Elon Musk Has Outfoxed Rupert Murdoch in Trump’s Orbit

During the election campaign, anchors on the opposing MSNBC channel were apt to refer to Fox as “Trump TV” as it aired some of the more fawning clips from the Fox coverage, but it’s never been that. All along it was Murdoch TV. To think otherwise is to oblige Murdoch by shifting accountability away from him, something he’s always happy to see.

As the campaign reached its final 21 days, Trump arrived at the curvy-couch of Fox & Friends and said he was due to meet Murdoch and request that Fox not run any commercials hostile to him for the rest of the campaign—“Rupert please do it this way and then we’re going to have a victory cause everyone wants that,” implying a level of influence that Murdoch would never acknowledge in public or private. (Fox News continued to run negative ads on Trump.)

Perhaps it was a final act of homage to a man that Trump really knew he no longer needed.

Nothing in Murdoch’s long history as a major media player matched the influence that came to him after Trump came down the golden escalator. The confluence of the Trump cult and Fox News served both the Trump and Murdoch agendas—a transaction in which Trump would gradually subsume the Republican Party into a personal project abetted by a network that abandoned all rules in order to serve that end. In 2016, Murdoch finally got what he had long wanted and been denied—a president who would serve his views and interests.

In return, the abasement of Fox News during the pandemic was absolute. Murdoch showed no sign of having any scruples about how Fox covered Trump’s handling of the crisis. This is the man who couldn’t wait to get a COVID shot as soon as they were available in England, where he was then living, while Fox News was demonizing Anthony Fauci and giving airtime to anti-vaccine rhetoric, creating a mindset that resulted in the preventable deaths of thousands of people.

But that embrace was not enough to give Trump a second term in 2020. And on January 8, 2021, after watching the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol incited by Trump, Murdoch emailed a former executive of Fox News: “Fox News is very busy pivoting…we want to make Trump a non person.”

That never happened. Although for a while, Fox News switched its allegiance to Florida governor Ron DeSantis as the likeliest Republican successor to Trump, Murdoch eventually recognized that there was only one Trump, and that Fox News and Trump were locked in a mutual fate. Until they weren’t.

We’ve yet to understand the full political impact of Musk unleashed. The rewiring of the media ecology has occurred almost invisibly. It’s unclear, precisely, how many young male voters gained by leaning heavily into podcasts, though he did improve in this demographic (as well as several others). The only clear thing is that the Trump campaign, with the help of Musk’s bottomless pockets, found a magic sauce somewhere.

In the 1980s, Murdoch redefined what a modern media mogul could be, by going global and seeking the power and influence that came with that business model— and inspiring the power-porn version of himself as Logan Roy in Succession.

Claire Enders, a widely respected media analyst and longtime Murdoch tracker, told me: “Murdoch was immeasurably influential during many decades and in many countries, often through quiet phone calls proffering advice, rather than obvious editorial positions, although of course there were many of those too.”

Musk’s style could not be more different. He is ever present with Trump, accompanying him to Washington on Wednesday, where Trump met with Joe Biden and congressional Republicans. Musk has been publicy advocating for positions favorable to Trump on X and, in Florida, being wildly importunate in meetings and hogging photo ops. “Elon won’t go home” Trump said, only half-joking. How long will that last?

It’s too soon to write an epitaph; the battle over the dynastic succession, between Rupert and his own chosen successor, Lachlan Murdoch, and other members of the Murdoch family trust, led by James Murdoch, is in limbo, awaiting a decision in an obscure Reno courtroom, where the battle for control is playing out.

There is speculation that were the “irrevocable” original family trust to remain irrevocable, blocking Lachlan’s ascent at the time of his father’s death, James and the other siblings would want to clean up their inheritance by selling Fox News. Estimates of its value I have heard from well-placed sources are between $13 billion and $15 billion. In 2022, Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter. Buying Fox News would be tempting for him, as a legacy media brand he could transform in the way he transformed Twitter, as part of the new world order that he seems already to be shaping.