Here's How Much Rupert Murdoch Is Really Worth
Are you as obsessed with "Succession" as we are? If the answer is yes, then this is for you. When it comes to billionaires, several names come to mind: Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, to name a few. Any list of powerful, dynastic captains of industry would be incomplete without Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch. He's not quite as rich as Bezos, but he's unsurpassed in terms of cultural sway. The nonagenarian owns Fox, The Sun, Page Six, The Wall Street Journal; the list is pretty long.
His political views are divisive, his family is complicated, and his journalistic ethics have been called into question more than a few times, but that hasn't stopped Murdoch from building a global mass media empire. In a number of ventures (take, for example, his 2019 multibillion-dollar deal with Disney), Murdoch is never not making money. So, how much does he have? How does he spend it? What about his family?
We break it all down — including those "Succession" rumors — to examine Murdoch's journey to massive wealth.
Rupert Murdoch inherited his business
Rupert Murdoch may be the father of modern news, but he isn't exactly a self-made billionaire. Murdoch grew up in Australia, learning the basics of publishing and news sourcing from his father, who always intended for him to take over the business one day. Unfortunately, that day came sooner than expected. Murdoch's father died suddenly while Murdoch was studying at the University of Oxford. He quickly returned home and took up his place in the family business, per CNN.
Murdoch turned his father's one regional paper into an empire, purchasing papers internationally and launching The Australian by 1964. After about five more years, he'd saved up enough to purchase News of the World and The Sun in the U.K., eventually consolidating everything under his company News Corp in 1980 as he acquired additional papers and media.
Murdoch soon made the jump to the U.S., where he purchased Fox News and 20th Century Fox. The latter proved to be one of Murdoch's smartest business ventures. Not only did Fox become a major moneymaker, but it cemented Murdoch's place as a Hollywood legacy. Under News Corp, Fox churned out such hits as "Star Wars: Episode 1," which made an astounding $1 billion at the box office, per The Numbers.
Did Rupert Murdoch invent tabloid news?
If you asked Rupert Murdoch how he made his money, he'd probably tell you it was through the news. While that isn't entirely untrue, it would be putting it mildly to say that Murdoch blatantly disregarded traditional journalism ethics on his way to the top. Murdoch's papers report the news, but it's a very specific tabloid genre of news in which the mogul specializes. In fact, author David Folkenflik, who wrote "Murdoch's World," described Murdoch's news empire as sitting atop "a cannibalistic feral version of tabloid journalism" (via CBC News).
Case in point, when Murdoch purchased the floundering Sun back in 1968, part of the rebranding included what he dubbed a "Page 3 girl" — a photo of a topless woman — inside almost all issues (per Vox). A topless woman isn't exactly news, but The Sun soon went from b-list paper to the most circulated publication in the U.K.
To balance out the sex that now dripped off the pages of Murdoch's papers, he also opted to add a healthy bit of political intrigue. Under Murdoch's direction, The Sun was famously pro-Thatcher during the Falkland Island controversy. He carried that formula over to the States with Fox News, which has been heavily criticized for its sensationalist and conservative-leaning journalism.
Rupert Murdoch failed along the way
When you've been in the game as long as Rupert Murdoch has, you're bound to make a few bad business moves along the way. For Murdoch, that was his monstrously bad decision to purchase MySpace in 2005. For context, Facebook launched in 2004, which means that MySpace was very much on the way out. Nevertheless, Murdoch paid a whopping $580 million for the site. At first, it didn't look like an unwise investment. By 2007, it was valued at $12 billion. However, within a matter of years, the popularity of Facebook made MySpace completely irrelevant (via The Guardian).
MySpace's value continued to depreciate until Murdoch was finally able to unload the company in 2012. By then, MySpace had become so unpopular that it was only worth $35 million (per The Verge). If we're doing the math, that's a $545 million loss for Murdoch and News Corp.
As for Murdoch, he took the loss in stride, tweeting in 2012: "Many questions and jokes about My Space.simple answer – we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons."
A Murdoch divorce is one of the most expensive ever
It should come as no surprise that divorce can get pricey. Rupert Murdoch learned that the hard way when he found himself in the midst of a divorce that would cost him over a billion dollars.
