Lachlan Murdoch's streaming reverse ferret
Fox’s new emperor makes his first big bet
The regulatory filings associated with Fox Corporation's $22 billion takeover of video streaming platform Roku contain a welter of financial and legal information. But they all omit one important detail: how much the Murdoch family thinks it will have to pay President Donald Trump to get the deal approved. Because without Trump's approval, this deal is going nowhere and Fox will be facing a break fee of at least US$1.2 billion ($1.7 billion).
Lost in the media coverage of the very peculiar Fox-Roku merger deal – and absent from the fine print of the 8K merger notice – is the fact that Trump is still suing the Murdochs, via their ownership of the Wall Street Journal, for US$10 billion in defamation damages.
Fox Corporation and News Corporation (which owns the WSJ) are totally separate public companies – but both are controlled by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. Everything is personal to Trump, and I'll bet London to a brick there is no way the hater-in-chief will leave the Murdochs un-reamed before he approves their Fox-Roku combination.
The defamation case, Trump v Murdoch, sits before the United States District Court in the Southern District of Florida. The Murdochs and News Corporation claim in submissions to the court that Trump's defamation argument is baseless and should be thrown out "with prejudice", meaning News Corp could force Trump to pay the legal fees it has incurred to date. In the latest skirmishes, Trump is trying to force Rupert Murdoch to testify in open court. The Sun King's lawyers are fighting this move tooth and claw.
