murdoch family is the owner of 21st century fox.
who is the owner of 21st century fox?
murdoch family
on december 9, 2016, 21st century fox announced it had made an offer to acquire the 61% share of sky plc that it did not already own. the company was valued at £18.5 billion. the deal was approved by the european commission on april 7, 2017, followed by ireland's minister for communications, climate action and environment on june 27. however, the deal has become subject to scrutiny and an extended regulatory review in the united kingdom, over concerns surrounding the plurality of british news media that will be owned by the murdoch family post-merger (counting sky news, as well as news corp's newspapers and recent acquisition of radio station operator wireless group), and violations of british news broadcasting regulations connected to sky's former carriage of fox news channel in the country. however, a bidding war ensued over the company; in september 2018, comcast won a regulator-mandated auction with a bid of £17.28 per-share. on september 26, 2018, 21st century fox subsequently announced its intent to sell all of its shares in sky plc to comcast for £12 billion. on october 4, 2018 21st century fox completed the sale of their stake to comcast, giving the latter a 76.8% controlling stake.
21st century fox
in 1935, fox film corporation, under new president sidney kent, merged with the upstart twentieth century pictures to form 20th century-fox. (darryl zanuck, the driving force behind the creation of 20th century-fox, was married to actress virginia fox. this has led to some erroneous claims on internet movie sites that zanuck was william fox's son-in-law. in fact, virginia fox and william fox were not related.) 20th century fox was itself merged into rupert murdoch's news corporation in 1985 (and in 2013, 20th century fox with most of news corporation's entertainment assets were spun out into 21st century fox which also use william fox's name). news corporation (and subsequently 21st century fox), 20th century fox's corporate parent, continues to make movies and started the fox network, one of the four principal commercial broadcast television networks in the united states. however as of december 14, 2017, the walt disney company (which owns and operates networks such as abc and espn) announced plans to purchase 21st century fox, which includes 20th century fox, for $52.4 billion, the deal was completed on march 20, 2019.
william fox (producer)