Who owns Tubi? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Tubi is the largest free ad-supported streaming service in the United States, and it sits inside one of the most tightly controlled media companies in the world. Millions of viewers use it without paying a cent, funded entirely by advertising. Behind that free product is a conventional corporate owner: Fox Corporation, the broadcast and news company that spun out of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.

Tubi did not start inside Fox. It began as an independent San Francisco startup that raised venture capital, built a large content library on a small budget, and grew into the leading name in free streaming. Fox bought it in 2020 for a fraction of what streaming assets were fetching at the time. Six years later, that purchase looks like one of the better bets in the sector.

Understanding Tubi's ownership matters because it explains both its strategy and its constraints. Tubi is a growth engine for a company whose main business is live news and sports. Its free, ad-only model is deliberate, and it reflects Fox's decision to avoid the expensive subscription arms race. Ownership also ties Tubi to the Murdoch family's control of Fox, a structure that concentrates decision-making power in very few hands. This article traces who owns Tubi, how Fox gained control, and what that means for viewers, advertisers, and investors.

Tubi was founded on April 1, 2014, in San Francisco by Farhad Massoudi and Thomas Ahn Hicks, through their advertising-technology company AdRise. It launched as a free, ad-supported streaming service originally called Tubi TV. The idea was straightforward: license a deep catalog of films and television series, stream them at no charge, and make money by showing ads, the same way broadcast television always had.

Tubi's core business is free ad-supported streaming television, often shortened to FAST. It carries more than 300,000 titles, including one of the largest horror libraries in streaming, and it produces a growing slate of original films and series at a lower cost than subscription rivals. Unlike Netflix and its paid ad tier, Tubi charges viewers nothing and runs entirely on advertising revenue. It reaches roughly 95% of US households across connected TVs, phones, and the web.

The scale is now substantial. Tubi reported more than 100 million monthly active users and about 1 billion hours of content streamed per month in 2025. It crossed more than $1 billion in annual revenue that year and reached profitability for the first time in the fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2025, which Fox chief executive Lachlan Murdoch said arrived earlier than expected. Nearly 60% of Tubi's audience is millennials or members of Generation Z, a demographic that advertisers pay a premium to reach.

Tubi is 100% owned by Fox Corporation. It operates as a subsidiary within Fox rather than as an independent company. There is no Tubi stock, no separate Tubi shareholders, and no outside investors with a stake in the service. Anyone who wants to own a piece of Tubi has to buy shares of Fox.

Fox is publicly traded on the Nasdaq under two tickers: FOXA for its Class A common stock and FOX for its Class B common stock. That means Tubi is indirectly owned by Fox's public shareholders. But Fox's share structure gives most of the voting power to a single family, so the public ownership is more limited than it looks. Fox's market capitalization was roughly $21 billion in mid-2026, down from about $31 billion at the end of 2025 after a sharp pullback in the stock, though Fox shares had risen more than 40% during 2025 on the strength of Tubi and its sports and news business.

Fox Corporation is a public company, but it is a controlled one. Fox uses a dual-class share structure. The Class A shares that most investors own carry no voting rights. Voting power sits almost entirely with the Class B shares, and the largest block of those has long been held by the Murdoch Family Trust.

Rupert Murdoch founded Fox Corporation in 2019, when it was spun off from 21st Century Fox after Disney acquired most of that company's entertainment assets. Rupert is now chairman emeritus. His eldest son, Lachlan Murdoch, serves as chairman and chief executive officer of Fox and controls the company through the family trust. This is the same pattern of concentrated founder-family control seen at other media and technology giants, comparable in spirit to the voting structures behind companies like Alphabet.

Before Fox, Tubi was a venture-backed startup. Farhad Massoudi and Thomas Ahn Hicks built it inside their company AdRise and raised outside capital from technology investors and Hollywood studios. Reported totals for its venture funding range between about $26 million and $34 million across its independent life, a modest sum for a streaming business.

