Cox scion’s defection over ‘Cop City’ shines a light on media conflicts, old-money power

The Cox family’s Marxist black sheep very publicly separating from the flock this month over their support of Atlanta’s public safety training center made for a cartoonish passing amusement in the right-wing press. Here in Atlanta, the defection of Jim “Fergie” Chambers Jr. is a bigger story than that. 

It’s a rare insider’s view of the profound ethical friction between Cox Enterprises’ involvement in secretive projects and the transparency mission of its media assets, especially the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It’s an even rarer spotlight on the way old money maintains a vice grip of privilege and power on this town — and even on its own family members.

It’s also a royal-family-sized power move underscoring how “Cop City” controversy has become a historic proxy battle over who really controls Atlanta and maybe Georgia — a new democracy or an old oligarchy. With his act of aristocratic class treason, Chambers claims he now independently controls a fortune somewhere north of $200 million and aims to spend virtually all of it on leftist revolutionary programs. That means he has far more money to throw into civic activism and international organizing than many large corporations dole out to leverage major local results — including the training center itself — and has already made the “Vote to Stop Cop City” referendum effort his first check-signing.

“I sent $60,000 to the referendum effort the day the bank transfer came down,” Chambers said in a recent phone interview. “That’s what was requested of me in the moment… I’m down to help Atlanta.”

Even within a Southern tradition of wealthy eccentrics, Chambers stands out. Clean-cut and bespectacled, he cuts an initially nerdy figure until one spots the communist and Soviet tattoos. In 2017, he made the news for banning police officers and active military service members from an East Atlanta gym he operated as a radical organizing space. For years, he ran a collective farm in Morgan County, an experiment he helped to rebuild in western Massachusetts. Last year, he headed to the Donbas to cover the invasion of Ukraine as a pro-Russia citizen journalist. He now lives with his partner and their toddler in New Hampshire — in part because it has no tax on his new fortune.

I first met Chambers at a 2015 protest he helped organize about the killing of Anthony Hill, who was shot to death by a DeKalb police officer while experiencing a manic episode. (The officer is serving a prison sentence for aggravated assault.) It was part of Chambers’ work as an organizer and funder of the historic 2014-2016 Black Lives Matter protests here that served as an early warning for the outrage to come in 2020. 

I was struck by how he was passionate about his politics but also constantly self-effacing, freely bringing up his own mental health struggles — which included a suicide attempt and manic domestic violence incident with his then-wife — and his role as a trust-funder white guy backing a Black-led movement. At another march, I saw him organize other white protesters to be the first in the line of fire in case police executed mass arrests so that Black protesters could continue their demonstration.

I also was fascinated by Chambers’ claim to be a scion of Atlanta’s ultra-powerful Cox family, billionaires whose private holdings include a top telecommunications firm, auto auctions and many media, including ownership of the AJC. He is the son of James Cox Chambers Sr., the billionaire whose notable public acts in recent years included buying into the ownership of the Atlanta Hawks. 

The younger Chambers brought this up in passing as of interest to someone else in the media world, not pushing it as a political angle to his protests. The AJC didn’t bring it up, either, even when its own protest stories quoted Chambers. In chats with longtime AJC reporters, I learned they had never heard of him despite their appetite for gossip about Cox family intrigues.

This family-secret approach continues today — at least one side. Cox Enterprises did not respond to any of my questions or comment requests for this column. The AJC says it is editorially independent from the parent company.

Chambers, on the other hand, blew it all up in July 1 posts on social media. He announced that he had become the first Cox family member since the founding of its fortune in the 1890s to break away from its web of private trusts. And the trigger, he said, was the training center — whose secretive corporate fundraising was led and seeded by his cousin, Cox Enterprises CEO Alex Taylor, and which is supported by the AJC’s editorial board.

“Cop City, the complicity of my family in supporting that project, both financially, via lobbying, and with our media outlets, changed that forever; the vestiges of family bonds I had held on to by a thread evaporated in the process, too, and so I took this final step,” wrote Chambers of his long detente with his capitalist family.

There’s still some secrecy, though. Chambers said he had to sign non-disclosure agreements that prevent him from stating the exact amount of money he has received — “multiple hundreds of millions” is as far as he’ll go — or the financial structure that secured it. But, he added, he avoided signing a “non-disparagement clause” that would have prevented him from discussing the situation at all — since secrecy is one of his main concerns.

“I think they all think this is just my family-rebellion agenda,” he said, adding that family conflicts and privileges indeed “inspired my politics” but that his breakaway is ultimately “tactical.”

“I still have other fish to fry,” he said of his message to the family. “I’m just making use of y’all for propaganda.”

Breaking away

Chambers describes his break-up as a highly complex extrication from a system of family trusts so secretive he was never sure what his own financial worth was and so ironclad that there are elements he is still tied to — and his own four children can’t be removed at all until they’re old enough to decide. It’s a system with significant public impacts, as Chambers describes it, because a major function is passing along massive wealth to the next generations with little or no tax, while another is ensuring exclusive family control of the business, with none of the at least theoretical public accountability elements of public shareholding.

