Inside the real-life Murdoch succession drama: The cruel king exposed by his own son
A blistering interview given by his youngest son has exposed Rupert Murdoch as a vindictive father who has pitted his children against each other all their lives. It gives us a fascinating insight into dynastic dysfunction, but can James Murdoch really outfox his dad? Megan Lloyd Davies reports
First came a billionaire family on opposing sides of a courtroom battle about the future of a huge family trust. Now there’s a bombshell interview with the out-of-favour son. The story of the Murdoch family and the vicious fight for future control of their media empire is the real-life Succession drama that just keeps giving.
In a new – and very rare – interview, youngest son James has laid bare some remarkable details about just how closely Murdoch fact mirrors, and even surpasses, the Roys’ family drama. And in a family that has long remained tight-lipped about their struggles for control, it’s a groundbreaking move.
Speaking to The Atlantic in the wake of a decision under which Rupert lost his legal fight to ensure his oldest son Lachlan would control a family trust after his death, his younger brother James has detailed courtroom moves straight out of the playbook of TV patriarch Logan Roy.
During a five-hour deposition in Nevada last September as James, Liz and Prue opposed Rupert’s proposed change to stop the trust being split between the four eldest Murdoch siblings as had always been agreed, James has revealed the pointed – and scathing – questions he was asked in the meeting with his father and his lawyers present.
These included: “Have you ever done anything successful on your own?” And the final insult? Rupert, his own father, was the one texting the lawyer the questions to ask as he sat in front of him. “How f****** twisted is that?” James said to journalist McKay Coppins.
Labelled “the troublesome beneficiary” during the legal battle, James was set up from an early age as the rival to his brother for his father’s favour. But while Lachlan, who is one year older than James, followed Rupert’s lead, his younger brother showed early signs that he wouldn’t necessarily toe their conservative line.
Bright and articulate, he made headlines when he fell asleep during a press conference while interning at one of his father’s newspapers. He loved the teenage summers he spent on archaeological digs in Italy as a teenager. Later, he went to Harvard, grew a beard and got a tattoo before dropping out to start a hip-hop label with friends in New York. If you feel there are echoes of Kendall Roy in there, you’re not mistaken.
Eventually, however, James came into the fold when Rupert bought his record label – which wasn’t the last time Murdoch senior acquired one of his children’s businesses. News Corporation bought Liz’s Shine TV for £415m in 2011.
But even though James had joined the family business, his first assignment was arguably a poisoned chalice: he was sent to Hong Kong to oversee a satellite TV company called Star which had lost $200m since News Corp acquired it. Meanwhile, Lachlan was still seen as the one being primed for succession.
James, however, defied Star’s performance to date by repositioning its growth strategy, changing up its programming and making it profitable. When he was promoted to chief executive of British Sky Broadcasting, his successes continued as he cleaned up its macho culture, restored audience faith and turned it into “a respected, high-growth company”.
Rupert, who is known for his conservative views, increasingly suspected James’s wife Kathryn Hufschmid was behind the liberal drift in his son’s attitudes. But even so, James looked in prime position to succeed when Lachlan resigned from Fox, another plank of the family media business, because he felt undermined by Rupert.
The Murdoch family psychology, however, remained doggedly problematic.
In 2008, biographer Michael Wolff wrote that while Rupert was clearly proud of James, he was also “even perhaps slightly afraid of him”. In 2010, in a plotline that made its way straight into an episode of Succession, Rupert called his adult children home to the family ranch in Australia for some family therapy which ended up a “car crash”, according to James. The siblings ended up signing “the Murdoch Principles”, detailing how they’d behave to each other in future, but the supposed truce didn’t last long.
First came the News of the World phone-hacking scandal that led to the resignation of James, who was by then overseeing News Corp’s operations in Europe and Asia, after being implicated and appearing before a parliamentary committee. According to him, Liz and Rupert were the ones who decided he should take the fall, and in 2012 he moved back to the US to become deputy chief operating officer of News Corp.
Speaking to The Atlantic, Kathryn said she believed James had long been set up to fail by his father. “He was pitting them against each other,” she said. “But there was always going to be one winner.”
Three years later came the next twist as Lachlan, who had been living in Australia since he left the family business, announced he was returning to the US to become chief executive of Fox – and James was going to report to him. After bluffs and double bluffs, it was decided that the brothers would run Fox together.
