James Murdoch Escaped His Father’s Empire. Now He’s Building His Own.

Politico ^ | November 14, 2026 | Sarah Ellison and Adam Wren

[MinorityRepublican]

In early 2025, as Donald Trump’s second term began, Pete Buttigieg met with two members of conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s family. The former and likely future presidential candidate had earned the nickname “Slayer Pete” for his virtuosic runs through the Fox News gauntlet, the Murdoch-controlled cable network that helped shape a generation of the American Right.

This time, however, Buttigieg was meeting the Murdochs not as adversaries but as potential allies. James Murdoch, a former News Corp. and 21st Century Fox executive now estranged from his father, Rupert, and the empire he built, was about to spend some of the family fortune on center-left candidates and media outlets, a concerted move to undo the political polarization his father’s businesses had helped create.

Over lunch at a Manhattan restaurant, the 52-year-old Murdoch and his Oregon-born wife Kathryn questioned Buttigieg about the political terrain. They had had drinks with Buttigieg the month he launched his presidential campaign in April 2019, and the following month invited him to their 12,000-square-foot Upper East Side townhouse for a small event focused on climate change. That fall they hosted a campaign fundraiser in the back garden, raising about $30,000, and two years later, they sold the home for 1,000 times more than that. The former South Bend mayor represented the type of candidate the billionaire couple wanted to see in the White House: a pragmatic, millennial problem solver.

In the intervening six years, as they grew increasingly disillusioned with the family-run conservative media empire in which they uneasily existed, James and Kathryn Murdoch have emerged as an unlikely force on the American left.

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TOPICS: Politics
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