Murdoch Family: The Murdochs are well-known Australian and British media moguls with significant holdings in the American media industry. Others have achieved notoriety in the arts, religion, and the armed forces.
The Reverend James Murdoch (1818-1884), a pastor in the Free Church of Scotland, and his wife Helen, née Garden, emigrated to Australia from Scotland, and their descendants have lived there for the past five generations (1826–1905). Both originally hailing from the Pitsligo region of Aberdeenshire, they journeyed to the Colony of Victoria in 1884.
Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is well-known for his role as a founder and owner of News Corporation, which was once the most influential media corporation in the world but was divided in half in the middle of 2013 to create 21st Century Fox and News Corp.
From its media publishing and media assets, respectively. The Murdochs are still in charge of the newly renamed NewsCorp and hold the majority stake in the Fox Corporation that was created after The Walt Disney Company’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox and its subsequent spin-off.
How Many Members of The Murdoch Family Are There?
Rupert Murdoch
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, 91, was born in Australia but expanded the small newspaper company he inherited from his father in 1952 into News Corporation, Ltd., a multi-billion dollar global media empire with a presence in cable, film, television, internet, satellite, sports broadcasting, publishing, and other fields.
The News of the World, Sun, New York Post, and Wall Street Journal were all part of the conglomerate at one point or another, as were the Fox film studio, Fox Broadcasting, Fox News, HarperCollins, and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Throughout his seven-decade career, Murdoch has been married four times and is the father of six children.
Many of Murdoch’s offspring have joined the media empire their father founded. It is commonly believed that the successful HBO series “Succession” was inspired by Murdoch’s tendency to put the brothers against each other in a years-long struggle to discover who would replace him as president of News Corp.
Murdoch’s cruelty isn’t limited to his immediate family. He adopted an early strategy for dealing with rivals: either buying them out or driving them out of business. When it was revealed in 2011 that reporters at his British tabloids had hacked the phones of royals, celebrities, and crime victims to gather their stories, he was under intense investigation for his business dealings at the publication.
Fox News Channel CEO Roger Ailes’ resignation in 2016 due to sexual harassment charges brought the Murdoch family name back into the spotlight. Even though News Corporation split into two firms in 2013, Murdoch is still at the helm of News Corp. After his passing, the company’s future leadership remains a mystery.
Lachlan Murdoch
Lachlan Murdoch, 50 years old, is Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son from his marriage to Anna, his second wife. Internships at his father’s media enterprises started him early in the family business. Rapidly climbing the corporate ladder, he became News Ltd.’s chairman and CEO by 1997. His father referred to Lachlan at the time as “the first among equals,” and hence his heir apparent.
Up until 2005, he had a steady rise to prominence. After a disagreement with Ailes about the future of the cable news network, Lachlan resigned from his executive roles at News Corporation that year, thereby removing himself from the line of succession. In Australia, Lachlan started his investment firm called Illyria Pty.
After a long sabbatical, Lachlan returned to the family firm in 2014 as CEO of Fox Broadcasting and executive chairman at 21st Century Fox, resuming his role as a possible heir to the empire. Rupert soon experimented with dividing power between Lachlan and his younger brother James by appointing James as CEO of 21st Century Fox.
As a result of the failure of his experiment, Rupert sold 21st Century Fox to Disney in 2019. Today, Lachlan serves as executive chair and CEO of Fox Corporation, co-chairman of News Corp, and executive chairman of NOVA Entertainment, an Australian media conglomerate.
James Murdoch
James Murdoch, 49 years old, is Rupert Murdoch’s fourth child and second son with his second wife, Anna. During his formative years, James’ professional interests clashed with those of his father’s conservative media business. In 1995, he left Harvard to launch the independent hip-hop label Rawkus Records.
After working at News Corporation for a while, he was promoted to an executive position, becoming the business’s prototypical company man. Following Lachlan’s departure from Fox in 2005, James was widely seen as the family scion’s next in line of succession.
James assumed the role of BSkyB chairman in 2007. In 2011, he was promoted to deputy chief operating officer at News Corporation and CEO of News International. In contrast to James’ meteoric rise within the empire, the company was enveloped in scandal when it was revealed that journalists and investigators had hacked the phones of public personalities and crime victims to gather their tales.
As a result, James had to resign as BSkyB’s chairman. He took a break from the family business for a while but came back and is now the CEO of 21st Century Fox and chairman of Sky alongside his older brother Lachlan, who is the executive chairman. The shared leadership arrangement failed, and James eventually left both 21st Century Fox (sold to Disney in 2019) and Sky (acquired by Comcast for a majority stake) in 2020.