Chambers said the family fortune was largely handed down via two trusts — the Dayton Trust and the Atlanta Trust — created by the Cox company founder James M. Cox, an Ohioan who served as a congressman and governor there in the early 1900s. Money and related power trickled down through the trusts to successive generations, known by sequential nicknames like “G3” and “G4,” Chambers said. Some income comes through other trusts, including a massive real estate holding entity, he said. The trusts also included the company’s shares, which under a modern structure still can’t be sold to anyone outside the family, he said.

As a member of “G4,” Chambers said, he initially got a “training-wheels trust” that gave him increasing amounts of income at various ages. That started with $1 million to $3 million at age 25, he said, in addition to the significant real estate trust income. While that gave him a very comfortable life and the ability to fund activism, Chambers said, the system was still intricate and secret, with power held by the generation currently in charge. The “smoke and mirrors at the whims of the old folks,” he said, made it impossible to even know what kind of wealth might come his way: “Am I sort of rich? I am really rich? Am I super rich?”

More transparency came, he said, about 10 years ago, when the family became concerned about the possibility of the death of his grandmother, Anne Cox Chambers, the powerful family matriarch who eventually passed in early 2020. The result was a massive restructuring to limit tax liability and pass on the fortune and corporate shares with no tax impact to recipients, Chambers claims, adding it drew scrutiny from the IRS. (The IRS did not respond to questions.) Brief public reports at the time referred to this as Anne Cox Chambers transferring her trust to her children, making them billionaires.

The changes created an entity called the Cox Family Office and liquidated the former trusts into a new grantor-retained annuity trust, Chambers said. “It’s a major-league tax loophole… by which rich people are evading the estate tax,” he said, adding that “what we did in Atlanta was one of the more considerable moves of that nature.”

The sheer existence of the AJC as a crucial Georgia news source is a big act of civic responsibility by the Cox family. But Chambers said that, at least before the restructuring, there were other motives as well — a clause that would have killed one of the trusts if the AJC left the family ownership. “If we sold the AJC, the trust would be over,” Chambers said. “Even if there’d been a broom closet with a guy tweeting for 20 bucks an hour, and we called that the AJC, we would have to own that.”

Chambers said he has long considered breaking away from the structure somehow, at one point telling Taylor, “I would like to take the luck of being born in this position and make it useful to things I care about, which frankly are diametrically opposed to what you care about.”

Those were non-confrontational discussions, though, in part because Chambers said he never wanted to say anything bad about Cox while his grandmother was still alive.

“I was closer to my grandmother than anyone in my family on an emotional and personal level, which is one reason they hate me,” Chambers said. “…I really loved her. I have a picture of her above my bed.”

The matriarch did not agree with his politics, he said, but “had sympathy for and saw an appeal in what she saw as a realness or down-to-earthness” in him and his eclectic array of friends, such as a tattoo artist and a train conductor who had done federal prison time for selling nitrous oxide at a Grateful Dead concert.

His relations with other family members varied, from one with whom he happily discussed such concepts as employee profit-sharing to others he claims had him “tailed” by private investigators and others he describes as “the epitome of spoiled rich kids that are living it up on the family dole.”

But his overall quiet approach changed with the controversy over the training center, which emerged as a surprise announcement in 2021 — including Cox’s role in secretly planning and funding it.

“When I found out we were sponsoring Cop City, I got bolder and aggressive,” Chambers said. He called his family “enemies of the people” and listed their names on social media. “We have blood on our hands, quite literally,” with the controversial police killing of the protester who called themself Tortuguita, he said, adding that some of his friends and friends-of-friends are among those facing disputed domestic terrorism charges.

All of that, he said, is “not only because of the material support we’re giving [training center planners] but the way the media is portraying them.” Referring to the AJC’s echoing of state and City claims that protesters are outsiders, he adds, “And media owned by roughly 15 people, the vast majority of whom live thousands of miles outside Atlanta, daring to call [protesters] outside agitators, [which] is just beyond me.”

Conflicts

Chambers’ concerns mirror many voiced by protest organizers and various social-media critics about Cox’s belatedly revealed involvement and the AJC’s coverage. Criticisms focus on the AJC’s spotty use of disclosures about Cox involvement in news stories and its editorial board’s stance. More broadly, the paper did no blow-by-blow coverage of planning meetings and was scooped on some major critical coverage, including the key revelation that the public spending was much higher than claimed.

It’s not the only ethical quandary for the AJC, as Cox’s massive interests continue to expand, including via a new venture capital fund. Another major case was a state deal to bring electric vehicle maker Rivian to Morgan and Walton counties with a secretly selected site and tax-break package, to angry surprise and pollution claims from neighbors.

Cox’s editorial disclosures emphasize editorial independence, but the company’s own moves appear to surprise its journalists at times, and there’s always the question of how much they can bite a hand that feeds them. Cox has an ethics policy that reflects the tension, simultaneously saying its media assets must focus on public trust and integrity while also telling Cox employees never to talk to reporters.

