2023-09-21 20:22:23
Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, 92, will leave the chairs of Fox Corporation, parent company of the favorite channel of American conservatives Fox News, and News Corp, and pass the baton to his son Lachlan, the two companies announced in a communicated Thursday.
This withdrawal will be effective at the next general meeting of shareholders of the two companies in mid-November. Murdoch will then become honorary chairman of both groups.
“Throughout my professional life, I have been confronted with news and ideas every day, and that will not change. But the time has come for me to take on different roles,” he wrote in a letter to his colleaguesin which he claims to be in good health.
“A lasting heritable”
“On behalf of the boards of FOX and News Corp, the management teams and all the shareholders who have benefited from his hard work, I congratulate my father on his remarkable 70-year career,” said Lachlan Murdoch, 52 years, in the press release, saluting his “pioneering spirit, his unwavering determination” his “lasting legacy” and saying he was counting on his “valuable advice”.
The boss of the Fox empire, whose 24-hour news channel Fox News is central to conservatives, is retiring at a key moment, in the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election, for which Donald Trump is the favorite of the Republican primary.
The nonagenarian is retiring five months after Fox News had to agree to pay the staggering sum of $787.5 million to electronic voting machine manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems to avoid an embarrassing defamation lawsuit after the 2020 presidential election. In the process, one of its star presenters, Tucker Carlson, left the channel, which has since lost audience.
Last March, Murdoch announced that he had become engaged for the fifth time to a former San Francisco police chaplain, Ann Lesley Smith, 66 years old.
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