Rupert Murdoch and his family control the most influential conservative media empire in the world. For more than a year, they’ve been locked in a secret legal battle over who controls it. Rupert and his oldest son, Lachlan, tried to hand Lachlan full control of the companies. His siblings blocked the move.

The New York Times obtained the bulk of the trial record, totaling more than 3,000 pages: most of the briefs, all of the rulings and the full transcript of the trial itself, including extensive exchanges among family members that were entered as evidence.

Here are six takeaways from those documents.

A conservative empire

Throughout his career, Rupert has been dogged by a question: Is he an ideological warrior intent on tilting the English-speaking world to the right or a pragmatic businessman catering to conservative audiences for profit?

The evidence presented at trial shows that — in his twilight years, at least — his ideological legacy is paramount. “Fox and our papers are the only faintly conservative voices against the monolithic liberal media,” he wrote to his ex-wife Anna in 2023. “I believe maintaining this is vital to the future of the English-speaking world.” He also testified that keeping his news outlets on their conservative course long after his death — by giving Lachlan full control — was more important to him than any profit he could realize by selling them to others.

The divided Murdochs

The fight over the Murdoch family trust has deepened old fault lines. Lachlan was convinced that his three oldest siblings, led by James, were plotting to overthrow him when their father dies. Elisabeth, who has historically seen herself as the family’s Switzerland,9x999 said that she felt “violated and forsaken” by her father’s plan to change the trust. “You’ve blown a hole in the family,” she told him. Rupert’s oldest child, Prudence, accused him of treating her and Elisabeth like “his assistants.” James’s representative to the family trust, his best friend, Jesse Angelo, called the plan “Orwellian” and compared it to the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the Jim Crow South.

Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, declined to say exactly how many troops were deploying, citing operational security.

Lachlan’s predicament

The fight is also about money — and specifically about how much Lachlan will be willing to pay for his siblings’ shares of the trust. Without those shares, he could lose control of the companies. Both he and Rupert have approached Prudence, Elisabeth and James about buyouts in the past, but Lachlan has never been willing to offer them more than 60 percent of the market value of their shares.

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