Worst Adaption of King Lear Ever

Rupert Murdoch has lost the court fight to cut 3 of his 4 children out of control of his media empire.

He wanted to give complete control to Lachlan, and leave the other 3 eldest James, Elisabeth and Prudence with no control of the Newscorp.

The judge said that an irrevocable trust is just that, irrevocable, and additionally making Lachlan the exclusive manager of the organization would jeopardize the interests of the other three.

In arguments, Rupert Murdoch stated that he wanted Lachlan, who most closely follows his antediluvian politics, to run things, but I'm wondering if this wasn't a ploy initiated by the eldest son.

In any case, whatever pain this causes the patriarch of the Murdoch clan is well deserved:

A Nevada commissioner ruled resoundingly against Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to change his family’s trust to consolidate his eldest son Lachlan’s control of his media empire and lock in Fox News’s right-wing editorial slant, according to a sealed court document obtained by The New York Times.

The commissioner, Edmund J. Gorman Jr., concluded in a decision filed on Saturday that the father and son, who is the head of Fox News and News Corp., had acted in “bad faith” in their effort to amend the irrevocable trust, which divides control of the company equally among Mr. Murdoch’s four oldest children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence — after his death.

The ruling was at times scathing. At one point in his 96-page opinion, Mr. Gorman characterizes the plan to change the trust as a “carefully crafted charade” to “permanently cement Lachlan Murdoch’s executive roles” inside the empire “regardless of the impacts such control would have over the companies or the beneficiaries” of the family trust.

………

The battle over the family trust is not about money — Mr. Murdoch is not seeking to diminish any of his children’s financial stakes in the company — but rather about future control of the world’s most powerful conservative media empire, which includes Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and major newspapers and television outlets in Australia and Britain.

And therein lies the rub.  If Lachlan runs said empire without any input from the beneficiaries of the fund, he can cause them significant financial harm.

It should be noted that the trust appears to have been structured to evade inheritance taxes, so there is a bit more schadenfreude there as well.

………

The commissioner’s ruling, while significant, is not the final word in the case. The commissioner acts as a “special master” who weighs the testimony and evidence and submits a recommended resolution to the Probate Court. It falls to a district judge to ratify or reject that recommendation. Even then, the losing party is free to challenge the determination, which could precipitate an intensive new round of litigation.

Yeah, but Murdoch is 93 years old, and any new round of litigation will likely outlast him.

You are going to hell Rupert, you might as well begin enjoying it on earth.

I am completely unsurprised that former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr is hip deep in this affair.  If something unethical is to be done, he's your man.