In 2019, the Murdoch family did something that looked, at the time, like a retreat. They sold most of 21st Century Fox - the film studio, the international networks, the Marvel and Avatar franchises - to Disney for tens of billions of dollars. What they kept was the leftovers: a cable news channel, a sports division, a broadcast network, and a batch of local TV stations. That pile of leftovers became Fox Corporation. Six years later, the leftovers just posted the best year in the company's short history.
Fox Corporation is a New York-based media company that reported roughly $16.3 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025, up about 17% year over year, with around 11,000 employees. It is controlled by the Murdoch family trust and led by Executive Chair and Chief Executive Lachlan Murdoch. On paper it is a smaller, simpler company than the conglomerate it came from. In practice, that simplicity is the whole point.
01 - The thesisBetting on the one thing you can't binge
While the rest of the industry poured money into on-demand libraries and prestige drama - the Netflix playbook - Fox made a contrarian wager. It built the company around content that only works live: breaking news and sports. You can watch a drama series any night of the week. You cannot watch the Super Bowl on Tuesday, and an election result is worthless the morning after. Live programming keeps audiences arriving in real time, which keeps advertisers paying and cable distributors sending checks.
The fiscal 2025 numbers backed the thesis. Fox aired the Super Bowl. It banked a wave of political advertising through the 2024 election cycle. And its streaming service Tubi kept compounding. Revenue, adjusted earnings per share and free cash flow all hit company records - not because Fox out-spent anyone on shows, but because it owned the moments people refuse to miss.
02 - The machineThree revenue engines, one audience
Fox does not make money one way. It makes money three ways off the same live audience, which is why the business holds up even as cable subscriptions shrink.
How Fox gets paid
Ads sold against live broadcast, cable news, sports and Tubi streaming. Big live events - the Super Bowl, elections - spike the price.
Cable and satellite providers pay Fox to carry its channels and local stations. A steady, recurring line that funds the rest.
Subscriptions from Fox Nation and the new Fox One bundle - Fox's answer to viewers who cut the cord entirely.
The map. Every asset Fox owns pours into one of these three buckets - and live news and sports feed all three at once.
03 - The sleeper hitTubi: the free streamer nobody talks about
The most interesting piece of Fox is the one that costs viewers nothing. Tubi, acquired in 2020 for roughly $440 million, is a free, ad-supported streaming service stocked with a giant licensed back-catalog that other companies overlooked. In fiscal 2025 it crossed 100 million monthly active users and passed $1 billion in annual revenue, premiering more than 70 new original titles and launching dozens of free channels along the way. It is arguably beating subscription services people won't stop talking about - and it does it entirely on ads.
Fox Sports revenue, illustrative scale
Not to scale as a P&L - a rough sense of the pieces. Sports revenue topped $2B; Tubi crossed $1B; Fox One lists at $19.99 a month.
04 - The new frontFox One and the cord-cutter hedge
On August 21, 2025 - deliberately timed to the week before NFL kickoff - Fox launched Fox One, its first wholly owned direct-to-consumer streaming service. For $19.99 a month (or $199.99 a year), it unifies live access to Fox News, Fox Business, Fox Weather, Fox Sports, FS1, FS2, the Big Ten Network, Fox Deportes, local stations and the Fox network in one app. From October, it can even be bundled with ESPN's direct-to-consumer service. The launch date was not a coincidence; the calendar is part of the strategy.
Read together, Fox now runs three streaming bets at once: free (Tubi), niche-subscription (Fox Nation), and all-in-one (Fox One). Whichever way the cord finally breaks, Fox has a product waiting. It is telling that Brian Borkowski's title at the company is Chief Marketing Officer, DTC - a job that barely existed here five years ago.
05 - The portfolioWhat Fox actually owns
- Fox News MediaFox News Channel, Fox Business, Fox Weather and the Fox Nation subscription service - the most-watched cable news operation in the U.S.
- Fox SportsThe NFL, MLB, college football, plus newer rights to INDYCAR and LIV Golf, across the Fox network, FS1 and FS2.
- Fox EntertainmentThe broadcast network's primetime lineup, Fox Entertainment Studios, animation house Bento Box, and MarVista Entertainment.
- TubiFree, ad-supported streaming - 100M+ users and $1B+ revenue.
- Fox OneThe 2025 direct-to-consumer bundle at $19.99/month.
- TMZ & CredibleCelebrity-news brand TMZ (2021) and a majority stake in consumer-finance marketplace Credible.
06 - The fieldWhere Fox sits in the market
Fox competes against much larger, more diversified rivals - Comcast's NBCUniversal, Disney (ABC and ESPN), Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery and Netflix - without owning a comparable film studio or a sprawling international footprint. Its edge is focus. On cable news it runs ahead of MSNBC and CNN. On free ad-supported streaming, Tubi goes up against the Roku Channel, Pluto TV and Amazon's free tier. On live sports, Fox picks the leagues audiences won't skip rather than trying to own them all - it added INDYCAR and LIV Golf, extended Big East rights through 2031, and let its WWE deal conclude.
The result is a media company that looks nothing like the empire it was carved from, and increasingly like a specialist: smaller, disciplined, and organized entirely around real-time attention. In an industry still nervous about cord-cutting, that focus is starting to look less like a limitation and more like a plan.