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Why is Rupert Murdoch leaving his empire now?

Lachlan Murdoch will be formally in charge of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and everything else his father built and bought. For now.

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Rupert Murdoch spent a lifetime building one of the world’s most important media empires. Now, at age 92, he says he’s no longer going to run it day to day.

In November, Murdoch will step down as chair for Fox Corporation, the company that owns Fox News and the Fox broadcast channel, as well as News Corp, the company that owns publishers including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.

Murdoch has been the last remaining media megamogul running the business he created. And that business has been extremely influential in both entertainment and politics — particularly in the US, where Fox News has enormous sway with Republican politicians and voters. His formal departure from the boardroom isn’t shocking — again, he’s 92 — but it is still momentous. And yes, there’s a lot in here that reminds people of HBO’s Succession because that show was deeply inspired by Murdoch and his family.

Here’s what we know, and don’t know, about the move:

Who’s going to run the Murdoch media empire now?

Rupert Murdoch’s announcement cements the notion that Lachlan Murdoch, one of his six children, will be steering the family business from now on. Lachlan was already CEO of Fox Corporation, and he’ll become the sole chair of News Corp. (Longtime Murdoch lieutenant Robert Thomson remains CEO of News Corp.)

Okay, but who’s really going to run the Murdoch media empire now?

That’s a good question. Fox and News Corp are public companies, but the Murdoch family controls them via ownership of a special class of shares , and Rupert Murdoch still controls the trust that controls those shares. So at the moment, nothing structural is going to happen at either company without his assent. It’s also worth noting there’s a scenario that gets floated periodically in which Lachlan’s brother James, who used to help manage the family business but split from it a few years ago, wrests control of it following his father’s death.

Why is Murdoch stepping down now?

We can’t stress this enough: He’s 92. He was going to have to leave the company sooner or later. But in a memo to his employees, Murdoch says he’s in “robust” health despite repeated incidents over the past few years. In 2018, for instance, he severely injured himself after falling on Lachlan’s yacht, the New York Times reported .

The clearest indicator that Murdoch has been thinking of moving on was a plan, floated last fall, to combine his two companies, which many observers thought was a step to give Lachlan increased control. That deal was scuttled in January after investors — and James Murdoch — complained. In 2019, Murdoch took many of his chips off the table by selling his Hollywood film studio and other assets to Disney for $71 billion .

Murdoch’s future and the future of his empire once he leaves have been the object of media speculation for years, and not just on prestige TV. This week, for example, author Michael Wolff published The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty , which covers infighting within the Murdoch empire and begins with a mock obituary for Murdoch.

How will things change at Murdoch’s companies if he’s not on their boards?

We’re going to find out. Murdoch came up through the news business — his father owned newspapers in Australia — and, for years, Murdoch was famously hands-on with many of his news properties. Fox News was a slightly different case. For a long time, it was run as a fiefdom by executive Roger Ailes, though Murdoch certainly had views about the channel’s coverage and enjoyed the power it gave him in Republican politics. And in 2016, Rupert and Lachlan forced Ailes out following sexual harassment claims.

So it’s unclear whether Rupert is willing or able to stop steering any of those properties now. In a company memo announcing his move, he made a point of saying he’s not walking away from his companies at all: “I will be watching our broadcasts with a critical eye, reading our newspapers and websites and books with much interest, and reaching out to you with thoughts, ideas and advice,” he wrote. (He also took time to complain about “elites” who have “open contempt” for the rest of the world, as well as “most of the media [that] is in cahoots with those elites”).

There is also an alternate view of Murdoch’s recent involvement at this company — which is that he hasn’t been that involved.

“There’s a leadership void,” says professional Murdoch-watcher Brian Stelter, most recently of CNN. Stelter notes that during the discovery for the Fox Dominion defamation case , emails and depositions paint Murdoch as more of a bystander to the goings-on at Fox News. That’s a real change from the Murdoch of old.

On the other hand, Murdoch has historically been quite good at buck-passing when his company has been accused of misdeeds (see: his testimony in the News of the World phone-hacking case more than a decade ago. Is it possible that Murdoch wasn’t really checked out in 2012, but has been for the last few years? We’ll find out.

This is a developing story that we’ll be updating as new information is available.

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In the Murdoch family succession battle, Fox News and democracy hang in the balance

Terry Gross

Rupert Murdoch speaks in San Francisco in 2011. Murdoch's media empire has included News Corp, Fox News, Fox Sports, 21st Century Fox, HarperCollins, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

Rupert Murdoch speaks in San Francisco in 2011. Murdoch's media empire has included News Corp, Fox News, Fox Sports, 21st Century Fox, HarperCollins, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal.

A 91-year-old billionaire sits atop a global media empire, while his adult children vie to control the family company in the next generation.

It sounds like the plot of the HBO series Succession , but New York Times journalist Jim Rutenberg says the real-life drama involving Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch and his children, Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence, rivals anything a screenwriter could dream up.

James Murdoch Quits Family Media Empire News Corp After 'Disagreements'

"I ... have always suspected that the Succession writers have some mole in the family, because it's just too many things they seem to know," Rutenberg says. "It's just got all the drama you want in television, but democracy hinges on its future."

Rutenberg is a consulting producer on the new CNN documentary series, The Murdochs: Empire of Influence, which is based on a long investigative piece that he wrote with Times reporter Jonathan Mahler in 2019. He says the next few years could help determine the direction of the Fox News empire.

Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch Heads To Australia As Fox News Faces Headwinds

"There's an interesting thing about the way Rupert set up the company," Rutenberg says. "It's a family board with these children. ... Rupert cannot be outvoted [but] once Rupert dies, each child has an equal vote ... and the company could conceivably be taken in a different direction."

Rupert named his eldest son, Lachlan, as CEO of the Fox Corp. in 2019. Lachlan is, Rutenberg notes, "actually more conservative than his father." Meanwhile, James has been "horrified by what he sees as a turn toward Trumpism by Fox News."

'Succession' actor Brian Cox can't defend Logan Roy, but he can relate to him

"Fox News is hands down the number one news network in this country, and it got even bigger under Trump," Rutenberg says. "If Trump gave Rupert anything, it was the lifeblood of his business, which was ratings, which equaled revenue."

Interview highlights

On a moment in 2016 when Rupert, then 86, suffered a serious spinal injury aboard Lachlan's yacht, and the Murdoch siblings scrambled to establish a line of succession

[Rupert] hasn't named a successor. The kids are called (now adults, really) and told, "Come to L.A.," because he's airlifted to a hospital in L.A. ... What's going on behind-the-scenes here is that not only has Rupert not named a successor, but his two leading candidates at this moment — his son, Lachlan, his eldest, and his son James — are in a really pitched battle to lead the company, and they will lead it in two very different directions. ... And there's also this long history of fighting for this job. In this moment, everything is just in sort of suspended animation while the family sort of sees how they're going to game this out. ...

Rupert Murdoch poses with his sons Lachlan (left) and James (right) in London in 2016. John Phillips/Getty Images hide caption

Rupert Murdoch poses with his sons Lachlan (left) and James (right) in London in 2016.

Now this being Rupert Murdoch, he is a survivor. His own mother lived till over 100 with all of her faculties intact – ultimately, comes through this with aplomb. ... He had said he "felt stronger than ever," but there really was this moment where he could have died and there would have been this fight and we would have, again, lived with the consequences.

On how Fox News changed after Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes stepped down and Lachlan assumed more control

The network started out with the tag "Fair and Balanced." It was very important to Roger Ailes that it established itself as a credible news voice, at least for the part of the country that he believed felt alienated by the rest of the press, but had strong, especially conservative opinion at night. But they threw in the occasional liberal, Alan Colmes was formerly the liberal co-host with Sean Hannity at the start of the network. Ailes, toward the end of his reign — which people may remember ended in a sexual harassment scandal, and then he died a bit later.