Murdoch and his second wife, Scottish-born journalist Anna Mann (to whom he was married 32 years), divorced in 1999 so he could marry his third wife, Wendi Deng (whom he has since divorced). Things between Murdoch and Mann quickly soured, and what seemed like an amicable divorce ended with Mann being forced off of the News Corp board, a position she'd held for years. "I began to think the Rupert Murdoch that I loved died a long time ago," she said in an interview with Australian Women's Weekly (via the Independent). "Perhaps I was in love with the idea of still being in love with him. But the Rupert I fell in love with could not have behaved this way."
It's unclear if Murdoch made Mann sign a prenup before they said "I do," but if he did, it wasn't a very good one. The couple was based in California, which meant that after three decades of marriage, Mann was entitled to half of Murdoch's estate, New York Magazine reported (via Insider). At the time, Murdoch was worth around $7.8 billion. The former couple reached a settlement in which Mann supposedly walked away with assets amounting to $1.7 billion, $110 million being cash.
Rupert Murdoch has had other, less expensive, divorces
It's no secret that Rupert Murdoch managed to have one of the most expensive divorces in history. You'd think that after a billion-dollar parting, he would have learned his lesson. Not so. In total, Murdoch has been married four times and divorced three.
After his divorce from Anna Mann, the media mogul split from Wendi Deng, an American entrepreneur 37 years younger than him. Together, they share two daughters, Chloe and Grace. Murdoch and Deng divorced in 2013 after 14 years of marriage. Their split was much more amicable than his split from Mann and likely less expensive, owing to the fact that Deng signed a prenup stating that divorce would not affect Murdoch's companies (via the Daily News). It's unclear how much money Deng walked away with. The Los Angeles Times reported that Murdoch forfeited his Manhattan penthouse (an apparent $44 million purchase, plus a potential $50 million in redecorating) so that their daughters could grow up comfortably there.
Relinquishing the penthouse to his ex-wife and daughters was likely an act of good faith on Murdoch's part, considering how contentious his fortune was during their marriage. Years before they filed, Murdoch reportedly caused major conflict with Deng when he refused to make their two daughters equal shareholders with his four elder children. So, while Chloe and Grace don't have as much voting power as the older kids, at least they have a nice penthouse to go home to.
Murdoch the movie mogul
When you hear the name "Rupert Murdoch," your first thought is likely "newspaper." While it's true that the news industry is where Murdoch made his millions, he's also made major moves in the world of film and TV. Murdoch bought a share in 20th Century Fox in the 1980s for a measly $250 million (via the Los Angeles Times).
Murdoch reportedly saw the purchase as a smart investment, even though movie-making wasn't his priority. With Murdoch at the helm, Fox churned out such hits as "The Simpsons," "Avatar" (which grossed $2.8 billion in the box office), and "Home Alone." "Rupert has been the most influential person in Hollywood in the last 25 years," a former deputy of Murdoch's told the Los Angeles Times. "He has been the key driver of trends that now define the industry."
After making a killing in the movie industry, Murdoch was ready to sell. In 2019, he officially sold 21st Century Fox assets to Disney in a $71.3 billion deal, per NPR. If you calculate for inflation, Murdoch paid around $700 million, give or take, for his studio share in the 1980s (in today's money). Bloomberg reported in 2019 that $12 billion in profits from the Disney deal would go to the Murdoch family and would be split among his six kids.
His personal life and business are the inspiration for TV shows
If you haven't figured it out yet, Rupert Murdoch's empire, his ruthless business tactics, his palatial estates, and his messy family are sources of inspiration for the HBO hit "Succession." "We thought of famous media families like the Hearsts, to modern-day Redstone, John Malone, Robert Fitz of Comcast, Murdoch, and Robert and Rebekah Mercer, who founded Breitbart," series creator Jesse Armstrong explained in an interview with HBO.
If you've seen the show, it's impossible not to see the parallels between Murdoch's family and the troubled Roy clan. In Season 1, for example, the Roys attend family therapy at one of the kids' palatial ranches. Murdoch once arranged for dynastic family therapy and an Australian ranch retreat to manage tension brought on by his refusal to name a successor, per The New York Times.
Additionally, he's been known to pit his two eldest sons, Lachlan and James, against each other, seemingly implying that whoever becomes more successful will eventually take over the company. When asked by The New York Times if he'd ever seen the television show, James (likely the inspiration for Roman), claimed he hadn't. "The dramatization of family affairs is as old as anything. It's always built in a certain construct, back in Shakespeare or back in Homer," he told the outlet.
