# 21st Century Fox The entertainment-and-news half of [[Rupert Murdoch]]'s empire from **June 28, 2013**, when [[News Corporation]] split in two. The publishing arm became a new News Corp. 21st Century Fox, the legal successor, kept the film studio, the Fox broadcast network, FX, National Geographic, the Sky stake and [[Fox News]]. ## Six years, three bids - **Time Warner, 2014.** Fox offered about $80 billion for [[Time Warner]] in June 2014 and withdrew in August after the board refused. Had it succeeded, [[CNN]] and Fox News would have sat under one roof a decade before the Paramount–WBD deal proposed the same thing. - **Sky, 2016–2018.** Fox's bid for the rest of European satellite broadcaster Sky stalled for two years under British scrutiny of Murdoch media concentration. [[Comcast]] won the regulator-run auction in September 2018, and Fox sold its stake to Comcast for £12 billion. - **The Disney sale, 2017–2019.** Disney agreed to buy most of the company on December 14, 2017 for $52.4 billion in stock. Comcast countered at $65 billion in cash. Disney raised to **$71.3 billion** on June 20, 2018. DOJ approved it on condition that Disney sell the regional sports networks, and the deal closed on **March 20, 2019** (see [[Disney - 21st Century Fox Deal]]). ## What Murdoch kept The sale was a deliberate sorting. Disney took the studios, FX, National Geographic and the international channels, the assets that feed streaming. The Murdochs kept the Fox broadcast network, Fox News, Fox Business and Fox Sports, and spun them into **[[Fox Corporation]]**, which began trading the day before the deal closed. They cashed out entertainment at the top of the streaming bidding war and kept the political assets in a smaller company they control even more tightly. It is the same sorting Comcast later ran in reverse with [[Versant]]: whatever feeds streaming stays with the big company, whatever does not goes to the spinoff. In both cases the news operation went where the owner wanted it, not where the business logic pointed. ## Related - [[Rupert Murdoch]] · [[Lachlan Murdoch]] · [[Fox Corporation]] · [[News Corporation]] - [[Disney - 21st Century Fox Deal]] · [[The Walt Disney Company]] - [[Fox News Timeline]] · [[News Corp Timeline]] · [[Media Consolidation]]