Rupert Murdoch has withdrawn his proposal to re-combine Fox Corp and News Corp.
Fox received a letter from Murdoch, its chairman, and his son and Fox CEO Lachlan, saying that they “determined that a combination is not optimal for the shareholders” of either company at the moment.
The abortive combination of the companies would have brought both companies under the same leadership and could have cut costs. Murdoch originally split the two companies up in 2013. However, the Murdoch family trust controls about 40 per cent of the voting rights of both companies.
At the time, it was thought that combining the companies would have given them greater scale to compete with other media companies for subscribers and ad revenue.
News Corp chief exec Robert Thomson told staff on Wednesday that the committee of independent directors, which had been set up to assess the deal, had been dissolved.
Neither company has provided any details as to why Murdoch nixed the merger.
Fox Corp, which operates the controversial Fox News in the US, sold most of its previously held entertainment assets to Walt Disney Co for more than AU$100 billion in 2019. It also runs FoxBet and newspapers such as the The Wall Street Journal, The Times, and The Australian.
News Corp, meanwhile controls a range of businesses around the world in including Foxtel, The New York Post, and News UK — publisher of The Sun tabloid.