Murdoch has been sued for his business practices
Rupert Murdoch makes much of his living off the news, but in 2011, his business became the news when it was discovered that he'd reportedly given his journalists permission to tap the phones and hack the voicemails of celebrities and politicians in the U.K., all for the sake of building more salacious stories. Murdoch and his son James had to testify in front of parliament and issue public apologies, but it was too little too late for Murdoch's reputation. He was ordered to pay $1.6 million to the charity of an affected family's choosing, and his paper's publisher had to pay $3.2 million directly to the family, per CNN. James resigned from his leadership positions within the company's News International arm (via the Daily Beast), and their News of the World publication was permanently shuttered.
That wasn't the last time Murdoch's business practices would land him in serious trouble, though. Across the pond (in the U.S.), Murdoch has faced a billion-dollar lawsuit about Fox News' false reporting during the 2020 presidential election. Dominion Voting Systems alleged that Fox knowingly misreported facts about issues with their voting machines, and the misreporting eventually led to the 2021 U.S. Capitol riots, per NPR. As of this publication, the suit has yet to be settled.
Murdoch's business practices have caused conflict with his kids
For real-life Logan Roy, Rupert Murdoch's business savvy has caused more than a few issues between himself and his kids that aren't confined to the world of "Succession" — most notably, the very public rift between himself and his second eldest son, James. In July 2020, James made headlines for resigning from his position on the board of News Corp. "My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company's news outlets and certain other strategic decisions," he said in a statement (via NPR). James evidently has a moral compass that conflicts with his father's "money is the bottom line" business practices.
James reportedly left News Corp because of the competitive atmosphere his father fostered between him and his older brother, Lachlan. Eventually, Lachlan landed an executive position within the company. "I think there's only so much you can do if you're not an executive," James said, explaining to The New York Times, "I decided that I could be much more effective outside." Additionally, James holds more liberal views than the rest of his family and found Fox News' coverage of the 2020 U.S. presidential election troubling. "I just felt increasingly uncomfortable with my position on the board having some disagreements over how certain decisions are being made," James told The New York Times. "So it was actually not that hard a decision to remove myself and have a kind of cleaner slate."
The incredible properties Rupert Murdoch owns
As Rupert Murdoch is one of the richest men in the world, you'd better believe he's got a property portfolio to match. He has luxurious residences all over the world, but he has a soft spot for Los Angeles. The media mogul has been buying up property in and around the City of Angels for years. His first major purchase there was in 2013 when he shelled out a cool $28.8 million for a winery, which he expanded in 2021 with the purchase of a nearby Bel Air mansion, per Dirt.
Of course, Murdoch also owns houses near his business dealings in the U.K., including a home in the Cotswolds region. Then there's New York, where Fox News is based, where Murdoch purchased and then refurbished a $44 million penthouse. The apartment went to his ex-wife, Wendi Deng, in the divorce, but Murdoch's not exactly homeless in the Big Apple just yet. Luckily, he snapped up a $57.5 million four-story penthouse overlooking Madison Square Park in 2014 (per Forbes), possibly as an emergency bachelor pad.
The most impressive of Murdoch's homes has got to be his Cotswolds residence, which he purchased in 2020. The 200-year-old manor house was reportedly in horrible condition when Murdoch bought it. He and his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, planned to put a supposed $33.85 million into repairs and restoration, which could take multiple years, per the Daily Mail.
Murdoch is one of the richest people in the world
We know that Rupert Murdoch has made, spent, and lost money, and that his finances have affected his personal life, but exactly how much money does he have? Well, as of 2021, Murdoch is sitting comfortably atop an estimated $23.5 billion fortune. That sounds like a lot (because it is!), but that doesn't even put Murdoch close to the top of the list of billionaires. In fact, according to Forbes, that lands Murdoch the #71 spot on 2021's list of richest people (tied with Indian IT billionaire Shiv Nadar).
Don't count him out just yet, though. Murdoch, now in his 90s, has shown no sign of slowing down any time soon. After Murdoch closed his corporation's multi-billion dollar deal with Disney to unload his 21st Century Fox assets, he consolidated the rest of his Fox holdings into the Fox Corporation, of which he is a 39% shareholder (via Forbes).
Murdoch's eye for business is as sharp as ever. He made deals in 2021 with Google and Facebook for news-sharing compensation; the New York Post reported that "a source close to the situation said Google will pay News Corp. tens of millions of dollars over the course of the deal." Murdoch's company made a similar deal with Facebook for Australian users, as reported by News Corp. All in a day's work for Murdoch the media magnate.