When Ailes left ... the command and control went away. And Lachlan Murdoch is not a command and control kind of guy. So what's happened since is that the network is on its own under the leadership of Suzanne Scott. And so far, her leadership seems to be that she'll allow strong personalities to move as they see fit within her own boundaries — and right now, those boundaries in primetime have been quite far.

On Trump's relationship with Murdoch's tabloid The New York Post

I was there working for the paper briefly and was on Page Six and part of the Murdoch era. ... Trump would just call and he was constantly feeding out items. And for Murdoch, Trump was content. I don't think he respected him or didn't show much respect for him as a businessman. But Trump was content, and I would submit that Trump would not have become the figure he became without The New York Post . Because before Twitter, there was The Post, and The Post was about grabbing attention in the information economy, and it was sensational claims that were going to create big headlines and take over the front page. It had a rat-a-tat-tat flow that obviously Twitter's way beyond, but it was an early version of that. And so Trump learns through Rupert's tabloid ... how to be a modern media figure.

On Rupert Murdoch not initially supporting Trump's run for president

Murdoch did not support Trump and was almost distraught about Trump's rise. ... When Trump visits him at his headquarters before he announces to say he's thinking of running and Rupert is really dismissive and actually, basically ... he says something like "prepare to be wrapped up," which I guess is Aussie for beaten up or knocked around. So he's warning him it's not going to be an easy ride, including from Fox. But ... he finally has to get behind Trump because he's always going to get behind the Republican nominee, and Trump really brings him in, and they're talking all the time and gossiping. And Rupert loves it, because as close as he's been with previous Republican administrations, he's never had this kind of access. So Trump really does win him over to his side. And then I think another factor is the reaction, the hard coverage that Trump drew from the rest of the press, I believe, sent Murdoch more so into the Trump fold, because he saw some of that as overblown. [He believed] the press is acting like the resistance, and this is inappropriate.

On Murdoch's relationship with Trump once he became president

The Two-Way

Murdoch and trump, an alliance of mutual interest.

They do really become pretty close. No one's going to control Trump or dictate what Trump does, and vice versa. Trump is not going to fully be able to tell Fox what to do, but there is this fascinating feedback loop that is allowed to happen. Everyone watched this happen in real time, but Fox News would sort of go in a certain tangent. And if that tangent was really striking a chord with the base, then Trump would repeat it. Sometimes Trump knows in his gut what's going to work, so sometimes he'd jump right on it and could see the words go from Fox News through to his Twitter feed.

And sometimes Fox would find itself on the wrong side of Trump, so it would have to scramble to stay good with Trump's base. Voting is one example. Murdoch would not listen to Trump when Trump asked him to rescind some calls on election night showing Joe Biden was going to win. But then Fox really scrambled back to Trump's camp because its audience is where Trump is, so it becomes this fascinating dance.

On how Murdoch-owned media is helping to determine the future of democracy

I think about the way Tucker Carlson or other hosts at the network handled the alleged and largely nonexistent voting fraud issue after the Election Day of 2020. They were airing a lot of leads and theories and allegations. It just never panned out. ... And they were doing so in the name of voter integrity, but nothing erodes voter integrity like telling four million people every night that there's no integrity in the voting system without having real evidence. So that's going to have an effect on democracy now.

Amy Salit and Seth Kelley produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Natalie Escobar adapted it for the Web.

• Lachlan Murdoch
• - President Trump
• James Murdoch
• Rupert Murdoch

How Rupert Murdoch's son Lachlan went from reluctant heir, to outcast, to Fox Corporation and News Corp successor

Rupert Murdoch has finally put to rest speculation about his succession plans.

From one single newspaper, the media mogul created a sprawling global empire that delivered him enormous influence, vast sums of money and made him a household name.

From Australia he went on to battle the UK media establishment, becoming the driving force behind the modern tabloid before making his mark in America as the shaper of conservative debate.

But at 92 years old, the matter of who would take over his life's work and help shape his legacy was still in doubt.

The possibility of being next in line has loomed over his children for most of their lives.

The next generation was often pitted against each other in a "Darwinian struggle" for their father's favour, a source close to the family told Vanity Fair.

Of his six children, the list of likely successors has often been narrowed down to just three: Lachlan, James or Elisabeth.

For reasons known only to Murdoch, he never considered his first born, Prudence, a viable contender.

By the time his next daughter, Elisabeth, was born to his second wife, Anna, Murdoch had evolved on the idea of a girl one day succeeding him.

But once she left the family business to strike out on her own, her two brothers were left to battle it out for heir apparent.

Despite James being known as the "smart one", Lachlan, as the first son, held a profound pull for the media mogul, according to biographer Michael Wolff.

Each man was groomed, at different times, to take over the Murdoch business.

They were both involved in their father's empire until 2020, when James resigned from the news conglomerate citing "disagreements over certain editorial content".

It left the  path clear for Lachlan to inherit the leadership.

He is now set to become News Corp chairman and continue as chief executive officer of Fox Corp, after his father announced that he would be stepping down.

"Rupert Murdoch said in the 90s that Lachlan was the first among equals of the three siblings from his second marriage to Anna Murdoch — Lachlan, Elizabeth and James — and that is how it has panned out," Paddy Manning, journalist and author of The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch, told News Breakfast.

How Lachlan was groomed to take over

Lachlan was born in London, but raised in New York City, moving with his family to the United States as Murdoch sought to chase his fortunes across the Atlantic.

He is his father's eldest boy and since a very early age, Murdoch has made sure Lachlan was involved in his company.

His education was exactly what you'd expect for someone being groomed to run News Corp.

For the price of about $100,000 a year, Lachlan attended Dalton on the Upper East Side, then Trinity across the park, then Princeton where he graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1994.

All the while, he was competing with his siblings for the respect and favour of his father — even if he had already won the ultimate birth lottery by being the first boy born to a billionaire.

As children, the morning routine for the Murdoch siblings involved reading the papers they owned, and some others as well.

Their father would flag stories of interest and command "read that" before the heirs to one of the most powerful media empires in the world would catch the bus to school.

In the evening, the children would try to capture their father's attention by talking about politics and media and then they'd play monopoly.

As Lachlan and James were playing make-believe moguls and attempting to avoid make-believe jail as they moved across the Monopoly board, there was an intense rivalry.

At the age of just 22, Lachlan was sent to Australia, to his father's homeland, to run several mastheads, including Queensland's Courier Mail.

The only daily newspaper for Australia's third-biggest city was being run by a college graduate from New York City.

It was on a boat in Sydney Harbour in the late 1990s, at a party reportedly hosted by fashion designer of the moment Collette Dinnigan, that Lachlan met his future wife, model Sarah O'Hare.

They were married on a sprawling family estate in country New South Wales in 1998 before having three children — bringing the Murdoch family home to Australia for generations to come.

Lachlan's time in Australia in his mid-20s might have been a welcomed change from the halls of Princeton, with biographer Manning writing that his wife Sarah had "a whole group of fabulous friends" that came together "with his tight group of mates".

Nicole Kidman, Baz Luhrmann and other members of the 90s Sydney social scene royalty became close friends.

And when Lachlan eventually entered his rebellious era, he would return to the sandy shores of Sydney's Eastern suburbs and to his status as the biggest fish in the smaller Australian pond.

After he married Sarah, Lachlan went back to the US where he continued to climb the corporate ladder his father had built before him.

He was rapidly ascending to positions of power inside an institution that wielded more than most.

Of all Murdoch's children, Lachlan had the perfect position and the education to follow in his footsteps and he was gaining the experience to legitimise himself as the heir apparent too.

As he takes control of the empire now, Lachlan shares many of his father's political sympathies, but there was a time when he went his own way and when the world questioned whether he really would be king.