James, the family’s lone liberal, resigned from News Corp’s board in 2020, citing “disagreements about certain editorial content produced by the Company’s news outlets and several other strategic decisions.”
Elisabeth Murdoch
Aged 53, Elisabeth Murdoch is Rupert Murdoch’s firstborn child with his second wife, Anna Murdoch. Beginning with internships and entry-level positions at Murdoch properties, Elizabeth got an early start on her career in the family business. She joined BSkyB in 1996, and by 1998 she was managing director of Sky Networks.
However, she was overlooked for Sky’s chief executive position several years later. Although Rupert views Elisabeth as the most similar to himself, he has been less than supportive of her ambitions to ascend to the kingdom, once telling her that she should settle on the number of children she wants before thinking about a career at the corporation.
She broke away from the family firm in the year 2000 to establish Shine, which has since become one of the most successful independent production companies in the United Kingdom, producing such hits as “The Biggest Loser,” “Master Chef,” and “History Cold Case.”
While Elizabeth tried to join the News Corporation board after the 2011 acquisition of Shine by News Corp., she was banned from doing so due to the company’s involvement in the phone hacking incident. Because Shine merged with two other production businesses, she decided to leave.
She launched her own production company in 2019, which she named Sister. Two years later, in 2021, Sister provided funding for the London location of Ghetto Film School, a nonprofit that introduces young people of color to careers in the film and television industries.
Patricia Booker
Patricia Booker, a former department store model and flight attendant, married Rupert Murdoch in 1956. Two years after they were married, she gave birth to a daughter they named Prudence. They were married for 11 years until splitting up in 1967.
Anna Murdoch
During her time as a correspondent for Rupert’s Sydney-based daily, The Daily Mirror, Rupert met Anna Torv. After Rupert’s divorce from Patricia was final, he and Anna tied the knot. Together, they had three children: Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James, all of whom are currently considered to be frontrunners for the position of successor to the Murdoch fortune.
Anna had written several novels over the years, one of which portrayed a family remarkably similar to hers. She devoted three decades to raising their children and supporting Rupert as he pursued international success alongside her.
In the mid-1990s, as Rupert prepared to enter conventional retirement age, Anna anticipated that his insatiable appetite for expanding the empire would wane and that he would spend more time with her in their golden years. Totally against the notion, Rupert. After 31 years of marriage, the couple finally split in 1999 due to irreconcilable differences.
Wendi Deng
Grace and Chloe Murdoch, ages 20 and 18, are the children of Rupert Murdoch and his third wife, Deng, 53. When Wendi worked for Rupert at his Star TV network in Hong Kong, they met. One of the media mogul’s former colleagues stated, “She was always someone who was going to do well.” The rising star won the media mogul over quickly.
We had no idea how nice that would go over. They wed in June of 1999, just 17 days after Rupert’s divorce from his second wife, Anna, was finalized and after they had been dating for two years.
While Rupert’s older children opposed the marriage and saw Wendi as a potential rival for control of the Murdoch company, they eventually came to respect and trust their brother’s wife. But after 14 years of marriage, Wendi has remained silent on rumors of adultery.
Jerry Hall
Jerry Hall, a former supermodel and Mick Jagger’s ex-girlfriend, married Rupert Murdoch in 2016 at 59. Murdoch was 85 at the time. Unlike his previous union with Wendi Deng, Jerry has the full support of the adult Murdoch children, who view the new couple affectionately. The Murdoch family celebrated their son’s wedding in London in a rare show of unity. Hall and Murdoch reportedly divorced in August, six years after they tied the knot.
Thank you @OverlandMovie for inviting me to your world premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, what a great success ❤️ pic.twitter.com/MxFRunmOyu
— Jerry Hall (@JerryHall_) January 27, 2020
Prudence Macleod
Rupert’s eldest child from his first marriage to Patricia Booker is Prudence Macleod. Prudence has stayed out of the succession dispute between her siblings, Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James, because she has never shown any interest in taking over the family business.
She has worked her way up through the ranks at News Corporation and is now a member of the board of directors for Times Newspapers, Ltd. Moreover, she is a shareholder in the Murdoch family trust and has the right to vote there.
Grace Murdoch & Chloe Murdoch
Grace, 20, and Chloe, 18, are Murdoch and Wendi Deng’s youngest children. They traveled the world in style as children, visiting the family mansions in New York, Los Angeles, and Arizona and other opulent resorts. Both of them went to New York City’s illustrious Brearley School.
Grace is now a student at Yale, while Chloe attends the University of Stanford. The younger Murdochs and their older half-siblings will inherit billions thanks to their non-voting interests in the Murdoch family trust. If you find this interesting, please forward it to your friends. Visit Newswatchlist.com for the most up-to-date and recent celebrity news.