Fox Corp
Fox Corporation (FOX)
Overview
Fox Corporation is an American mass media company built around news, sports, and entertainment broadcasting, headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan with major operations also based in Los Angeles. It was formed on March 19, 2019, when 21st Century Fox spun off its news, sports, and broadcast television assets after selling most of its entertainment studio and cable-network businesses to Disney. For fiscal year 2026 (ended June 30, 2026), Fox reported roughly $17.1 billion in trailing revenue and employs approximately 10,550 people. Fox Corporation has two publicly traded share classes representing the same underlying business: Class B (FOX), which carries voting rights and is where the Murdoch family holds its controlling stake (through a family trust holding roughly 36% of voting power), and Class A (FOXA), non-voting stock that trades at higher volume; this profile covers the Class B shares.
What They Do & How They Make Money
Fox generates revenue primarily by selling advertising and by charging cable, satellite, and streaming distributors "affiliate" or "retransmission" fees to carry its channels and stations. Its news and sports cable networks (Fox News, Fox Business, FS1, FS2, Big Ten Network) earn a mix of subscriber fees paid by pay-TV and virtual pay-TV providers plus advertising sold against news and sports programming. The broadcast side — the Fox Network and its owned-and-operated local television stations — earns advertising revenue from entertainment programming, NFL and college football, MLB, and other live sports, along with retransmission-consent fees paid by cable and satellite operators. Fox also monetizes content through Tubi, its free ad-supported streaming service (AVOD), which sells advertising against a large library of licensed and owned film and television content, and through licensing fees for content sold to third parties. Live news and, especially, live sports are the strategic core of the model: unscripted, appointment-viewing content that is relatively resistant to on-demand streaming disruption and commands premium advertising rates.
Business Segments
Fox reports its results in two primary operating segments plus a corporate/other category:
- Cable Network Programming — the largest segment, encompassing Fox News Media (Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network) and Fox Sports' cable properties (FS1, FS2, Big Ten Network, Fox Deportes). Revenue comes from affiliate/subscriber fees and advertising; this segment is the company's primary profit driver given Fox News' consistently high cable ratings.
- Television — the Fox Broadcasting Company network, the Fox Television Stations owned-and-operated group, Fox Entertainment (content production, including Fox Alternative Entertainment and MarVista), and Tubi Media Group (Tubi, Credible). This segment carries the costs and revenue of NFL, MLB, Big Ten, and other live sports rights, national entertainment programming, and streaming.
- Other, Corporate and Eliminations — corporate overhead, equity investments, and inter-segment eliminations.
Cable Network Programming (led by Fox News) has historically generated outsized profit margins relative to its revenue share, while the Television segment carries heavier sports-rights costs but drives reach and retransmission leverage.
Competitors
- Cable/broadcast news and general entertainment: Comcast/NBCUniversal (MSNBC, NBC), Paramount Global/Paramount Skydance (CBS), Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN), Disney (ABC).
- Sports rights and programming: ESPN (Disney), NBC Sports, CBS Sports, Warner Bros. Discovery (TNT Sports), Amazon Prime Video, Netflix — all bidding for the same NFL, college football, and other live-sports packages.
- Free ad-supported streaming (Tubi's direct competitors): Amazon's ad-supported Prime Video tier, Paramount's Pluto TV, Roku Channel, Peacock's ad tier.
- Cable news specifically: MSNBC and CNN compete most directly with Fox News for audience and advertising share.
Competitive Position
Fox's core moat is its portfolio of live, must-watch content — Fox News' dominant cable-news ratings and Fox Sports' NFL/college football rights — which is difficult to replicate and remains a draw for both traditional pay-TV subscribers and advertisers even as cord-cutting continues. Owning marquee sports rights also gives Fox leverage in retransmission and affiliate-fee negotiations with distributors. Tubi provides a hedge against linear-TV decline by capturing ad-supported streaming viewership, particularly among younger and cord-never audiences, and has scaled to over 100 million monthly active users. The Class B (FOX) shares are the locus of corporate control: the Murdoch family trust holds the controlling voting stake, with Lachlan Murdoch serving as chairman and CEO, giving the family effective control over strategy, leadership, and major transactions despite owning a minority of total equity — a structure that affords strategic continuity but limits influence for holders of the non-voting Class A stock and for other Class B holders. Key risks include continued erosion of traditional pay-TV subscriber counts (which pressures affiliate-fee revenue over time), the escalating cost of live sports rights, reputational and legal exposure tied to Fox News (including past high-profile defamation litigation), and increasing competitive pressure for sports rights and advertising dollars from deep-pocketed streaming entrants like Amazon and Netflix. In 2026, Fox announced a roughly $22 billion agreement to acquire Roku, a major strategic move to combine Fox's content and advertising business with Roku's streaming device and platform reach, expected to close in the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval — a deal that, if completed, would materially reshape Fox's streaming and advertising-technology position.