The prince in exile

During a confrontation with his father in LA in 2005, Murdoch tried to talk him out of quitting, offering him promotions and perks to tempt him to stay.

"Look, that's not going to work," Lachlan tearfully said over lunch, according to Manning's book The Successor.

"I have to do my own thing. I have to be my own man."

He got up, walked out of the restaurant, and boarded a private jet back to the safety of Sydney's Eastern Suburbs.

Murdoch told reporters that he hoped his son would one day return to the family empire that was meant to be his birthright.

Lachlan needed space from his family, but believed his father was secretly proud that he was striking out on his own.

"Proud that you are doing your own thing and that you've got the balls to do it, the guts to leave, the courage to leave," he said, according to New York Magazine.

Lachlan's first venture under his own steam was to found a private investment company, Illyria, splashing his cash on an Indian Premier League cricket team, an online DVD rental company, and a struggling toy maker.

After his two-year non-compete clause was over, Lachlan struck a deal with James Packer — a longtime friend who had inherited the Australian empire owned by his father's oldest rival.

The two would spend $3.3 billion to privatise the publicly listed Consolidated Media Holdings and hand themselves a fat stack of Australian media assets.

"My dad's not involved," the young Murdoch proudly announced.

"There's no News Corp money or association in any way."

But the deal quickly collapsed, and the two went their separate ways again, with Lachlan setting his sights on DMG Radio, which would become Nova Entertainment, one of his most profitable investments to date .

In 2010, Lachlan teamed up with Packer again, joining the board of television's Network Ten and parachuting into the role of interim CEO, then chairman.

At the head of the boardroom table once again, Lachlan oversaw many strategic and programming decisions, including wrangling his wife a gig hosting the revamped So You Think You Can Dance after she stepped away from Australia's Next Top Model on Fox.

"I find that long period in the wilderness for Lachlan confusing,"  Wolff told The Monthly in 2012 .

There were questions around why Lachlan had not "clarified his position" within the family and News Corp.

Wolff said it shone a light on "the fundamental ambivalence at the heart of where he finds himself".

"There is almost something Prince Charles–ish about him," he said at the time.

From the outside, the Australian Murdochs appeared to be thriving.

Sydney became a sanctuary for Lachlan and his family. When you have all the money in the world, Sydney can be like that.

A beachfront mansion, kids in elite schools, a deep tan from surfing the Bronte break every day and an easy entry into the city's tightest circles — business or otherwise.

But the honeymoon didn't last long — Ten's share price was plummeting.

In a Crikey opinion piece titled Who really killed Channel Ten?, Glenn Dyer laid the blame squarely at Lachlan's feet.

"In other words, the billionaires, led by Murdoch, have helped blow up more than a billion dollars in balance sheet value at Ten," he wrote.

With the writing on the wall, the young Murdoch made a plan to reunite with his father.

After almost a decade away, Lachlan was back.

The relationship between Lachlan and his baby brother

Sibling rivalries can shape the dynamics of even the most functional family units, but when this amount of money and power is up for grabs, the stakes are sky high.

Though he may have been seen as Murdoch's "golden child", Lachlan's baby brother had been climbing the ladder, and their competitive childhood set the stage for an almighty showdown.

After years in exile, Lachlan was welcomed back into the family fold in 2015, just as James's mission to cement himself as heir apparent was beginning to come unstuck.

He'd spent years working to reposition the company as future-focused media conglomerate embracing the industry's digital transition.

The prodigal son's return was "a big slap in the face", a person close to James told Vanity Fair.

After years devoted to modernising the media empire and chasing the warmth of his father's approval, James would now report to his older brother.

And the fact that it was Lachlan — rather than his father — who delivered the news only twisted the knife.

"James was livid. The two brothers and their father had explicitly discussed succession not even two years earlier. James was supposed to take over, and Lachlan would never assume more than a symbolic role," Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg wrote for New York Times Magazine in 2019.

"As James saw it, he had not only been promised the job; he had earned it."

Within three years, Lachlan was appointed as Fox Corporation CEO in the 21st Century Fox-Disney merger.

While he retained the jewels in his father's crown, Fox News and Fox Sport, James walked away from the empire with $US2 billion and a "clean slate".

In the years since, James has increasingly distanced himself from his family business, railing against climate change denialism  and election conspiracy peddling at Fox News.

Cutting the final ties in 2020, he resigned from the board of News Corp, noting "disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company's news outlets and certain other strategic decisions".

While he rarely comments on his relationship with his father, James conceded in a 2019 profile with the New Yorker that "there are periods of time when we do not [talk]".

In 2021, as the family was preparing to mark the patriarch's 90th birthday, Murdoch got word to James that it would mean a lot if all of his children could attend.

James skipped the event.

But the rift between the brothers is seen as the central tension.

According to Vanity Fair sources , Lachlan told his father that James had been leaking stories to the writers of Succession, HBO's elite family drama that creators have openly acknowledged is inspired by the Murdochs.

And if there is any grain of truth to be taken from the fictionalised version of this media dynasty, Lachlan's relationships with his siblings could ultimately decide his fate after father is gone.

Since last year, Lachlan has been steadily taking on a greater role at Murdoch's biggest money-maker, Fox.

Tim Burrows, journalist and media commentator, says there was a baton passing moment from father to son in early 2022.

"Lachlan brought the boards of both Fox and News Corporation together at his Beverly Hills mansion in Chartwell and that kicked off talks about merging Fox and News Corporation," he told News Breakfast.

"And …really that proposal was designed to entrench Lachlan as the undisputed person in charge of the empire and I think that is what we have seen [with this recent announcement]."

But lingering questions over Lachlan's appointment remain, including why Murdoch has chosen this moment to finalise his succession plan.

They say in business, one must always have an exit strategy.

For someone with the business instincts sharp enough to leverage a single newspaper in Australia's fifth biggest city, to a global empire with undeniable influence over the highest powers in the United States, there will be a reason for dropping this news now.

In April, Fox settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems — a company that produces equipment used to cast votes in American elections.

The hefty $787.5 million payout ended legal action brought by Dominion that alleged Murdoch's network had defamed it by knowingly broadcasting false claims that it was involved in a plot to steal the election.

Days later, Lachlan dropped his own defamation proceedings against Australia's Crikey . The Private Media brand had published an article referring to the family as "unindicted co-conspirators" in the US Capitol riots.

It was also April when Donald Trump was indicted for the first time. The former president is now facing charges in four different states — two of the cases are over his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

For Trump, those dramas are only just getting started, but for the Murdoch family, there is a quiet lull between the fallout of the last US election cycle and the start of the next one.

The first Republican caucus is on January 15.

This move hands Lachlan editorial control over how the empire covers the candidates and who they select as their ultimate favourite.

Also, Murdoch will be approaching the age of 94 at the next inauguration.

The media mogul has stared down his share of health scares in recent years, but none that moved him to name an heir.

"It strikes me as probably about solidifying Lachlan at the top of the company, because the longer he's in that seat, the longer he might hold on it," Burrows said.

While the expectation is that Lachlan is unlikely to make any big changes in the short term, observers say when Murdoch eventually passes, his other adult children — James, Elisabeth, and Prudence — might look to take the company in a "much more dramatic, a different direction" .

All four will inherit a family trust with a 40 per cent stake in News Corp and Fox Corp, giving them a powerful voice in the future of the company.

But with equal voting rights, decision-making will be a delicate process of negotiation between the siblings.

The same appears to hold true of a possible succession battle. To unseat Lachlan from the top job, James would need the support of Elisabeth and Prudence.

"It's not like a real succession scenario right now, this minute," Alice Enders, head of research at Enders Analysis, told Reuters.

"It's more in the future I'd say."

Complex sibling dynamics are not the only challenge to Lachlan's leadership.

There is also the question of what the Murdoch empire is without the man who built it.

