For New York magazine staffers, this archival pit stop was a relief. It signaled real interest—a sign that the Murdochs’ $300 million–plus purchase, through their investment company called Lupa, was not a vanity play.
“You can just tell when someone is passionate about something versus when it is just a business decision,” Bankoff had told me just days before the deal officially closed. “They’re not someone who is curious and maybe did something in a different realm and now wants to enter the media space—they know the media space better than anyone,” he’d said.
To say the media is in James’s blood, or part of his DNA, would be both cliché and true. He was four years old when his father, Rupert, purchased New York and 18 when he sold it. When we met on a sultry early June afternoon at Lupa’s headquarters, in downtown Manhattan, he had the unmistakable swagger of a Murdoch.
“I remember that it was part of the sort of portfolio…because back then it was—” James says haltingly, careful not to reference his estranged father in even a pronoun. “I mean, this is, like, ancient history, right? But it was like the San Antonio Express-News. The Star. The Village Voice. New York magazine.”
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.
“I sold one and left,” he tells me. “I wouldn’t say I spent time ‘distancing’ myself,” he says defensively, pointing to investments in India—including Bodhi Tree Systems, a joint venture with former Disney India and Star India big cheese Uday Shankar—as an example that he never left the media business.
Thanks to the windfall from Disney’s $71.3 billion acquisition of Fox in 2019, from which James made $2 billion, and his brother Lachlan’s $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 as a “riff on the world’s fair.”
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