AJC spokesperson Jaime McMurtrie says the media organization’s editorial decision-making is insulated from the parent company.

“Neither Cox Enterprises nor the Cox Family Office has any input into the editorial decisions of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The newsroom operates as an independent organization with its own leadership and governance structures,” said McMurtrie. Regarding policies on disclosing Cox relationships with subjects of stories, she said, “We follow the standard journalism practice of disclosing in stories that Cox Enterprises owns The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. We have done so for decades and will continue to do so.”

Among the questions Cox Enterprises did not answer is why the company continues to invest in or donate to inherently secretive projects that conflict with their media arm’s transparency objectives and whether those media have pushed for any such policy changes. McMurtrie said the AJC has not.

Those assets now include the recently purchased Axios, a major digital media outlet, which would not answer questions on the record. The ethical implications are spreading to independent media as well that “partner” with the AJC on “content-sharing” or special projects in an increasing trend.

Jane Kirtley, director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota, said that Cox’s private ownership and multiple corporate interests mean it should go the extra mile in the transparency of its deals that affect news coverage and objectivity. News organizations will always emphasize independence, she said but noted that in today’s “fragile” media environment, it could be harder in practice to ignore financial pressures that could come from challenging the mother ship.

“Of course, in an ideal world, no, they should not have any kind of economic dealings that would have impact or perceived impact on the independence of their news organization,” Kirtley said of Cox. “But when you look at the many threads that make up the quilt of the Cox empire, they need to make money wherever they can… If it’s unavoidable — you as the editor can’t stop the parent company from entering into a potentially conflicting operation — then all you can really do is make sure your readers [or] viewers are aware.”

Chambers said he had no say in the AJC’s operations, and he learned of Cox’s training center involvement only from news coverage after the fact. He said he thinks “directives are given” from Cox to AJC editorial leadership at times but that a real bias problem is cultural and based on the types of executives who are hired and how they are trained. He ties it into the “Atlanta Way,” the old system where white-led corporations and white politicians agreed to team with Black elite leaders as a Civil Rights compromise that evolved into a system of such backroom deal-making and favor-trading as the training center.

“The Atlanta Way is so widespread. Everybody sits on everybody else’s board,” said Chambers. “It’s just so incestuous that you don’t need to sit down and tell the editor what to say or not… It’s a culture being advanced.”

“Frankly, these media outlets are very small divisions of the corporations that are running them,” Chambers adds. “It’s a propaganda division. It’s not making money for anyone.”

Now long living outside Atlanta himself and interested in international socialist and communist movements, Chambers also takes a bigger view. “The Atlanta Way is the American Way,” he said. “It’s just a little more blatant in Atlanta because they’ve always played these race games with it, and they’ve played the Civil Rights [community] to make it a little more Teflon.”

Where the money goes

The Atlanta Way is under direct assault now from “Cop City” protest organizers, but they clearly won’t be outspending the corporate community. Then again, any given corporation’s spending is relatively minor, Chambers notes, calling Cox’s $10 million to the training center similar to what the family tosses to a startup investment or to quiet an “annoying cousin.” Yet that still sets off entire movements with agendas of their own. Chambers said the training center buy-in reflects a family phobia of populist uprisings and crime. “They’re so paranoid. Especially the ones who continue to live in the city,” he said.

Now Chambers says he has a massive fund of his own — and his own agenda of “building revolutionary organizations” and infrastructure. “I’m developing really a team to help craft a long-term plan for this,” he said. “Another thing people have been cautionary about is, don’t give all of this away right now.”

Speaking like an athlete who just signed a major-league contract or someone who won the Powerball lottery, Chambers said it would take time to develop a structure to vet and wisely distribute the funds while avoiding grifters and opportunists. He doesn’t want it to become a traditional nonprofit foundation that becomes fossilized, either.

He wouldn’t identify his advisors but said there are a variety of them looking at both domestic and international opportunities. He’s going to a “Marxist school” outside the country later this year for some training. But Atlanta also remains on his radar as a place he still cares about and the training center as a key “metaphor” for a lot of issues that he believes must be opposed. One priority he’s heard from Atlanta is the need for independent media resources, he said.

Some ideals remain from his previous level of giving as a low-seven-figures millionaire — specifically not dictating how his money is used and not buying his way into movements.

“I’m not trying to lead any [expletive] movement,” he said. “My primary purpose is to identify leadership and follow it, basically. Maybe the last, most adventurous thing I will do on my own is make this move and announce it like I did. This is like, ‘Fergie takes his pants off!’ and that’s what I do.”

And while he muses on Lenin’s theories of when the world is ready for revolution, Chambers is also ready to ally with other flavors of leftism he doesn’t necessarily agree with, such as anarchists and mainstream liberals who are involved in the “Cop City” protests.

“I’m willing to work with whoever is opposing the right things for the right reasons,” he said.

Update: This story has been updated with comment from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and with an additional photo from Chambers.