Cox heir slams capitalism after securing ‘hundreds of millions’ from family

By Shannon Thaler

Published July 6, 2023

nypost.com/2023/07/06/cox-media-heir-slams-capitalism-after-securing-millions/

A cop-hating heir to the Cox media empire ripped its sprawling businesses as “rotten capitalism” — days after claiming he had secured “multiple hundreds of millions of dollars” for himself as he cut ties with his wealthy clan.

James “Fergie” Chambers — a 38-year-old professed Communist who also loves guns and has the letters “ACAB,” standing for “All cops are bastards,” on his neck — said he was outraged at his family over their $10 million donation to the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, also known as Cop City.

In an exclusive interview with The Post, Chambers said this week that his family’s gift to the police last month was the final straw in a “lifetime of buildup” to cutting ties with his family, ranked by Forbes as the eighth-richest in the US with a fortune of $34.5 billion.

“My family is a rotten capitalism firm like the rest of them,” Chambers said, claiming that he lives a humble life in New Hampshire with his partner and four children compared to his Atlanta-based relatives.

He is the first-born son of James Cox Chambers, the co-owner of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks with a net worth of $5.65 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.

Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises was founded 1898 by Chambers’ great-grandfather, former Ohio Gov. James M. Cox, who made an unsuccessful run for president in 1920 against Warren G. Harding with Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his running mate before going on to build his industrial empire.

The powerful conglomerate has grown to include Cox Communications, the nation’s third-largest cable company, and businesses including Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book and Valpak.

“Personally, I don’t spend much money on myself. I drive a three-year-old Tacoma, and I live in a three-bedroom house,” he claimed.

“I don’t even like to fly — never mind own a private jet,” he added, noting that his extended family is “all about maintaining dynasty.”

The family fortune built by Gov. Cox was bequeathed to his two daughters, Barbara and Anne, Chambers’ grandmother.

Before Anne died at 100 in January 2020, she distributed her shares to her three children, who included James Cox Chambers, who reportedly owns a 17% stake in Cox Enterprises.

After Cox Chambers divorced Fergie’s mom, he married the daughter of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and fathered another son.

After hearing about Cox Foundation’s Cop City donation, Chambers said he proceeded to call his cousin Alex Taylor — who has served as the president and CEO of Cox Enterprises since 2018 — to tell him, “I don’t want any part of this.”

“I was disgusted by it,” Chambers said of the cop training center, which is expected to occupy 85 acres with classrooms, a burn building and a mock city that will even include a nightclub upon completion later this year.

Chambers went on to score himself an alleged payout more befitting an oligarch than a proletariat.

Exact figures and details of the deal must remain confidential, Chambers said.

“I will be ‘worth’ multiple hundreds of millions of dollars, and I will continue to have a considerable income for the decade or so to come,” he tweeted.

Chambers added that with his exit, he took the “opportunity to extract as much from the Cox capital as I possibly could before I die.”

When The Post reached out to Cox Enterprises for comment, a spokesperson said Chambers “has never had an active role in Cox Enterprises or any of its businesses.”

The spokesperson declined to comment further.

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Chambers said he plans to use his purported windfall to support pro-Communist organizations.

He has previously worked with progressive groups like Rise Up Georgia, Occupy Our Homes Atlanta and a number of other action-based collectives across Georgia and New England.

Chambers may detest cops, but the heavily tattooed Bard College dropout has expressed his affinity for firearms.

Earlier this year, he posted a photo on Instagram of the “very fave” gun in his collection, and complained about the Bay State’s strict gun laws.

“I love Massachusetts, but I don’t love that my guns have to go to jail when I’m a resident there,” he wrote.

“Being anti-cop and pro-gun from a revolutionary perspective is the only sensible stance you can take,” he told The Post, claiming that the country’s issues with guns stem from the fact that “we don’t live in a workers’ state” but rather one that’s “controlled by the few and powerful.”

He also claimed that MMA and jiu-jitsu “have an incredibly right-wing, cop-heavy culture [and] that something needs to change to create a culture of self-defense on the left in the US.”

When he showed off his freshly inked ACAB tattoo in 2020, he called it “a sound investment in my future.”

“Law enforcement is about the protection of capital and nothing else,” he told The Post. “Most people with my perspective see the expansion of the surveillance state and the militarized police — even enhanced police training as a means to bettering police — as simply a consolidation of the ruling class who is very afraid that the amount of wealth they’ve hoarded at this point could come to bite them in the ass.”

In a weekend tweetstorm addressed to his “friends and comrades,” Chambers gloated about becoming “the 1st Cox to fully detach from the company.”

“I did this bc I believe strongly that my primary material purpose on earth is to extract as much capital from that entity as possible, in order to build socialist infrastructure/institutions in the 21st century, on the domestic & intl level,” he wrote.