{"id":365362,"date":"2026-10-06T01:26:46","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T01:26:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/365362\/"},"modified":"2026-10-06T01:26:46","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T01:26:46","slug":"james-murdoch-and-kathryn-murdoch-discuss-new-york-magazine-but-not-rupert-murdoch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/365362\/","title":{"rendered":"James Murdoch and Kathryn Murdoch Discuss \u2018New York Magazine\u2019\u2014But Not Rupert Murdoch"},"content":{"rendered":"

For New York magazine staffers<\/a>, this archival pit stop was a relief. It signaled real interest\u2014a sign that the Murdochs\u2019 $300 million\u2013plus purchase, through their investment company called Lupa, was not a vanity play.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can just tell when someone is passionate about something versus when it is just a business decision,\u201d Bankoff had told me just days before the deal officially closed. \u201cThey\u2019re not someone who is curious and maybe did something in a different realm and now wants to enter the media space\u2014they know the media space better than anyone,\u201d he\u2019d said.<\/p>\n

To say the media is in James\u2019s blood, or part of his DNA, would be both clich\u00e9 and true. He was four years old when his father, Rupert<\/a>, purchased New York and 18 when he sold it. When we met on a sultry early June afternoon at Lupa\u2019s headquarters, in downtown Manhattan, he had the unmistakable swagger of a Murdoch.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember that it was part of the sort of portfolio\u2026because back then it was\u2014\u201d James says haltingly, careful not to reference his estranged father in even a pronoun. \u201cI mean, this is, like, ancient history, right? But it was like the San Antonio Express-News. The Star. The Village Voice. New York magazine.\u201d<\/p>\n

James bristles when I suggest that he has made a concerted effort to distance himself from media and specifically from Fox and News Corp, which his father and brother own.<\/p>\n

\u201cI sold one and left,\u201d he tells me. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say I spent time \u2018distancing\u2019 myself,\u201d he says defensively, pointing to investments in India\u2014including Bodhi Tree Systems, a joint venture with former Disney India and Star India big cheese Uday Shankar\u2014as an example that he never left the media business.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the windfall from Disney\u2019s $71.3 billion acquisition of Fox in 2019, from which James made $2 billion, and his brother Lachlan\u2019s $1.1 billion buyout following the courtroom brawl for News Corp, James and Kathryn have been able to buy the Tribeca Film Festival and Art Basel, and have launched the Futurific Institute, what a source described to my colleague Nate Freeman<\/a> as a \u201criff on the world\u2019s fair.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For New York magazine staffers, this archival pit stop was a relief. It signaled real interest\u2014a sign that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":365363,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[288,7443,87024,65173,1208,237,87760,135384,135385,9,11,2409,10,10809],"class_list":["post-365362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-business","tag-climate-change","tag-james-murdoch","tag-lachlan-murdoch","tag-media","tag-money","tag-murdoch","tag-murdoch-family","tag-murdochs","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-magazine","tag-new-york-news","tag-rupert-murdoch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}