were already rolling off the presses in Wapping.

The Wapping dispute lasted over a year. There were riots, arrests, and accusations of police brutality. Murdoch won. The print unions were broken, and Murdoch’s labor costs plummeted. It was brutal, it was calculated, and it was the moment Murdoch proved he would sacrifice anything — relationships, reputation, workers’ livelihoods — to protect the commercial logic of his empire.

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🇺🇸 Chapter 3: The American Conquest

Murdoch became a U.S. citizen in 1985 — not out of patriotism but because U.S. law required American citizenship to own a television station. He had already bought the New York Post in 1976, injecting it with the same tabloid energy he’d brought to The Sun. Now he wanted television.

In 1985, he bought 20th Century Fox for $575 million and a collection of television stations from Metromedia for $2 billion. Then he did something the entire television industry thought was impossible: he launched a fourth broadcast network.

Fox Broadcasting Company debuted on October 9, 1986. The established networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — laughed. They had decades of affiliate relationships, massive production budgets, and lock-in with advertisers. What could a scrappy Australian with a movie studio and a handful of stations do?

The answer: everything they couldn’t. Fox launched edgy, younger-skewing programming that the legacy networks were too cautious to try. Married… with Children. The Simpsons. In Living Color. Beverly Hills, 90210. The content was louder, cruder, and more irreverent than anything on the Big Three. Advertisers chasing the 18-34 demographic couldn’t get enough.

By the mid-1990s, Fox was a legitimate fourth network. And then Murdoch made the move that would reshape American politics for a generation.

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📺 Chapter 4: The Fox News Gambit

On October 7, 1996, Fox News Channel launched with a staff of roughly 300 and distribution in 17 million homes. Its founding CEO was Roger Ailes, a former Republican political consultant who had advised Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush.

The premise was simple and devastating: CNN and the broadcast networks had a liberal bias. Millions of American conservatives felt unrepresented by mainstream television news. Fox News would serve them.

The slogan was “Fair and Balanced.” The content was anything but — and that was the point. Fox News didn’t pretend to be neutral. It built a fortress of opinion programming hosted by charismatic, combative anchors like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and later Tucker Carlson. The shows were fast-paced, emotionally charged, and designed to produce outrage — the most shareable, most addictive emotion in media.

Fox News lost money for its first five years. Murdoch absorbed the losses without flinching. He knew what he was building.

By 2002, Fox News surpassed CNN in ratings. By 2010, it was the most-watched cable news network in America by a wide margin, often drawing more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined. It wasn’t just a news channel anymore. It was a political institution. Republican candidates campaigned on its airwaves. Republican voters organized around its narratives. When Donald Trump rode down an escalator in June 2015 to announce his presidential candidacy, Fox News was the oxygen supply that kept his campaign alive.

The financial results were staggering. At its peak, Fox News generated roughly $2.7 billion in annual revenue with profit margins north of 60%. It was one of the most profitable media properties in history — and it reshaped American democracy in ways that are still being debated.

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💔 Chapter 5: The Scandals

The phone-hacking scandal broke in 2006 when a royal editor at the News of the World was convicted of intercepting voicemail messages of members of the British royal household. But the true scope of the scandal didn’t emerge until 2011, when The Guardian reported that News of the World journalists had hacked the phone of murdered teenager Milly Dowler in 2002.

The revelation triggered a national reckoning. Advertisers fled. Public outrage was volcanic. On July 7, 2011, Murdoch announced the News of the World would publish its final edition three days later. A 168-year-old newspaper, dead in 72 hours.

The Leveson Inquiry — a judicial public inquiry into the culture, practices, and ethics of the British press — laid bare the symbiotic relationship between Murdoch’s media empire and British politicians. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was godfather to one of Murdoch’s children. David Cameron, the sitting Prime Minister, had hired a former News of the World editor as his communications director. The inquiry revealed a power network so intertwined that it was impossible to tell where journalism ended and politics began.

Murdoch himself testified before Parliament on July 19, 2011. In one of the most surreal moments in modern political theater, a protester threw a plate of shaving foam at his face. Murdoch’s then-wife, Wendi Deng, leapt up and slapped the attacker — a moment that was replayed millions of times and briefly made her a folk hero.

