Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Fox Corporation
Fox makes and sells news, sports, and entertainment television, plus the local broadcast stations that beam it to homes.
Fox is a television company built around three things people watch live: news, sports, and entertainment. It runs Fox News and Fox Business, the Fox broadcast network with shows like NFL football and The Simpsons, and a string of local TV stations in big cities. It also owns Tubi, a free ad-supported streaming service.
The money comes mostly from two pockets. One is advertising: businesses pay Fox to run commercials during highly watched live programming, especially sports and news. The other is fees from cable and satellite distributors, who pay Fox to carry its channels. Live content is the engine here — it is hard to skip ads during a football game or a breaking news segment, which is exactly why advertisers and pay-TV operators keep paying. Fox has been through some turbulence. In 2023 it settled a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million over claims aired after the 2020 election. In 2025 it agreed to pay $100 million to settle a separate suit from Smartmatic. These are real costs of running a news business built on opinion and speed, and they show the legal risk baked into that model.
The big structural worry is cord-cutting. As more households drop traditional pay-TV, the distributor fees that once looked so reliable start to shrink. Fox's answer is to lean harder into live sports and news — the stuff streaming can't easily replace — and to push Tubi as a free, ad-funded way to reach people who no longer pay for cable. It is a bet that live eyeballs will keep commanding premium prices, even as the pipes that deliver them change.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026
BIG PICTURE
Fox makes most of its money from old-style TV, while streaming stays a side dish
- 30% Streaming (Tubi and Roku projected share of revenue)
- 70% Broadcast, cable, news and sports TV
Analysts at MoffettNathanson estimate that Tubi and Roku will bring in about 30% of the combined company's revenue once the deal settles. The other 70% still comes from the broadcast stations, cable channels and live sports that Fox has sold for decades. That mix explains why Fox can be a streaming newcomer and a traditional TV giant at the same time. Source: The Economist, citing MoffettNathanson, data from 2026
Timeline
Murdoch Builds a Media Empire
Rupert Murdoch set up News Corporation as a holding company for his growing pile of newspapers, TV stations, and entertainment businesses. Over the next few decades he kept adding pieces — film, TV production, cable news, sports — until it was one of the biggest media companies in the world. The empire was huge, but it was also a tangle of very different businesses under one roof.
News Corp Splits in Two
That tangle got untangled in 2013, when News Corporation split into two public companies. The publishing side became News Corp, while a new company called 21st Century Fox took the entertainment and TV assets: the Fox broadcast network, Fox News, Fox Sports, and the 20th Century Fox studios.
Disney Buys 21st Century Fox
Soon the entertainment giant itself became a target. Disney agreed to buy most of 21st Century Fox for roughly 71 billion dollars, finishing the deal in March 2019. What Disney didn't take — including the Fox broadcast network — was separated into a new company, Fox Corporation, with Lachlan Murdoch as CEO.
Fox Corporation Lists on Nasdaq
The new company got its own place on the stock market, listing on Nasdaq under the ticker FOXA. It was now a standalone public company, small and focused next to the empire it had come from.
Fox Buys Tubi
The next year, Fox bought Tubi, a free streaming service paid for by ads rather than subscriptions. It turned out to be a smart bet: under Fox, Tubi grew into one of the most-used free streaming services in the U.S., and by 2025 its yearly revenue passed a billion dollars.
Lachlan Murdoch Takes the Chair
In 2023, Rupert Murdoch stepped down as chair of Fox and became chairman emeritus. Lachlan, already CEO, added the chair role — the son now formally at the top of the company his father built.
Fox Settles With Dominion
That same year brought a costly legal fight. Fox agreed to pay 787.5 million dollars to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. It was a very public and very expensive reminder that what a news network says can carry a real price.
Fox Launches Fox One
Fox then launched Fox One, a subscription service bundling programming from its news, sports, and entertainment arms. It was a bet that viewers would pay Fox directly, not just find it through a cable package.
Fox Buys Roku
The streaming push then became a lot bigger. Fox completed its 22 billion dollar acquisition of Roku in November 2026, a deal first announced that June. Roku's platform reaches more than 100 million households worldwide, and Fox put it — along with Tubi, Fox One, and Frndly TV — into a new division called FOX Digital Platforms. That deal pushed Fox well beyond traditional broadcast and cable and firmly toward streaming and connected TV.