Walt Disney buys Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox for £39bn ($52.4bn)

Walt Disney’s deal includes Fox’s 39 per cent stake in satellite broadcaster Sky and the 20^th Century Fox Film Studio for a total of $52.4bn (£39bn).

Fox’s remaining assets, including Fox News and Sports, will form a new company. The deal concludes over fifty years of media expansion by Rupert Murdoch (86), who turned a single Australian newspaper which he inherited from his father at the age of 21 into one of the world’s largest news and film empires.

However, Murdoch will still retain control of News Corp, the news publishing group which owns The Times and the Sun newspapers, that split away from 21^st Century Fox in 2013.