Criminal trials followed. Andy Coulson, a former News of the World editor who had served as Cameron’s communications director, was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Rebekah Brooks, CEO of News International and one of Murdoch’s closest lieutenants, was acquitted.

Murdoch shut down the scandal, absorbed the damage, and kept going. He spun off his publishing assets into a new company called News Corp in 2013, separating the “clean” entertainment businesses (21st Century Fox) from the “messy” newspaper businesses. It was corporate surgery performed without anesthesia.

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💎 Chapter 6: The Disney Deal and the Fox Remains

In December 2017, Murdoch did something nobody expected: he sold most of 21st Century Fox to The Walt Disney Company for $71.3 billion.

The deal included 20th Century Fox film and television studios, FX Networks, National Geographic, Star India, and Fox’s 30% stake in Hulu. What Murdoch kept was Fox News, Fox Sports, Fox Broadcasting, and the local television stations — the assets that gave him political influence and live sports, the two things that couldn’t be replicated by streaming.

Why sell? Murdoch reportedly told people he saw the streaming wars coming and concluded that Fox didn’t have the scale to compete with Netflix, Amazon, and the soon-to-launch Disney+. “Scale matters,” he told associates. Better to sell at a premium and let Disney fight that war.

The price was extraordinary. Murdoch had bought 20th Century Fox for $575 million in 1985. He sold it — along with the empire he’d built around it — for $71.3 billion. Even after accounting for the assets he’d added over three decades, the return was staggering.

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👑 Chapter 7: The Succession War

Rupert Murdoch has been married four times. He has six children from three marriages. And the question of who would inherit control of his empire has consumed more attention than any business succession since the Rothschilds.

The key players: Lachlan Murdoch, the eldest son, who serves as chairman of both Fox Corporation and News Corp. James Murdoch, the younger son, who was once heir apparent before a falling-out with his father over Fox News’s political direction and climate change coverage. Prudence, the eldest daughter from Murdoch’s first marriage. And Elisabeth Murdoch, who has run her own production companies.

In September 2023, at age 92, Murdoch stepped down as chairman of both Fox Corporation and News Corp, handing the titles to Lachlan. But in December 2023, news broke that Murdoch was seeking to amend the family trust to give Lachlan sole control — overriding a structure that was supposed to give all four eldest children equal voting power after Rupert’s death.

The legal battle that followed was straight out of the HBO series Succession — which, not coincidentally, was widely reported to be inspired by the Murdoch family. James, Elisabeth, and Prudence challenged the amendment. The case went to a Nevada court. In December 2024, a commissioner ruled against Rupert’s proposed changes, finding he had acted in “bad faith.”

The succession war laid bare the fundamental tension at the heart of every dynastic empire: the founder builds for control, but control cannot survive the grave. Murdoch spent 70 years constructing a media empire designed to bend to his will. Now, with multiple heirs pulling in different directions, the empire faces the one force its founder cannot outmaneuver — biology.

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🏛️ Chapter 8: The Verdict

Rupert Murdoch’s net worth as of early 2026 is estimated at approximately $20 billion — lower than you might expect for a man of his influence, but Murdoch was never primarily motivated by personal wealth. He was motivated by power. Specifically, the power to shape public opinion across continents.

At his peak, Murdoch’s media properties reached hundreds of millions of people daily across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Asia. He helped elect prime ministers and presidents. He broke unions, destroyed competitors, and survived scandals that would have vaporized anyone else. He saw the digital revolution coming, sold his entertainment assets at the top of the market, and retained the properties that give him maximum political leverage per dollar.

His legacy is a machine that manufactures influence. Whether that machine has been good for democracy is a question that will be debated for decades. What is not debatable is this: for 70 years, Rupert Murdoch understood something about media that most of his competitors never grasped.

He understood that the news isn’t the product. The audience is the product. And the customer is whoever wants to reach them — advertisers, politicians, or anyone else willing to pay the toll.

He built the tollbooth. He set the price. And for seven decades, the most powerful people in the English-speaking world lined up to pay it.