In the mid-1960s, media baron Rupert Murdoch bought a single-storey stone house that sat on thousands of hectares of pastoral land, not far from Canberra, for $200,000. The estate, called Cavan, which sprawls along the banks of the Murrumbidgee River, now spans more than 10,000 hectares and is worth multi-millions. It is a working farm with thousands of sheep and cattle, and the stone house has been replaced with a palatial homestead, tennis court, pool and airstrip.

Cavan, which is about 30 kilometres from Yass, is where Murdoch once flirted with the idea of becoming a local member of parliament, according to his biographer William Shawcross. That is, before he decided to focus on building the world’s most powerful conservative media empire.

Murdoch, who is now 93, hasn’t called Australia home since 1985, which was the year he became an American citizen. However, he’s here now visiting the country where he grew up. It’s his first visit to Australia since 2018, and accompanying him is his fifth wife, Elena Zhukova, a retired molecular biologist, whom he married earlier this year after a brief courtship.

Murdoch is expected to spend some of his time in Australia at Cavan, and it’s there that he will most likely reflect on the future of his companies, Fox and News Corporation, which own Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and major newspapers and television outlets in Australia and Britain, including The Australian and Sky News. How Murdoch’s companies will survive him once he dies is unclear.

Murdoch’s extraordinary competitive drive, his eerie grasp of numbers, his ambition and risk-taking have been at the core of Fox and News Corporation’s success. It is those attributes that have enabled him to turn a single Australian newspaper into two global companies. It is also what investors in his companies have banked on for decades, even though Murdoch has demonstrated little regard for shareholders. He treats them like second-class citizens, who pose a potential threat to the control of his empire.

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But it’s nothing personal. Murdoch recently demonstrated equal disdain for the rights that three of his children, Prudence, Elisabeth and James, hold in the family’s trust. The trust is the vehicle through which Murdoch controls Fox and News Corporation, with about a 40 per cent stake in voting shares of each company.

Murdoch hatched a plan, with his eldest son, Lachlan, his chosen successor, to change that irrevocable trust, which would cement Lachlan’s control over the companies, and enshrine their right-wing slant. Prudence, Elisabeth and James argued such changes violated the trust’s original conditions, and they would be wrongfully disenfranchised.

When Murdoch dies, the trust is supposed to divide control of his empire equally among his four eldest children. He has six children but only four have voting rights in the trust, while all six have economic interests.