Rupert Murdoch Testified That He 'Kicked Around' the Idea of Buying 'The Apprentice' After Trump Lost 2020 Election

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The billionaire co-founder of Fox News once mulled buying the rights to defunct television show The Apprentice after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, but ultimately didn't move forward as he thought the former president would "kill" the show by making it about politics.

In sworn testimony released publicly this week, Fox executive Rupert Murdoch acknowledged he and his son "kicked around" the idea of acquiring the show, which Trump hosted for 14 seasons starting in 2004, in the wake of the election.

"We were looking around for what in the hell do we put on the evenings in Fox Business because CNBC has on repeats of, I don't know, Shark Tank, I think," Murdoch said in the testimony, reported by NBC News.

He added: "You have a lot of crazy ideas in business. We talk about it, we do something, or we don't do it."

But weeks later, his thoughts had shifted.

"Having second thoughts, Trump would turn it into a full-time campaign vehicle. He would kill it," Murdoch said elsewhere in the testimony.

The testimony was made public in a court filing as part of a $1.6 billion lawsuit brought against Fox News by voting equipment company Dominion Voting Systems, which was the subject of conspiracies of widespread election fraud and other wrongdoing in the wake of the November 2020 presidential election.

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The company has argued that some of the people spreading the lies about election fraud — including, it argues, Fox News personalities — privately acknowledged they did not believe the conspiracy theories, but still amplified them on-air, allegedly in order to get ratings.

Executives at the network were seemingly worried about how some of its top personalities were speaking on air. In one email made public Tuesday and highlighted by the Post, Murdoch emailed the company's CEO, writing: "Maybe Sean and Laura went too far," a reference to primetime stars Hannity and Ingraham.

In another email sent by Murdoch to former House Speaker Paul Ryan, the Fox News chairman wrote that Hannity was "privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers!" In the same email, Murdoch referred to conspiracies about the election being rigged as "nonsense."

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Fox has argued, in a counterclaim, that Dominion "mischaracterized the record" and "cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context."

RELATED: In Testimony, Sean Hannity Said He Did Not Believe 'for One Second' the 2020 Election Was Fraudulent

In a statement sent to PEOPLE, a spokesperson for Fox accused Dominion of using "distortions and misinformation" in what it called a "PR campaign to smear FOX News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press."