The ongoing succession battle within Rupert Murdoch's multibillion-dollar conservative media empire underscores critical estate planning lessons for navigating the transition of family businesses across generations.
“Only transfer control of assets that you’re willing to actually transfer control of at the creation of the trust,” said Kathy Lintz, founder of the St. Louis-based Matter Family Office. “That seems to be the big lesson Rupert Murdoch has learned. He transferred control of an asset that he still wanted to control, which was unfortunate for him.”
In a December court decision, Nevada Probate Commissioner Edmund J. Gorman Jr. ruled that Murdoch and his oldest son, Lachlan, acted in “bad faith” in their effort to amend the family’s decades-old irrevocable trust to move control of Fox News and News Corp to Lachlan. The ruling maintained the trust’s current structure, which divides company control equally among Rupert’s four oldest children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence—upon Rupert’s death.
Rupert reportedly argued that installing Lachlan, who shares more conservative views than his siblings, as successor at Fox News would be in the financial interest of all the elder Murdoch's beneficiaries. Rupert thought that Lachlan’s leadership would ensure the outlet’s continued conservative editorial slant — which Rupert worries would evaporate should his media empire end in the hands of his other children, who have donated to the Democratic Party and other liberal-leaning causes.
“When you have multiple children that don’t have shared values — when one of them specifically differs from the other three — I think that’s obviously where the biggest conflict is happening,” said Isaac Richard III, CEO of the Los Angeles-based multi-family office Mavros Capital. “It’s never nice to see a family go through something like this, especially publicly.”
Earning control: The ‘active in business’ clause
Rupert established his irrevocable family trust in Nevada in 1999 as part of his divorce settlement with his second wife, Anna Torv. Then in 2006, after Rupert married his third wife, Wendi Deng, the trust added their newborn youngest children, Grace and Chloe. They maintain equal financial stakes in their father’s media empire but no company voting power, unlike their four other half-siblings.
“When I read that four of the six children were given equal voting power, it seemed like a recipe for potential conflicts,” said John Resnick, founder of the Naples, Florida-based Resnick Group. “Unless all four had individual leadership skills, a mutual respect for each other and the ability to work together as a team running the business, this was a conflict waiting to happen. In 1999, there obviously weren’t any clear successors that Rupert Murdoch was comfortable selecting, so he most likely chose parity, hoping for the best.”
The Resnick Group, which specializes in trust and estate planning for ultra-high-net-worth families, sometimes recommends that its clients include an active-in-business (AIB) clause in their trusts for an added element of meritocracy during the transfer of assets.
“The AIB would require any family member to first work in the business full time for several years and develop management skills necessary to run the business,” Resnick said. “Once they become qualified as AIB, they become qualified to own voting shares that affect management and control of the enterprise.”
Blended-family challenges
Further complicating the Murdoch family’s estate and succession planning are the dynamics of a blended family, as Rupert has children from three relationships. When Murdoch married his fifth wife, Elena Zhukova, at his California vineyard last June, it was reported that children James, Elisabeth and Prudence did not attend the wedding.
“There are children from many different women, so there’s not a great amount of unity to begin with,” said Christina Wing, founder of the Massachusetts-based family wealth advisory firm Wingspan Legacy Partners. “When there are many different spouses, it’s up to the one consistent spouse to provide transparency to all of his or her heirs because they are the only common person talking to them.”
Lintz, whose Matter Family Office clients surpass $5 billion in combined net worth, said it’s “exponentially more complicated to do estate planning for families that have had multiple marriages, which is one reason many people don’t do it. They just avoid it. That’s the worst scenario, to avoid the work because it’s hard.”
The Buffett-Murdoch juxtaposition
Estate planning experts have noticed a stark contrast in the approaches between Murdoch and fellow nonagenarian billionaire Warren Buffett. The 94-year-old Berkshire Hathaway chairman published a letter in November detailing his intent to donate the majority of his fortune to philanthropic causes, and the remainder will be put into a charitable trust overseen by his daughter and two sons.
As outlined in Buffett’s letter, his three children must unanimously decide which charitable organizations to donate to. Buffett also collaborated with each of his children — ages 71, 69 and 66 — to pick three potential successor trustees in the event his children do not distribute the entirety of his estate in their lifetimes.
“It’s the opposite end of the spectrum,” Lintz said of Buffett’s transparency. “He’s very clear based on his greater purpose; it’s clear and communicated in his values, which are shared with his children. He has taken the opposite approach compared to Rupert Murdoch.
“Done well, great estate planning and great family communication can be such a positive. It can really enhance relationships, not destroy relationships.”
Shareholder threats
The Murdoch family owns a 14% stake in News Corp, but they have 41% of the voting power because of dual-class stock, which gives majority voting control of the company to the Murdoch family.
“If Rupert wants to regain some trust and credibility with his shareholders, he should replace Lachlan with an independent. He’s not going to do that, but that would be my biggest recommendation,” said Wing, who also pointed to the Walton family dynasty behind Walmart as an example of great succession planning.
“They still have a structure where they maintain control, but they leave the day-to-day operations to the management team. So the management team and the employees are nonfamily; the family sits at the board level. That is a really good way for companies that become national treasures, like some of these media companies do, to have some independent thinking.”
Since Murdoch lost his court case in December, the media mogul has already moved to sell News Corp’s Australian cable TV business, Foxtel, to the sports streaming network DAZN for about $2.1 billion. While Murdoch is expected to appeal the recent Nevada court decision in a continued attempt to transfer control to Lachlan, Wing warns that his push could further alienate activist shareholders who have tried in the past to vote to end News Corp's dual-class share structure.
“The family is fighting, and now they’re fighting in public; and they might lose their 41% operating and voting control based on it, so it was a bad hand to play,” Wing said. “They could lose that power if the shareholders vote against them and reach supermajority, which means 67%.
“They could get 67% [to vote against dual-class stock structure] probably because the family only has 14%, and maybe all of this nonsense with a declining stock price will make the shareholders follow the activists and say we should take the voting power away.”