For now at least, Rupert Murdoch will continue to have a role to play, despite handing his son the keys to the kingdom.

"In my new role, I can guarantee you that I will be involved every day in the contest of ideas," he wrote in a letter to staff.

"Our companies are communities, and I will be an active member of our community. I will be watching our broadcasts with a critical eye, reading our newspapers and websites and books with much interest."

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‘succession’ creator talks why the yacht scene is his favorite and james murdoch resignation.

'Succession' showrunner Jesse Armstrong reveals how he’s reworking the scripts to be more filmable and whether we'll see a pandemic storyline in the series.

By Bryn Sandberg

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Succession showrunner Jesse Armstrong was gearing up to shoot the third season of his Emmy-nominated HBO drama when the COVID-19 outbreak pushed filming back indefinitely. Unable to be in production in New York, he’s spent much of the shutdown in the U.K. fine-tuning the season three scripts instead — that way he’ll be ready to go as soon as they can figure out how to safely film the show, which is up for 18 Emmy nominations, this fall. From his home in London, Armstrong opens up about the tentative date for resuming production, how he’s reworking the scripts to be more filmable and whether there are any plans for a pandemic storyline in the upcoming season.

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I realize everything is very fluid at the moment and no one has a crystal ball, but is there a tentative plan for when you’ll try to start filming?

The tentative plan is, ideally, in the late fall around Christmas to start shooting, but it’s nothing we can totally commit to because we just have to respond to the situation with the pandemic. But we’re trying to make plans, and I’m trying to focus my own mind and that of my fellow writers on a realistic timetable. Ultimately, nobody knows, so we’ve got to try and remain flexible.

Did you take into consideration the fact that the virus might very well get worse during the winter months? Was that part of the discussion?

I mean, we don’t have our own World Health Organization, so it’s the same information as everyone else has. And yeah, there’s a lot of speculation and some days it feels better and other days it feels worse. It’s just totally beyond our control. We have to try and in some Buddhist way to learn to live with the uncertainty.

Has the story that you planned to tell changed due to the pandemic? Are you rewriting anything to make it more filmable amid the virus?

If you would excuse me, I won’t get into the stuff of the next season, just so it’s fresh for when people get it and enjoy it, hopefully. But I’m being flexible if there are things creatively that I and the writing team can do to make it more filmable. We won’t make any compromises which mean the show is worse, but we are willing to think about how we can do this thing safely on a doable timeline. We’re trying to help the physical production from the writing room.

What’s your favorite scene from the past season?

I wrote a big scene in the last episode where there’s lots of recriminations going on around the table on the yacht. From early on, you think, “What’s going to be the heart of the episode?” It felt like when you’re putting the cards on the wall. Like, who’s going to take the rap for this? Who is going to go to prison? And we were all on that boat together, so it was quite an exciting, creative time to film.

That one was a crowd-pleaser.

And then there’s a scene in the safe room episode, where Shiv and Kendall have a moment of brother and sisterly connection where they had been jousting as they frequently are, jockeying for their father’s affections and their positions, and there’s a moment of honesty where Kendall kind of tells his sister he doesn’t think he’s ever going to be able to fulfill the ambition [to take over their dad’s company], which has always been dangling in front of them as this great, meaningful thing in their lives. And it was really just a magic moment on set where — I don’t know, I may be getting soppy about the show and the characters, but I was reduced to tears by the level of Sarah [Snook] and Jeremy [Strong]’s performance.

Was there a scene that was particularly hard to write?

I do remember we built this set for the Senate hearings in episode nine, and I was behind on finishing the script. So the set was built before I had completed my really solid draft of it. I remember going in and seeing this pretty impressive senatorial edifice growing when I hadn’t written the words to fill it, and that gave me the heebie-jeebies. But on the day, even though [the actors’] stuff came in quite late, they learned it so well and we managed to whip through so quickly that we had the opportunity to write a bunch of extra questions from the senators and put them under real pressure so that the stuff was coming at them pretty late. So that was one of those things where you find yourself in the dressing room at Silvercup [Studios] hammering out questions to senators. It’s fun, but it feels high-pressure when they’re downstairs waiting for you to run down with the questions.

Do you like keeping the actors on their toes?

Yeah. I don’t want to sound like I’m a puppet master because they’re pretty weighty puppets, but I think they enjoy it, too — the feeling that things might change.

The Succession jokes abounded when James Murdoch resigned from News Corp in July. How much do you pay attention to news like that as you’re writing?

Oh, we read and consume it all. The fact that it’s not meant to be a portrait of any one family doesn’t mean that we don’t read all that stuff. Frankly, it’s money for free for writers, whether it’s a story about Sumner Redstone or Comcast or any of the Mercers and the Murdochs. And Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s the scion of a British media baron, Robert Maxwell. We feel total freedom to not use 98 percent of it, but 2 percent of it can start great plotlines.

Do you feel like there’s any misconceptions about the show that you’d like to clear up?

Not really. I feel like the great pleasure of doing a show is that you try and say something without saying it. You’re trying to make people feel a certain way and certain things without saying them out loud and the danger of playing that particular game is that people might misconstrue you or not hear you clearly because you don’t want to be too clear because then it feels like you’re writing propaganda or you’re in the world of politics, not in the world of craft and art. So I don’t mind. It’s all our fault, up to a point, what we’ve done.

What’s the likelihood we’ll see a pandemic storyline in an upcoming season of the show? How do you imagine the Roy family would act in the current crisis?

Well, I don’t want to get into what we’ve got in the show, but I would expect them to behave with the highest ethical standards, as they always do. ( Laughs .)

Interview edited for length and clarity.

And The Odds Are..

Outside of Watchmen walking away with the limited series title, the 2020 Emmys seem to offer few sure bets. If you’re talking about almost sure bets, however, Succession may be just that. HBO’s sophomore drama was an instant industry favorite when it premiered in 2018. And while it stood zero chance of topping network neighbor Game of Thrones to win best drama in 2019, its first Emmys did include one very auspicious win in drama writing for creator Jesse Armstrong. Ozark and, to a lesser extent, The Crown present real threats to Succession ‘s favorite status. But many insiders have been saying for nearly a year, back when the series’ sophomore run seemed to outshine the season that preceded it, that this race is Succession ‘s to lose. — MICHAEL O’CONNELL

This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe .

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How Rupert Murdoch turned a small Australian newspaper into a global media empire — and built a family dynasty worth $17 billion

• Australian-born billionaire Rupert Murdoch, 89, helms a media empire at News Corp. made up of newspapers like The Wall Street Journal , television networks like Fox News , and a handful of other publications across the world.
• James Murdoch, Rupert's son and former heir apparent to take over for him, resigned from News Corp.'s board on Friday , citing his disagreement with certain editorial decisions. The news publisher disclosed his resignation in a regulatory filing.
• Rupert Murdoch inherited his very first newspaper from his father, who was a war reporter turned publisher. 
• Bloomberg estimates his individual net worth to be $6.53 billion as of July 31, while Forbes pegs the Murdoch family's collective fortune at $16.9 billion.
• Following Disney's $71 billion purchase of 21st Century Fox assets, Murdoch distributed $12 billion in proceeds to his six children.
• In December 2019, Murdoch's son Lachlan purchased Chartwell , a historic Bel Air estate, for $150 million. The purchase set a California record and is the third-priciest home sale ever recorded in the US.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories . 

Rupert Murdoch's name is one synonymous with media, but it took decades to build his sprawling empire.

He owns dozens upon dozens of newspapers spanning three continents, founded the Fox network — responsible for revolutionizing cable television to what it is today — in the 1980s, and has a net worth $6.53 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which pegs him as the 301st-richest person in the world. Forbes, meanwhile, ranks Murdoch and his family at No. 68 on their own billionaires list with a combined net worth of $17 billion .

Over the span of his five-decade career, Murdoch has been in four marriages. He has six kids.

