Rupert Murdoch
American businessman
Keith Rupert Murdoch ( MUR-dok; born 11 March 1931) is an Australian-born American former business magnate, investor, and media mogul. Through his company News Corp, he is the owner of hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets around the world, including in the United Kingdom (The Sun and The Times), in Australia (The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, and The Australian), in the United States (The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post), book publisher HarperCollins, and the television broadcasting channels Sky News Australia and Fox News (through Fox Corporation). He was also the owner of Sky (until 2018), 21st Century Fox (until 2019), and the now-defunct News of the World. With a net worth of US$21.7 billion as of 2 March 2022, Murdoch is the 31st-richest person in the United States and the 71st richest in the world according to Forbes magazine. Due to his extensive wealth and influence over media and politics, Murdoch has been described as an oligarch.
Murdoch was born and raised in Melbourne. After his father Keith Murdoch died in 1952, Murdoch took over the running of The News, a small Adelaide newspaper owned by his father. In the 1950s and 1960s, Murdoch acquired a number of newspapers in Australia and New Zealand before expanding into the United Kingdom in 1969, taking over the News of the World, followed closely by The Sun. In 1974, Murdoch moved to New York City, to expand into the American market; however, he retained interests in Australia and the United Kingdom. In 1981, Murdoch bought The Times, his first British broadsheet, and, in 1985, became a naturalised American citizen, giving up his Australian citizenship, to satisfy the legal requirement for American television network ownership.
“Rupert Murdoch” enters the record as american businessman. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rupert, Murdoch and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Rupert Murdoch” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Rupert, Murdoch and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q53944. VIAF identifies the subject as 85338033. The Library of Congress control number is n83219772. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931, 2018, 2019 and 2022.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Rupert Murdoch”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Rupert Murdoch primary sources, Rupert Murdoch archive and Rupert research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Rupert Murdoch”?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Rupert Murdoch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.