How it started
Formation
21st Century Fox was formed by the splitting of entertainment and media properties from News Corporation. In February 2012, Natalie Ravitz accepted a position to become Rupert Murdoch's Chief of Staff at News Corporation.
News Corporation's board approved the split on May 24, 2013, while shareholders approved the split on June 11, 2013; the company completed the split on June 28 and formally started trading on NASDAQ on July 1.
Plans for the split were originally announced on June 28, 2012, while additional details and the working name of the new company were unveiled on December 3, 2012.
Murdoch stated that performing this split would "unlock the true value of both companies and their distinct assets, enabling investors to benefit from the separate strategic opportunities resulting from more focused management of each division." The move also came in the wake of a series of scandals that had damaged the reputation of the company's publishing operations in the United Kingdom. The split was structured so that the old News Corporation would change its name to 21st Century Fox and spin-off its publishing assets into a "new" News Corporation.
While the company was originally announced as the Fox Group, on April 16, 2013, Murdoch announced the new name as a way to not only leverage the already-established 20th Century Fox brand name, but to also help drive the company into the future (more specifically, the new century). Its logo was officially unveiled on May 9, 2013, featuring a modernized version of the iconic Fox searchlights designed by Pentagram.
From Wikipedia’s article on 21st Century Fox, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3