One of his sons — James Murdoch — was once anticipated to be Murdoch's heir apparent . The news publisher disclosed that he had resigned in a Friday regulatory filing , effective immediately. "My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company's news outlets and certain other strategic decisions," he wrote in his resignation letter. 

He's also been the subject of a variety of scandals, most prominently when his UK-based paper News of the World was forced to shutter after it was found to have hacked the phone of a slain teenager.

In March 2019, Murdoch received $12 billion from Disney's purchase of Fox assets and distributed the proceeds to his children, boosting his dynasty's collective wealth.

Take a look at how Murdoch got his start, the deals he has made, and the growth of his family and empire.

Rupert Murdoch graduated from Oxford University, then known as Worcester College, in 1952.

His father, Sir Keith Murdoch, a war reporter turned publisher, died the same year, and Murdoch went back to Australia to take over the family business at the age of 22.

Source : BBC News

Murdoch, seen here in 1960, inherited a chain of Australian newspapers from his father. According to Bloomberg, Murdoch embedded himself in all matters of production, from writing copy to managing the printer and redesigning page layouts.

He especially made it a priority to include "lurid stories and scandals," which made paper sales boom. He began buying other publications, including The Daily Mirror and the Perth Sunday Times.

Source : Bloomberg

Murdoch then went on to found Australia's first nationwide newspaper, The Australian, in 1964.

Murdoch later founded News Corporation, known as News Corp, which now owns more than 170 papers worldwide.

Murdoch made his first UK purchase in 1968, buying News of the World. He later acquired The Sun.

In 1981, he bought the Times Group — adding the Sunday Times and The Times, two UK newspapers, to his growing international portfolio.

Murdoch moved to New York City in the late 1970s, and bought his first US newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News, though many say Murdoch came into his stride in the 1980s when he purchased the New York Post and New York magazine.

Murdoch still owns the Post today, but offloaded New York magazine in the early 1990s, along with a few other magazines he previously owned.

In 1987, Murdoch bought what is now book publishing giant Harper Collins for $293 million. He still owns the publishing house today.

Source : The New York Times

It was during the 1980s that Murdoch began his Fox empire, buying stake in 20th Century Fox, subsequently creating television stations, and effectively transforming cable television.

He bought over 50% of stock in the company, for over $250 million. 

Source : Bloomberg, Washington Post

In 1989, Murdoch became a naturalized US citizen.

Murdoch has been married four times. He married his first wife, Patricia Booker, in 1956, when he was 25. The couple divorced 11 years later. Prudence, born in 1958, is Murdoch and Booker's eldest child and daughter.

Source: Vanity Fair

About a year after his first marriage ended, Murdoch married Anna Mann (née Torv). The couple had three children — Elisabeth, James, and Lachlan — and divorced in 1999. Elisabeth, Murdoch's second child and daughter, was born 10 years after Prudence.

Elisabeth has worked for many of her father's businesses, including News Corp. and FX. In 2019, she became executive chairman of Sister, a global TV and film production company.

Source: The New York Times , Vanity Fair , Deadline

Just 17 days after divorcing his second wife, Murdoch married Wendi Deng, whom he met while she was working at Star TV in Hong Kong, in 1999.

They were married for 14 years before splitting in 2013. 

Source : Business Insider

They have two teenage daughters, Grace, 19, and Chloe, 17.

Murdoch would go on to buy social network MySpace for $580 million in 2005, only to sell it for $35 million a few years later.

Murdoch's News Corp won a bid to buy Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and other brands, in 2007 for $5 billion.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the paper is one the billionaire long coveted; some feared, at the time, that he would meddle in its editorial affairs. 

Source : The Wall Street Journal

Murdoch is also very close with former Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson. Murdoch made Thomson, who is also from Australia, the CEO of News Corp in 2013.

In 2011, The New Yorker reported Thomson was Murdoch's "closest friend," dining in restaurants frequently with one another and chatting about politics and drinking wine.

Source: Bloomberg , The New Yorker

In 2009, The Guardian published an article about illicit phone hacking conducted by News of the World into the voicemail of a British teenager who had been killed.

The scandal went on to rock Murdoch's reputation in Britain. Years after the scandal, his attempt to buy television network British Sky Broadcasting was dropped due to public outcry. 

Source : The Guardian , The New York Times

Two years later, the Murdoch family announced plans to shutter the paper after 168 years of operation.

In front of lawmakers in 2011, Murdoch apologized for the phone hacking.

In 2015, 21st Century Fox announced that Murdoch would be handing off new leadership roles to his two sons, James and Lachlan, keeping the company in the family.

Lachlan, 48, now holds the role of co-chairman of News Corp and executive chairman and CEO of Fox Corporation. James, 47, no longer works for Fox and founded Lupa Systems , a private investment company, in 2019. Murdoch's two sons are from his second marriage to Anna Mann. 

Source : The New York Times ; Fox Corporation ; Hollywood Reporter

Lachlan celebrated the promotion by buying a $29 million, 13,500-square-foot home in Aspen, Colorado in 2017.

Murdoch himself doesn't mind living lavishly — he owns an $84 million Gulfstream G650.

He also bought this Bel Air mansion for $28.8 million in 2013.

The property was once a horse ranch and has over 16 acres of land, 13 of which are grapevines. The residence is nearly 8,000 square feet and includes a guest house and office building. 

In 2017, Variety reported that Murdoch's estate was impacted by a California wildfire, but none of the buildings were burned. 

Source : Variety

In 2014, Murdoch bought the top four floors in the One Madison Park building in New York City, just steps away from Madison Square Park, for $57.5 million. The penthouse offers sweeping views of Lower Manhattan and Midtown.

Murdoch tried to sell the elaborate four-story apartment for $72 million less than a year later. According to Zillow, the list was removed in 2016; it's unclear whether Murdoch still owns the property.

Source : Curbed NY , Zillow

Murdoch bought a 180-foot yacht in 2006 and named it Rosehearty, after a village home to his ancestors in Scotland. He later sold it after his divorce from Deng in 2013.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner vacationed on the boat with Murdoch's ex-wife Deng prior to her divorce from Murdoch. The yacht has seven guest cabins and a Jacuzzi on the deck. 

Source : Boat International , The New York Times

Murdoch and former supermodel Jerry Hall got married at St. Bride's church in London in March of 2016.

Hall is his fourth wife and was formerly a partner of Mick Jagger, with whom she has four kids.

The day Murdoch married Hall was also the last day he tweeted — he was formerly prolific on Twitter, and would comment on topics like politics.

—Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) March 4, 2016

Although many of Murdoch's publications and television networks lean toward the right politically, he tried to convince former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to run for president against Donald Trump in 2016.

During the 2016 primaries, Murdoch's publications, the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, went after Trump, calling him "toast" and a "phony."

Source : Forbes;   The New York Times

Yet, since the 2016 presidential election, Murdoch and Trump have become quite close. In 2017, The New York Times reported that Murdoch calls Trump at the White House a few times a week to chat about politics and business.

Their relationship was not always friendly, though. When Trump was an up-and-comer in the real-estate industry, Murdoch's Page Six would often cover the saucy details of his personal life.

The two eventually became friendly as their circles drew closer together.

A 2017 report from the New York Times noted that Murdoch's ex-wife Deng is good friends with Trump's daughter Ivanka. Deng even played a part in getting Ivanka back with husband Jared Kushner when the two briefly broke up in 2008.

Source : The New York Times, Business Insider

In 2017, Murdoch-run 21st Century Fox announced it would sell to Disney for $71.1 billion.

On March 20, 2019, Disney acquired the famed Fox Hollywood studios and various other television operations of the Murdoch family-controlled group, which is responsible for blockbusters like "Avatar" and series like "The Simpsons." The total purchase came to $71.3 billion.