But gradually James became more and more concerned about the direction the Murdoch media empire was taking, as News Corp newspapers The Sun and The Sunday Times threw their support behind Brexit and Fox News rallied for Donald Trump.
“There’s this tabloid culture that’s contrarian for the sake of it, and delights in poking people in the eye,” James told The Atlantic. “At its worst, it metastasizes into something nasty and scary and manipulative.”
A philosophical divide was beginning to yawn with James, Pru and Liz on one side, and Lachlan and Rupert on the other.
“I underestimated the ability of a profit motive to make people do terrible things – to make companies do terrible things,” James said.
Concerned about the effect Fox News was having both on US politics and the whole Murdoch empire, James took a key decision in 2017 after white supremacists marched through Charlottesville and Fox backed Trump, who had said there were “very fine people” among them. With Kathryn’s backing, he wrote an email that he presumably knew would be leaked to the press.
“I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis,” he wrote before announcing a $1m donation to the Anti-Defamation League.
The divisions continued. Lachlan was against the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney for $71.3bn in 2019 – a deal that James was involved in – and when each of the siblings netted around $2bn, James and Kathryn donated $100m to their non-profit foundation. It was later revealed it had largely backed nonpartisan and Democratic-leaning causes in the 2020 US election.
The final blow came when wildfires raged through Australia in early 2020 and the Murdochs’ Australian news outlets downplayed the role of climate change in causing them. James, knowing that Lachlan was now set for the top spot when his father died, decided to speak out once again, and the family divisions hit the headlines again after a spokesperson for the couple talked of their “frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic” and “disappointment” with the “ongoing denial” in the Australian media.
The News Corp board had had enough, and James resigned.
But with relations between Rupert and his youngest son at a new low and increasing media speculation that James would team up with his sisters to wrest control of the empire, Rupert became more and more concerned. News stories were leaked, suspicions planted and a battle plan honed. In November 2023, the three siblings were summoned for a Zoom meeting with Rupert and Lachlan, where they were told about the intention to change the terms of the family trust.
Last December, The New York Times reported that a Nevada commissioner had ruled Rupert and Lachlan could not change its terms and had acted in “bad faith”. Their actions were described as a “carefully crafted charade”. Rupert, who had developed the Australian newspaper his father had left him into a huge empire through a combination of tenacity, risk-taking and aggressive expansion, had been thwarted in his ambition to control how his legacy would be shaped after his death. At 93, his next move remains to be seen.
A hint of the fury that lies behind closed doors, however, lies in the response to James’s tell-all, by one of Rupert’s most trusted columnists, the Sky News political commentator Andrew Bolt. In a column in the pages of the media magnate’s own newspapers this week, he labelled James “a most ungrateful, entitled and treacherous hypocrite”.
“This second son of Rupert Murdoch, chairman emeritus of the Murdoch media empire, is getting hero headlines for abusing his father and brother [Lachlan] and whingeing how he’s been hard done by,” Bolt fumed in the opinion piece, which was syndicated in News Corp’s tabloid titles around the country.
“He’s also bitching about his brother Lachlan, now steering this company – all in a long profile of James in the left-wing Atlantic magazine, and gleefully retailed by Murdoch-hating papers.
“I haven’t seen such treachery and jealousy since Prince Harry and Meghan Markle did the same wah-wah about Harry’s family, falsely painting the royals as racists and b******s.”
Not wanting to be accused of being steered by his bosses, he added: “I should declare I did not warn Lachlan or his team I was writing this, and was not asked to.”
As James surveys the wreckage that the decades-long power struggle over legacy has wreaked in his family, he must surely be wondering what the Murdoch empire could look like in the future if the trust stays intact.
All the indications are that he feels it makes good business sense to focus on corporate and editorial governance, because Fox News has paid dearly in the past for giving airtime to misinformation. Last year, the company paid $787m to settle a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems after false claims were aired that their machines had rigged the 2020 election against Trump.
Only time will tell if James has indeed played a trump card that will allow him to outfox his father and brother and inherit the crown they fought so ruthlessly to disinherit him from. But if his interview in The Atlantic is anything to go by, James is ready for the fight.
And he’s ready to do it very publicly too.
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