Who Owns Fox News?

Fox News is controlled by Lachlan Murdoch. A family settlement in September 2025 ended years of litigation over the Murdoch trust: Lachlan became sole decision-maker, and his siblings Prudence, Elisabeth and James took a reported $1.1bn each to give up their stakes and cease to be beneficiaries. A new holding company under his control holds around 36% of Fox’s Class B voting stock, and the arrangement runs to 2050. Ownership verified 6 September 2026.

Who owns Fox News?

Fox Corporation, listed on Nasdaq, owns Fox News. Fox Corporation is owned by its shareholders — and controlled by one family through a share class most of them cannot buy.

Fox has Class A shares, which carry no vote, and Class B shares, which do. The Murdoch interests hold the Class B stock. Ordinary investors buying Fox shares generally buy the non-voting class.

Fox News has no separate ownership. It is a division of Fox Corporation, not a company anyone can hold shares in directly.

Parent company and ownership structure

Above Fox Corporation sits the family trust, and its restructuring is the most consequential thing to have happened to this ownership in a generation.

Rupert Murdoch attempted in 2024 to alter the existing trust to guarantee Lachlan’s control, against the interests of three of his other children. A Nevada probate commissioner rejected that attempt. The dispute was settled in September 2025 instead:

• Lachlan Murdoch becomes sole decision-maker for the trust controlling Fox and News Corp
• Prudence MacLeod, Elisabeth Murdoch and James Murdoch cease to be beneficiaries, taking a reported $1.1bn each
• Shares are sold to fund the buyout — reported at 16.9 million Fox shares and 14.2 million News Corp shares
• A new holding company under Lachlan’s control holds about 36.2% of Fox’s Class B and 33.1% of News Corp’s
• The new trust runs until 2050

That last point is the one worth dwelling on. The settlement did not merely resolve a family argument; it fixed the control of Fox News for a quarter of a century, past the lifetime of the person who built it. James Murdoch, who had publicly criticised the company’s editorial direction, is now outside the ownership entirely.

Major shareholders or controlling interests

Beyond the Murdoch holding, Fox Corporation’s Class A shares are held by institutions and retail investors — index managers foremost among them — with no voice in governance.

Around 36% of a voting class is not a majority, and it does not need to be. With the non-voting class held by everyone else, a plurality of the votes concentrated in one holder is sufficient in practice. This is the same arithmetic this site documents at Paramount, whose Class A/Class B split gave the Redstones and then the Ellisons control.

It differs from the mechanisms at Alphabet and Roblox, where each founder share carries ten or twenty votes, and from Nike’s, where classes elect different numbers of directors. Fox’s route is the simplest: most shareholders have no vote at all.

Other media assets in the group

Fox Corporation owns Fox News, Fox Business, Fox Sports, the Fox broadcast network and Tubi.

News Corp is a separate listed company under the same family control, and owns The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, TalkTV, HarperCollins, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. The British newspapers are there, not in Fox.

The 2019 split is what people get wrong most often. 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets — the film studio, FX, the National Geographic channels and the stake in Hulu — were sold to Disney and are not in the group. Fox Corporation kept the news, sports and broadcast businesses.

And Sky is not in the group. Fox lost it to Comcast in the 2018 blind auction, covered elsewhere on this site — which is why Sky News and Fox News, both once destined for the same owner, now have entirely different ones.

Ownership history

• 1996 — Fox News launches, under Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
• 2013 — News Corporation splits: publishing becomes News Corp, entertainment becomes 21st Century Fox.
• 2018 — Fox loses the auction for Sky to Comcast.
• 2019 — Disney buys 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets; the remainder becomes Fox Corporation.
• 2023 — Fox settles the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case for a reported $787.5m.
• 2024 — Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to amend the trust is rejected in Nevada.
• September 2025 — the family settlement; Lachlan takes sole control to 2050.

The 2023 Dominion settlement is relevant to ownership rather than merely to editorial: a payment of that size falls on the shareholders, and the non-voting class bore it without any say in the decisions that led to it.

Sources and verification

Companies House holds nothing on Fox News. Fox Corporation is American and has no UK-registered parent, so no British filing bears on this page. News Corp’s British newspaper subsidiaries do appear on the register, and are covered separately on this site’s Times profile.

The authoritative sources are Fox Corporation’s SEC filings — the annual proxy statement sets out the share classes and the Murdoch holdings — and the Nevada probate proceedings and settlement announcements of 2024 and 2025.

Two limits. Percentages move with buybacks and share sales, and the 2025 settlement itself involved substantial disposals, so figures around it are unusually unstable. And a trust is where ownership becomes hardest to state simply — the register of shareholders names the trust’s holding company, not the people who benefit from it. This site records the same difficulty at JCB, boohoo and Graceland.