Source : The Wall Street Journal ; Vox

So what's left after the sale? A lot, actually. Lachlan Murdoch heads Fox News, the Fox Broadcasting network, and the FS1 cable sports network, while Rupert himself still helms News Corporation and the handful of newspapers it publishes.

After news of the Disney deal broke, Murdoch's net worth jumped by $1.2 billion. In early March 2019, the collective Murdoch family's fortune sat at $19.8 billion, according to Forbes.

Disney has since dropped "Fox" from the name of the studios it acquired in the deal.

Source : Forbes , Associated Press

Murdoch received $12 billion in proceeds from the sale, which he distributed to his children, dropping his net worth by roughly that amount. Murdoch is now, according to Bloomberg, individually worth $6.53 billion, making him the 301st-richest person in the world.

Source : Forbes , Bloomberg

In December 2019, Lachlan Murdoch purchased the Chartwell estate, a historic Bel-Air estate previously owned by media billionaire A. Jerrold Perenchio, for $150 million. The sale set a California record and is the third-most expensive home sale ever recorded in the US.

Source: Business Insider

A new three-part BBC documentary documenting Rupert Murdoch's rise to media fame and his influence on world events debuted July 14 on BBC Two.

Source: Financial Times

In a regulatory filing on Friday, July 31, News Corp. announced that Murdoch's son James was resigning from the board. He wrote that the decision was made "due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company's news outlets and certain other strategic decisions" in his resignation letter.

Source:  Securities and Exchange Commission

• Main content

James Murdoch, Rupert’s rebel son: ‘We’ve been arguing since I was a teenager’

Rupert murdoch’s younger son on quitting news corp and not watching succession.

James Murdoch in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. Photograph: Jared Soares/The New York Times

As we sat down to lunch in my garden, I mentioned to James Murdoch that I've been reading a lot of classical plays lately and a popular theme is the rancourous battle between two brothers over a kingdom. "But these plays end in cannibalism and civil war, so at least your family hasn't gone there yet," I said brightly.

Above his mask and behind his Kingsman glasses, Murdoch's brown eyes widened with alarm. The issue of dynastic succession – the real one and the one in Succession, the Emmy-winning HBO drama that is inspired by the Murdochs – was definitely on the menu, along with fried calamari. Murdoch (47) resigned from the board of News Corp this summer with an elliptical statement, saying he was leaving "due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company's news outlets and certain other strategic decisions."

Rupert Murdoch’s youngest child with his second wife, Anna, is loath to get into the epic family drama that found its climax in the 15 months between pushing a deal to sell 21st Century Fox to Disney and ankling the family business he once hoped to lead.

But in his briskly analytical way, over lunch and a subsequent phone call, he tried to explain why he “pulled the rip cord,” as he put it, after deepening estrangement with his father and brother and growing discomfort over the toxicity of Fox News and other conservative News Corp properties.

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“I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important,” he told me. “But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas. A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt – not to sow doubt to obscure fact, if you will.

“And I just felt increasingly uncomfortable with my position on the board having some disagreements over how certain decisions are being made. So it was actually not that hard a decision to remove myself and have a kind of cleaner slate.”

The younger Murdoch’s disgust had flashed publicly before on a few occasions: He showed the disdain for Roger Ailes he shared with his more conservative, older brother, Lachlan (49). In 2017, US president Donald Trump’s praise for white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people” spurred James Murdoch to give over €846,000 ($1 million) to the Anti-Defamation League.

In an email to friends obtained by The New York Times, Murdoch rebuked Trump and wrote: “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists.” The email stood in sharp relief, given Fox News’ fetid racism-by-night routine.

In January, James and his wife, Kathryn, expressed “frustration” about News Corp’s peddling of climate change denialism in the face of apocalyptic Australian wildfires that incinerated 46 million acres. Fox News nighttime anchors picked up a false storyline about arson from The Australian, a Murdoch-owned newspaper in Oz.

Once, James Murdoch thought he could reshape Fox News. But in the summer of 2016, he failed to get his father to sign off on replacing Roger Ailes – embroiled in the sexual harassment scandals at Fox News – with David Rhodes, the former president of CBS News.

When Rupert, the chairman of the company, decided to run the network himself, the writing was on the wall. Rupert and Trump stepped up their dangerous tango, and James, those who know him say, eventually decided it was time to get out of his Faustian deal.

At times, over the years, it looked as if James and Kathryn might be bringing around Rupert Murdoch on climate change. But that was not to be, either. "We've been arguing about politics since I was a teenager," James told me.

So it wasn’t possible to change News Corp from the inside? “I think there’s only so much you can do if you’re not an executive, you’re on the board, you’re quite removed from a lot of the day-to-day decisions, obviously,” he said. “And if you’re uncomfortable with those decisions, you have to take stock of whether or not you want to be associated and can you change it or not. I decided that I could be much more effective outside.”

‘His better angels’

James Murdoch was on top for long enough to get more than his share of headlines about the rising son of the Sun King. But then, while he was overseeing the operation in London, Rupert’s lieutenant and spiritual daughter, Rebekah Brooks, and her former deputy and lover, Andy Coulson, got ensnared in the British phone hacking scandal. (Brooks was acquitted and Coulson convicted in the case that followed.)

The slime splashed on the son who had been seen as a clean-as-a-whistle smarty-pants. British regulators faulted James for not stopping the hacking, despite his claim that he didn’t read an entire email chain that would have clued him in. A New York Times Magazine investigation into the Murdochs last year by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg reported that James’ sister Elisabeth urged her father to fire James and replace him with her. (She denied it.)

Some Murdoch familiars say that it was only when it was clear that James had lost the succession war that he showed more leg in expressing qualms and pushed the more than€60 billion ($71.3 billion) Disney deal – it ensured that Lachlan, seen as his father’s darling, would be left with a hollowed-out empire.

Though the kids each walked away with billions in cash and stock, the deal bared all the competing interests in the family. Lachlan was, by all accounts, aghast to be left merely with the rump – the part James had dismissed to friends as an “American political project.” Rupert Murdoch did not try to make a top job for James at Disney a condition of the deal. He looked at James objectively vis-a-vis the deal, Disney insiders said, not with a father’s protective instinct.

Friends say that James has been on a collision course with his family for 15 years

“James was nothing but a gentleman in the whole process,” Bob Iger, the chairman of Disney, told me. James said he pressed the deal because he knew, as the great digital transformation of Tinseltown got underway, that the Murdochs’ collection of old-school media assets had to be combined with a company like Disney to have the heft to compete against behemoths like Netflix.

News reports at the time suggested James harboured a fantasy about succeeding Iger, and the two talked about a possible role. But, James told me: “I decided pretty soon after we closed it that I didn’t want to stay on in the business. So if you think about it, I mean, your ego talks to you a little bit or somebody writes a story that says, ‘Oh, they don’t have a succession plan. James Murdoch can do X, Y and Z.’ And your ego goes, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ But then, you have to sit back and go, ‘That’s not me defining that. That’s some media journalist somewhere making up what they think success or failure is.’

“The idea, at my age, with a long career ahead of me, of going into a place where it’s a big corporate structure, you don’t really know what the future’s going to hold. And the other side is absolute self-determination and agency. It was a pretty simple choice. We never really even took talks very far at all about going to Disney because I informed them, because they were really trying to figure, ‘Okay, what does the structure look like? Et cetera.’ I called Bob and said, ‘Look, you need to design that without me.’”

Friends say that James has been on a collision course with his family for 15 years. His evolution has been profoundly influenced by his wife, a former communications executive. He is, as one friend puts it, “living much more in his own skin, realizing his better angels and his better instincts.”

But when your last name is Murdoch and those billions sloshing around in your bank account come from a juggernaut co-opting governments across the English-speaking world and perpetuating climate-change denial, nativism and Sean Hannity, can you ever start fresh? As a beneficiary of his family’s trust, James is still reaping profits from Rupert Murdoch’s assets. Can he be the anti-venom?