The founders and early investors were bought out when Fox acquired the company in 2020. Fox paid cash, so the venture backers exited rather than rolling equity into Fox. The exact payouts to Massoudi, Hicks, and individual investors were not disclosed. What is public is the funding history and the final acquisition price.

The table below summarizes Tubi's funding and the change of ownership. Pre-acquisition round details are only partly disclosed, so some figures are approximate.

Because Tubi's owner is a public company, the ultimate owners of Tubi's economic interest are Fox's shareholders. Fox has no controlling founder holding a majority of its total equity in the way a private startup founder might. Its non-voting Class A shares are held broadly, with large positions concentrated among index-fund managers.

The biggest institutional holders of Fox stock are the major passive managers, led by Vanguard Group and BlackRock, along with State Street and other index funds. Reported percentages shift by filing date, but these firms typically rank as Fox's largest outside shareholders. Their stakes reflect Fox's presence in major stock indexes rather than any strategic interest in Tubi. Crucially, most of this institutional ownership is in the non-voting Class A stock, so it carries economic exposure but little control. This split between economic ownership and voting control is a recurring theme in how Netflix and other large media companies are owned, though at Fox the concentration of voting power is far more extreme.

Fox does not report Tubi as a standalone public segment with its own audited income statement. Tubi's results are folded into Fox's television business, and executives disclose Tubi metrics selectively on earnings calls. Fox has highlighted Tubi's revenue growth, monthly active users, view time, and, more recently, its move into profitability. On Fox's most recent earnings call, chief financial officer Steve Tomsic said the company's overall television advertising revenue rose 6%, driven primarily by Tubi's growth. That framing shows how central Tubi has become to Fox's advertising story, even without a separate line item.

Tubi is run day to day by Anjali Sud, who became chief executive officer on September 1, 2023. Sud previously led the video platform Vimeo as its CEO. She succeeded founder Farhad Massoudi, who departed after nearly a decade running the company he started. Under Sud, Tubi crossed 100 million monthly active users, passed $1 billion in annual revenue, and reached profitability.

Above Tubi sits Fox's leadership. Lachlan Murdoch is chairman and CEO of Fox Corporation and holds ultimate control of the company through the Murdoch family's trust. His father, Rupert Murdoch, remains chairman emeritus. Fox's board and senior executives, including CFO Steve Tomsic, set the capital allocation and strategy that govern how much Fox invests in Tubi.

What is confirmed is the chain of control: Sud leads Tubi, Tubi reports up through Fox's television and streaming operations, and Lachlan Murdoch controls Fox. What is less transparent is how much operating autonomy Tubi retains internally, since Fox does not break out Tubi as a separate governed entity with its own public board. Tubi has no independent directors answering to outside shareholders. It is a subsidiary managed inside a family-controlled public company.

The most consequential ownership story around Tubi is not about Tubi itself but about who controls its parent. For years, the Murdoch Family Trust structure left open the question of which of Rupert Murdoch's children would command Fox after his death. That question triggered litigation in Nevada among the family.

Fox announced a resolution on September 8, 2025. Under the settlement, several of Rupert Murdoch's children exited the trust and received cash funded partly by selling shares, while a new entity called LGC Holdco took over the remaining family stake. After the transactions, the family's holding is expected to be about 36.2% of Fox's Class B voting stock, concentrated to keep Lachlan Murdoch in control. A new stockholders agreement caps the family's combined voting power at 44% of Class B shares. The outcome cements Lachlan's grip on Fox, and by extension on Tubi, for years to come.

Tubi's free model and enormous library invite a different kind of scrutiny than subscription services face. A catalog of more than 300,000 licensed titles, plus low-cost originals and a push into creator content, is harder to curate tightly than a smaller premium library. Free platforms that reach very large, young audiences draw questions about age-appropriate content, ad placement, and how aggressively they moderate what appears alongside their programming. Tubi's scale with millennial and Gen Z viewers makes these questions more visible.

