For a while, Rupert Murdoch seemed invincible.
First, the mogul emerged relatively unscathed from a 2011 phone hacking scandal involving his British tabloids that threatened to upend his empire.
Then, he installed his sons, Lachlan and James, in leadership roles at 21st Century Fox. And, last year, the thrice-divorced Mr. Murdoch married Jerry Hall, a former supermodel 25 years his junior.But even Mr. Murdoch, a self-made billionaire whose range of media assets wield enormous political influence on three continents, was no match for Silicon Valley.
Like King Lear confronting his mortality, Mr. Murdoch, 86, is preparing to divide up a lifetime of spoils. And as he moves to sell off wide swaths of his media and entertainment business, he is also throwing into confusion the line of succession and testing the ties that bind the family-run fief.
The Walt Disney Company announced on Thursday it had reached a deal to acquire most of 21st Century Fox Inc., the Murdoch-owned company that includes the storied movie and television studio, national cable networks like FX and National Geographic, 22 regional cable channels dedicated to sports and a 39 percent stake in Britain’s pay TV service, Sky.
The $52.4 billion deal — which would not include Fox News, the Fox broadcast network or the FS1 sports cable channel, which will be spun off into a newly listed company — has come about as part of the consolidation sweeping over traditional media companies as they try to fight off threats from Amazon, Apple and Netflix.
It also represents a remarkable shift for Mr. Murdoch, a visionary businessman who has long lived by a single credo: Buy, buy, buy.After all, Mr. Murdoch didn’t grow a single newspaper in Adelaide, Australia, into a $100 billion media business by selling. “Rupert has always been a collector, a builder,” said Laura Martin, an analyst at Needham & Company.
In 2007, when newspapers were facing a decline, Mr. Murdoch defied Wall Street investors and his own advisers to pay $5 billion for Dow Jones, the company that publishes The Wall Street Journal. Why? Because he wanted to.
In 2012, under pressure in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, Mr. Murdoch split his entertainment assets into a separate publicly traded company, 21st Century Fox, from News Corporation, the company that includes The Journal, the New York Post and other newspapers. For a time Mr. Murdoch’s enterprise looked like an entertainment company with a newspaper problem, with glitzy Hollywood assets and lucrative Fox News keeping Mr. Murdoch’s true love, printed papers, afloat.
But 21st Century Fox soon faced the same economic headwinds affecting other traditional media companies that have been disrupted by the rise of digital: customers cut the cable cord and streamed TV shows and movies on multiple devices. At the same time, Fox News, the highly rated basic cable channel and a big moneymaker, has suffered setbacks after a series of sexual harassment allegations at the network led to high-level departures and costly legal settlements.
Mr. Murdoch must have known he needed to get even bigger to survive. But lately his buying prowess has taken a hit. In 2014, investors rebuffed him when he tried to gain scale with an $80 billion offer for Time Warner Inc., the company that owns HBO and CNN — and which may end up the property of AT&T, if a deal long in the making survives…
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