In signing a $300m deal to buy half of New York-based Vox Media, James Murdoch joins liberal billionaires Laurene Powell Jobs at the Atlantic and John Henry at the Boston Globe in attempting to defend struggling US media operations.
Murdoch, who once told an interviewer he’d been arguing with his father about politics “since I was a teenager”, is buying Vox.com, known for “explanatory journalism”, New York magazine and Vox’s podcast network – which hosts high-ranking shows like Today, Explained and Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway.
A multibillionaire thanks to his father Rupert’s deals and a recent court settlement over the family inheritance, Murdoch told the New York Times he didn’t want a “daily news business” but a “longer-form, thoughtful journalism that can really speak to the culture”. Vox properties Eater, PopSugar, SportsBlogs Nation, the Dodo and the Verge are not part of the deal.
“I think he’s a multibillionaire doing this to safeguard neutral, fairer media,” suggests Mathew Horsman, founder of Mediatique. “I’m not saying that [siblings] Liz and James are the epitome of progressivism, but compared with Rupert and [their brother] Lachlan, they were very uncomfortable with the reporting Fox was doing. This deal is not going head-to-head with dad. James was a big advocate for Rupert to buy Myspace, so he hasn’t really proven his digital chops.”
Vox Media – like fellow New York-based digital outfits Vice and Buzzfeed – expanded rapidly after 2010 and then stumbled post-Covid. When NBCU invested $200m in 2015, the company was valued at $1bn. Over the following decade came a range of acquisitions – including New York magazine, which Rupert owned from 1976 to 1991 – but the growth engine is the company’s podcast network, with reported revenues of $80m, turning $20m in profit, compared with New York magazine’s $6m profit on $100m revenue.
It went up for sale in whole or in part at the end of 2025, with rival bidders Versant, the parent company of MS Now and CNBC, in talks to buy the podcast network. Murdoch’s $300m keeps the company relatively intact.
Murdoch has always proved exasperating to his father, a source formerly close to him said. He dropped out of Harvard to follow the Grateful Dead and then helped set up the hip-hop label Rawkus Records in 1995. After joining his father’s business, he continued supplying satirical cartoons to US magazine Gear, often mocking Rupert. He resigned from the board of News Corp in 2020 over the company’s climate change denial.
The source pointed to “the Oedipal dynamics” at play in his new venture. The question is will he take his cue from HBO’s Succession and turn Vox.com into a version of the fictional news venture The Hundred?
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