Rupert Murdoch is secretly involved in a Succession-style court battle with three of his children for control of his empire after he dies.
Murdoch, 93, has urged a court to block three of his children—James, Elisabeth, and Prudence—from gaining control of his family’s business after he dies, according to a sealed court document obtained by The New York Times. Instead, Murdoch wants to give it to his eldest son, the politically like-minded Lachlan, allowing him to maintain the organization’s conservative bent and—according to Murdoch’s lawyers—not ruin its market capitalization.
The court case was started before his fifth marriage, to Elena Zhukova, 67, at his Bel Air vineyard, which Lachlan attended but the other three did not. The court documents say that Murdoch’s representatives have referred to James, who has been publicly critical of his father’s Fox News and his Australian newspapers, as the “troublesome beneficiary.”
