Rupert Murdoch stepped down as the chairman of Fox Corp and News Corp on Thursday, ending a long reign that saw him develop and lead a global media empire.

Here is a look at some crucial moments from his decades-long career under the spotlight:

ROOTS

The son of a famous war correspondent in Australia, Rupert Murdoch took over his father's newspaper business in the early 1950s and set about turning it into a global media empire.

He took up residence in the United States in 1974 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985, based in New York City.

EARLY INTEREST IN MEDIA

Murdoch's first brush with journalism was at college. His experience as an editor of the Daily Express in London is thought to have shaped his future as he embarked on popularizing tabloid-like journalism.

MARRIAGES

Murdoch and former San Francisco police chaplain Ann Lesley Smith called off their engagement in April. That would have been the billionaire' s fifth marriage.

He reportedly ended his fourth marriage to actress and model Jerry Hall via an email. Their divorce was finalized last year.

NEWS OF THE WORLD SCANDAL

Murdoch's News of the World, Britain's one-time biggest selling weekly newspaper, hit the streets for the last time on July 10, 2011, succumbing to a phone hacking scandal that sent tremors through the British political establishment.

Accusations that telephone hacking at the newspaper stretched from celebrities to missing children, relatives of those killed in the 2005 bomb attacks on London's transport network and families of soldiers killed in action triggered a huge public outcry.

SPLIT OF THE MURDOCH EMPIRE

Bowing to pressure from shareholders, Murdoch separated News Corp's publishing and entertainment assets in 2013. Almost a decade later, he would consider reuniting those firms but the plans were abandoned later.

POLITICS

"The Murdoch dynasty draws no lines among politics, money and power; they all work together seamlessly in service of the overarching goal of imperial expansion," a piece from the New York Times magazine wrote of Murdoch's family in 2019.

Though several of his companies are known for their conservative tilt, he initially urged Michael Bloomberg to run for president against Donald Trump.

Murdoch reportedly has an unflattering opinion of the former president and has also criticized Fox News anchors for siding with Trump.

Source: Forbes, media reports

(Reporting by Niket Nishant and Noor Zainab Hussain in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)