Fox News's $3.3 billion: the trust Rupert Murdoch could not rewrite, so he bought his children out

Run it as a Singapore structure. The founder settles the controlling shares in his lifetime — but the deed is drafted as a living document, not a monument. The economic shares of all six children are fixed, identical if that is what he wants; control is its own chapter, with a named successor and a letter of wishes explaining why; and — the clause the 1999 deed lacked — a written amendment mechanism. A power reserved to the founder while he has capacity, and after him a protector or a family council acting by a defined majority, to change the named controller as the family changes. Singapore's Trustees Act expressly preserves a trust in which the settlor reserves powers over investment and asset management, and Singapore drafting practice routinely writes further reserved and protector powers into the deed itself. The founder who changes his mind in 2023 signs a deed of amendment. He does not sue his own children.

Then the structure prices the decision the Murdochs eventually reached anyway. If one heir is to hold the wheel, the others' economic interest converts by formula — a valuation method fixed in the deed, funding arranged in advance — and the exit happens by mechanism, not after three years of discovery. The bought-out heirs sign the same release the 2025 deal contains, but in private: a Singapore trust sits on no public register, and its disputes go to confidential arbitration, not to a Reno courtroom whose files can be unsealed a year after the settlement.

Two honest footnotes. First, the Murdoch trust was not badly drafted; it was drafted for a different purpose — to protect the position of Anna Murdoch's children against a second family — and it did exactly that for a quarter of a century. A settlor who wants his children protected from his own later changes of heart should want an irrevocable deed with no back door, and the Murdoch children of 1999 did. The Singapore answer does not dissolve that trade-off; it forces the founder to name it on day one: whom does the lock protect, and from whom? Second, a Nevada trust holding US-listed voting shares is a US matter — a Singapore deed would have changed neither the SEC disclosures nor the Class B economics. What it changes is what our readers face in Jakarta, Bangkok and Taipei, where the operating stake still sits in the founder's own name, 'equal votes among the children' is the default nobody negotiated, and the founder's later change of mind arrives, as it did in 2023, in a form the deed cannot honour.