And is the great game of Murdoch succession truly over – Murdoch watchers across media say James is aligned with his sister Elisabeth and his half sister, Prudence, even as he is estranged from his father and brother. When Rupert, (89) finally leaves the stage and his elder children take over, that could make three votes in the family trust against one. Is there still time to de-Foxify Fox News – labelled a “hate-for-profit racket” by Elizabeth Warren – and other conservative News Corp outlets? Would Fox News and its kin – downscale, feral creatures conjured by Rupert to help the bottom line – be the huge moneymakers they are if they went straight?

For a long time, people have referred to James as “the smart brother,” the more strategic one, the more interesting one, the harder working one, the more enlightened one. He is nothing like the hopeless sons on Succession. He came into his own at Star TV in Asia and then deftly entered the broadband market and positioned Sky TV as more than a satellite television provider. He says he is very proud of helping to restructure the National Geographic partnership, which caused the society’s endowment to swell to nearly €846 million ($1 billion).

A Harvard dropout, James has long been teased for his techno argot, a contrast to Lachlan's rock-climbing, red meat, good ol' Aussie boy style

Unlike his father and grandfather – who broke the story of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign and later become an Australian regional newspaper magnate – James wasn’t interested in the romance of newspapers. He has always been looking around the corner for new technologies.

In 2006, he promised to make Sky carbon neutral. (He invited Al Gore to give his climate slide show at a corporate retreat in Pebble Beach, California, a talk that inspired Kathryn Murdoch to become an eco-warrior.) He drove a Prius around London and then switched to an early model of the Tesla roadster; he later joined Tesla’s board.

A Harvard dropout, James has long been teased for his techno argot, a contrast to Lachlan’s rock-climbing, red meat, good ol’ Aussie boy style. James’ look was more mogul-casual at lunch: a Loro Piana navy jacket, slim-fit jeans and Common Projects white sneakers. His hair, flecked with a few strands of gray, is longer than it has been since college. “I haven’t been to the barber since March,” Murdoch said. “Now it catches leaves and stuff.”

His Panama hat from San Juan – he wears straw hats year-round – was attached to his attaché case. He has set up offices for a new company, Lupa Systems, in downtown Manhattan, New York, and Mumbai. It is named for the she-wolf who suckles twin boys in Rome’s origin myth. When they grow up, Remus is killed by Romulus, who goes on to found the city – which James says is his favourite – and become its first king. (In Succession, Brian Cox’s character, the Rupert of the show, refers to his younger son, Roman, as Romulus.)

So far, Murdoch has made investments in the Tribeca Film Festival, Art Basel, Vice Media and a comic book company whose publisher once worked for Marvel. The dream there is to create another Marvel-like universe of characters who could cavort across different platforms.

He is excited about investing in startups created to combat fake news and the spread of disinformation, having found the proliferation of deep fakes “terrifying” because they “undermine our ability to discern what’s true and what’s not” and it “is only at the beginning, as far as I can tell.” He’s funding a research program to study digital manipulation of societies, hoping to curtail “the use of technology to promulgate totalitarianism’’ and undermine democracies.

“So everything from the use of mass surveillance, telephone networks, 5G, all that stuff, domestically in a country like China, for example,” he said. I wonder if this is some sort of expiation, given all the disinformation that News Corp has spewed. (Shades of Melania fighting cyberbullying?) Murdoch did not really answer. But later, when I talked to Kathryn Murdoch over Zoom from their farm in Connecticut, where they live with their three teenagers, chickens and sheep, she was more direct about the issue of using money made from disinformation to combat disinformation.

“I think that what’s important about what we’re doing is that we’re in control of ourselves,” she said, adding: “I’m in control of what I do, he is in control of what he does. We should be held accountable for those things. It’s very hard to be held accountable for things that other people do or are in control of. And I think that’s what was untenable.”

I asked her if they are happy with their liberation. “It’s nice to be able to do our own thing and just to have James be free of that tension,” she said with a broad smile. “It’s good for him.” She added: “When a family is very involved in the business, it’s a big decision to leave that. I don’t know if it’s ever ending. It’s always, you know, ongoing.” She gave a wry chuckle.

CNBC has called Kathryn and James “a political power couple in the Trump era,” and James says his wife is “a force of nature.” “She’s encouraged me to take risks, to do things,” he said. “She’s encouraged me to speak up about things. I’m very lucky.”

Their foundation, Quadrivium, has supported voter participation, democracy reform and climate change projects. “I never thought that we would actually be at the point where we would have climate change effects and people would still be denying it,” Murdoch said.

Murdoch donated to Pete Buttigieg in the primary, and the couple has given over €1.04 million ($1.23 million) to Joe Biden. So that’s who he’ll be voting for in November then? “Hell, yes,” he said with a smile.

I noted to Kathryn Murdoch that the effect of News Corp on the world is astounding when you think about it, from Brexit to Trump to the Supreme Court we may be heading toward. “I’m not sure if I would give it that much credit,” she said. “Rupert’s talent was always in understanding what the public wanted, and I think it much more follows or echoes what’s going on as opposed to leads. That’s not to say it doesn’t have responsibility. It does. But I think sometimes, inside the journalism world, it gets a little more credit than it deserves on that.”

I wondered if Rupert Murdoch ever got mad at Kathryn for pulling James to the light side on the environment and other issues. Was it daunting to argue with him? “We’ve had plenty of very good dinners and very good discussions,” she said. “He relishes an argument. If you’re well prepared and you have your facts, it’s a really good debate practice. We’ve always gotten along even if we disagree. I actually have friends whose fathers are far scarier. Rupert actually told James to marry me as soon as he possibly could.”

Like James, she thinks Jerry Hall, the patriarch’s wife since 2016, is really fun. “Rupert is so lucky,” she said. “She’s just always wanting to, you know, sneak over and have a drink or smoke with you. ‘Just don’t tell Rupert I’m smoking.’”

Kathryn Murdoch has been tempted to watch Succession. But Murdoch said he didn’t watch it, possibly so he didn’t have to answer pesky questions about the portrayal of sons who veer between feeling entitled and feeling unworthy because they fear that everything they get is only because of their name.

After so much time in the executive suite, Murdoch seems genuinely excited to be in a smaller shop

Asked how he could possibly not watch a buzzy show about his family, he smiled and replied: “I think you’d find it really easy. The other thing is, the dramatisation of family affairs is as old as anything. It’s always built in a certain construct, back in Shakespeare or back in Homer.

“I think the reality, my reality anyways, is that I’ve never felt that comfortable drawing any parallels, because I don’t feel as if I live solely in a needy orbit of approval or whatever from the charismatic megafauna. Not at all. I’m entirely my own person. I think having agency from the beginning when I left school and started on my own, to set up with some partners, a tiny hip-hop record label, to moving with Kathryn to Hong Kong a few years later.” Five years after that he went to Sky. “I feel like every few years I set out on something new, and it’s not this drama that other people try to make about it,” he said. “But I don’t know anything about the show.”

After so much time in the executive suite, Murdoch seems genuinely excited to be in a smaller shop. He said that last year, just for the hell of it, he thought of becoming an architect, going back to school. “The outside world,” he continued, “it looks at you and says: ‘Well, these are the runners and riders. This person is up and down and this is success and this is failure.’ I think that that has to come much more from yourself. I’m incredibly grateful to be able to be just a totally free agent.”

When he looks back at the searing hacking scandal, to that painful moment sitting in front of a parliamentary committee in London with his father, who called it “the most humble day of my life,” how does he feel? Was James angry to be left holding the bag for the hacking, which was the ultimate end of the tabloid culture his father created?

