Heir to the Empire: What is known about Rupert Murdoch’s son who will take office

Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chairman of media empires News Corp and 21st Century Fox. His son Lachlan will take his place. In total, Murdoch has six children from his three wives, but responsibility has been handed over to his heir, who is believed to continue to run the family business. The legendary media mogul ruled his media empire for 70 years. The Daily Mail writes about this.

Lachlan, 52, was born in Wimbledon, London, but grew up in New York. He is the son of Rupert Murdoch and his second wife, Scottish journalist Anna Mann, who worked for the Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph. He has a sister named Elizabeth and a brother named James.

Rupert and Anna divorced in 1999, and Anna received $1.2 billion from their separation.

Lachlan, like the media mogul’s other children, was involved in the family business from an early age.

Former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, who was once close to Murdoch, said in his book Full Distained that neither Lachlan nor his brother “ever acted like spoiled rich kids” and were “always fun to be around”.

Lachlan was educated at the elite Aspen Country Day School in Aspen, Colorado and Trinity School in New York, and studied philosophy at Princeton University.

But it is said that he always felt at home in Australia, where his father was born and raised.

Murdoch’s half-sister Prudence, the eldest child, once called Lachlan the “King of Sydney”.

Murdoch recalled with pride how his son worked in a printing house when he was only 13 years old and how he cleaned the dirt from the printing houses.

At just 22, Lachlan became director of the Brisbane Courier-Mail, one of the papers in Murdoch’s stable of Australian publications.

Before he was 25, he became the publisher of the national publication The Australian.

He moved to New York in 2000 to become News Corp’s vice president of operations.

But the transition from laid-back Sydney to the harsh corporate politics of New York is said to be difficult.

Success came to him with the revival of the New York Post. But he stunned his father by deciding to leave News Corp in 2005, when he was third in line at the company.

By then her older sister Elizabeth had left the family business to start a production company called Shine TV, which was successful.

There have been big changes for Murdoch, too. He divorced Lachlan’s mother and married his third wife, Wendy Deng, and started a new family with her.

Lachlan married former Wonderbra model Sarah O’Hara in 1999, whom he met while working in Sydney. They spent their three-week honeymoon in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan and the Caribbean.

Lachlan and his wife have three children. Their sons Kalan and Aidan were born in 2004 and 2006 respectively. Daughter Aerin was born in 2010.

After leaving News Corp, Lachlan founded private investment company Illyria in Australia and developed his own media portfolio, including the purchase of part of the Network 10 television channel.

But Murdoch’s eldest son returned to his father’s job in 2014 as co-chairman of News Corp and 21st Century Fox.

His brother James was at the center of a phone-hacking scandal when he was head of News International (now News UK), publisher of the defunct News of the World. He resigned from News Corp’s board in 2020, citing “disagreements” over editorial content. He served as CEO of 21st Century Fox until 2019.

Lachlan became chairman of the board of 21st Century Fox in 2015 and became chairman and CEO of Fox Corporation in March 2019.

He was instrumental in the rise of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and was on hand when voting systems company Dominion sued the firm over its coverage of the 2020 presidential election.

Fox paid $786 million in damages, and the saga led to Carlson’s departure. However, this incident clearly did not prevent Murdoch from making his son his successor.

Thanking his father after the announcement of his retirement, Lachlan said in a statement today: “On behalf of the boards and executives of FOX and News Corp and all the shareholders who have benefited from his hard work, I congratulate my father on his “extraordinary 70th anniversary.” “We thank his vision, innovative spirit, unwavering determination and the lasting legacy he left to the companies he founded.”

“We are grateful that he will serve as Chairman Emeritus and know he will continue to provide valuable advice to both companies,” Lachlan concluded.

Let us remind you that 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch was recently seen with Elena Zhukova, the former mother-in-law of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. The couple holidayed together on the legendary yacht Christina O, owned by Aristotle Onassis.