Tubi competes in an increasingly consolidated streaming market. Its free rivals include YouTube, the dominant ad-supported video platform, along with Paramount's Pluto TV and The Roku Channel. Its owner, Fox, is a large media company with significant control over sports and news rights in the US. As media companies bundle services and pool content, regulators watch how much market power concentrates in a few hands. Tubi's growth strengthens Fox's position in advertising-funded streaming, which sits next to the subscription bundling seen at rivals like Disney-owned Hulu. The competitive question is whether free, ad-supported streaming pulls advertising and viewing away from the paid model, and Fox is betting that it does.

Ownership explains Tubi's strategy. Fox chose not to spend billions building a premium subscription service to fight Netflix and Disney head-on, which is the route Comcast took with its own Peacock service. Instead it bought a free, ad-supported platform for about $440 million and let it grow on advertising alone. That decision flows directly from who owns Tubi. Fox is a company built on advertising and affiliate fees from news and sports, and Tubi extends that model to streaming rather than replacing it with subscriptions.

For Fox's investors, Tubi has become a rare bright spot. Fox executives credit Tubi for driving overall television advertising growth, and the service reached profitability faster than the company projected. In a media sector where many peers are losing money on streaming, a profitable free service that reaches younger audiences is a genuine strategic asset. Fox's stock strength in 2025 reflected that story, even as the shares gave back gains in 2026.

For viewers and advertisers, the ownership structure sets the terms of the product. Because Tubi answers to a family-controlled public company focused on advertising, its incentives point toward keeping the service free, maximizing watch time, and selling ads against a young audience. Viewers get a no-cost library, and advertisers get access to millennials and Gen Z who are hard to reach elsewhere. The tradeoff is that Tubi's users are the product being sold to advertisers, and decisions about content, ads, and data sit with Fox rather than with any independent Tubi board.

Finally, ownership concentrates control. Lachlan Murdoch controls Fox through a family trust that holds roughly a third of the voting stock, and the 2025 settlement locked that arrangement in place. That means the long-term direction of Tubi, one of the most-watched free services in America, ultimately rests with a single family. Public shareholders own the economics through Class A stock, but they hold almost no say over strategy. For a service used by more than 100 million people each month, that is a notable concentration of power.

Tubi is owned by Fox Corporation. Fox acquired Tubi in 2020 for about $440 million in cash, and Tubi now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary. Because Fox is publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the tickers FOXA and FOX, Tubi is indirectly owned by Fox's shareholders, though voting control of Fox rests with the Murdoch family.

Anjali Sud is the CEO of Tubi. She took the role on September 1, 2023, after previously serving as CEO of the video platform Vimeo. She succeeded Tubi's founder, Farhad Massoudi. Above her, Lachlan Murdoch is chairman and CEO of Fox Corporation, Tubi's parent company.

Tubi is not publicly traded on its own. It has no separate stock. Its parent, Fox Corporation, is publicly traded on the Nasdaq under FOXA for Class A shares and FOX for Class B shares. To gain economic exposure to Tubi, an investor would buy Fox stock rather than any Tubi security.

Tubi was founded in 2014 in San Francisco by Farhad Massoudi and Thomas Ahn Hicks, through their advertising-technology company AdRise. It launched as a free ad-supported service called Tubi TV. Massoudi served as CEO until 2023, when Anjali Sud took over.

Fox Corporation agreed to acquire Tubi in March 2020 and closed the deal in April 2020 for approximately $440 million in cash. Before the acquisition, Tubi had raised a reported $26 million to $34 million in venture funding from investors including Jump Capital, Foundation Capital, Lionsgate, and MGM. Those investors and the founders were bought out in the cash deal.

Tubi crossed more than 100 million monthly active users and over $1 billion in annual revenue in 2025, and it streams around 1 billion hours of content per month. It reached profitability for the first time in the quarter ended September 30, 2025. Nearly 60% of its audience is made up of millennials and Gen Z viewers, which makes it a valuable advertising platform for Fox.