“Going through something so intense like that, you definitely learn a lot of different lessons,” he said, adding, “It was very much about some stuff that had gone on at the newspapers before I was there, by the way.” I wondered what he made of Fox News and Trump playing down the coronavirus, even after the president was hospitalised. “Look, you do worry about it and I think that we’re in the middle of a public health crisis,” Murdoch said. “Climate is also a public health crisis.” He continued: “Whatever political spin on that, if it gets in the way of delivering crucial public health information, I think is pretty bad.”

He added that Trump’s likening Covid-19 to the flu had been “his message from day one,” and was “craziness.” He thinks that “companies have a responsibility to their customers and their communities” and “that responsibility shouldn’t be compromised by political point scoring, that’s for sure.”

Did he catch that bananas moment on Fox News after the president’s loony Evita balcony star turn, when Sean Hannity compared DJT to FDR? Murdoch, who doesn’t usually watch Fox News, said he didn’t see that show and didn’t like to criticise specific Fox News personalities, but added dryly, “I think comparing that kind of personal behaviour to FDR, it’s a little much, you know?”

I noted that his father had a very dim view of Trump – in 2015, he tweeted, “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” – before the pragmatic Rupert came around to the president. “I’m just concerned that the leadership that we have, to me, just seems characterized by callousness and a level of cruelty that I think is really dangerous and then it infects the population,” he said, referring to the Trump administration. “It’s not a coincidence that the number of hate crimes in this country are rising over the last three years for the first time in a long time.”

With Trump and Fox News, who is the dog and who is the tail? “It looks to me, anyway, like it’s going to be a hard thing to understand because it probably goes back and forth,’’ he said. “I don’t think you’re going to get one pristine, consistent analysis of that phenomenon.” I asked if he was friends with Ivanka and Jared Kushner. Ivanka was at one point a trustee for the fortune of the two daughters of Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng. “She and Jared are both close with Wendi,” he said, adding: “I don’t know them well. I wasn’t in New York, you have to remember. I came back from abroad after over 10 years and I didn’t know a lot of things. I missed the whole ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians,’ the whole origin story of that.”

(The Times Magazine report included the detail that James and Lachlan tried to dissuade Pops, as they call him, from marrying Deng; James was worried, based on information he had received from senior foreign officials, that she was a Chinese asset; she has denied that.)

Murdoch’s friends describe him as “happy as a clam,” “giddy” and far more relaxed now that he has shaken off the King Lear machinations he has dealt with his whole life, as his father pitted the siblings against each other for the golden crown.

Murdoch’s friend Matthew Vaughn, an English producer and writer who did both “Kingsman” movies, believes that James will now start his own empire. “James’ next chapter is going to be a damn good one, and it will surprise so many people,” Vaughn said. “He’ll be released from the blessing and the curse of the name Murdoch.” I asked Murdoch if he would create his own “Game of Thrones” and bring in his own children – a daughter and two sons – to help run it. “There’s no empire,” he replied, laughing a bit ruefully. “There’s no future dynasty.”

Confirm or Deny

Dowd: Judge Jeanine Pirro is really fun at the company Christmas party. Murdoch: I have no knowledge of that.

Dowd: When you were 18, you had a summer job as a production assistant on "Rising Sun" and you held a giant duct of personal air-conditioning on Sean Connery wherever he was on the set. Murdoch: Yes, I held the air-conditioning behind Sean Connery. The most interesting thing was, if he wanted the tube moved to a different spot he wouldn't tell me. He would tell the director, who would tell the first assistant director, who would tell the second assistant director, who would tell me. It was a very hierarchical management of the air-conditioning tube.

Dowd: You've never filled out a job application. Murdoch: No, not true. When I went to Sky, for example, it was pretty controversial. It had to be voted on by all the shareholders. It was like months of job application in full public glare with psychological tests. Psychometric testing.

Dowd:  You know how much a gallon of milk costs. Murdoch: Confirm. I just bought one the other day. It depends on where you get it, I guess. It's like $4.

Dowd: You're tatted up. Murdoch: I have a few. I drew them myself. One of them is a weird shape I drew when I was a kid. The other is actually a lightbulb. I feel like tattoos should never have stories attached to them. You always regret it.

Dowd: After you quit the board, you considered bleaching your hair again just for the hell of it. Murdoch: Deny.

Dowd: Your father made you and your siblings watch "Gallipoli" on every family vacation. Murdoch: No. Great movie, though.

Dowd: When you had a hip-hop record company after college, you slept with a gun under your bed. Murdoch: It's an urban myth.

Dowd: You were childhood friends with Ghislaine Maxwell. Murdoch: Nope. Absolutely not.

Dowd: You bought a 445-acre "end of times" house in a remote part of Canada with its own water and solar energy supply. Murdoch: Oh, it's just a fishing cabin. But the borders got shut so I haven't been. I don't know why we didn't think that through.

Dowd: You wrote a column in The Harvard Lampoon titled "Albrecht the Atypical Hun." Murdoch: Yes. It was a cartoon that I wrote with a friend. I am not great at it, but I can draw.

Dowd: Lachlan is not very good at rock climbing. Murdoch: I have no knowledge of that. I think he's probably pretty good.

Dowd: President Trump has handled the TikTok situation perfectly. Murdoch: It doesn't look very handled right now.

Dowd: You do your best thinking about climate change on your father's yacht. Murdoch: (Laughs.)

Dowd: You were the driving force behind Fox's Myspace acquisition in 2005. Murdoch: No, I wasn't there at the time.

Dowd: Prince Harry reached out to you about how he should deal with Prince William. Murdoch: No. No.

Dowd: You have a black belt in karate. Murdoch: Yeah.

Dowd: You are extremely fastidious. Murdoch: I have a bad habit of straightening other people's pictures on their walls, yes. I'm just trying to be helpful.

Dowd: Most of your success has come from hard work, not luck. Murdoch: Isn't that what they say – the harder you work, the luckier you get? Dowd:  You make your children call you "Dottore." Murdoch: I got an honorary doctorate from the American University of Rome, and I continue to insist that I'm called "Dottore," but it's not working.

Dowd: You don't watch Fox News. Murdoch: Sometimes I watch, if there's an important thing, like an important interview or something like that, sometimes.

Dowd: Wendi Deng dated Vladimir Putin. Murdoch: You can't ask me those questions.

Maureen Dowd

Maureen Dowd is a columnist with the New York Times

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All of the Similarities Between the Murdochs and the Roy Family in HBO's Succession

The New York Times Magazine story on the Murdoch family reads like a script of the HBO series.

Rupert Murdoch runs the News Corp. empire, which includes Fox News, the New York Post , and a slew of influential news entities in Europe and Australia. The fictional Logan Roy runs Waystar-Royco, a telecommunications conglomerate which includes everything from cable news networks to theme parks.

Both the HBO series and the Murdoch expose are about wealth, power, and the family tension that comes when a tycoon is choosing a successor among relatives. Here are the biggest similarities:

Media magnate facing a health scare

The premiere of S uccession begins with patriarch Logan Roy reconsidering his plans to retire as the CEO of his company after he suffers a stroke. The New York Times Magazine cover story begins with Rupert Murdoch falling on his son’s yacht which caused a broken vertebrae and a spinal hematoma.

Both Logan’s scare and Rupert’s fall bring together their heirs to their hospital bedsides to battle it out over the future of the companies.

Siblings competing for power

Rupert Murdoch has six children: Prudence, his daughter from his first marriage to Patricia Booker; Lachlan, James, and Elisabeth, from his second marriage to Anna Murdoch Mann; and Chloe and Grace from his third marriage to Wendi Deng.

Logan Roy has four children: Connor from his first marriage; Kendall, Roman, and Siobhan from his second marriage.

Both Logan and Rupert’s first children are largely out of the conversation about who will take over the company. According to the Times , Prudence "kept some distance from the family business;" in Succession , Connor spends his time tending to his ranch in the middle of New Mexico and recording a podcast about Napoleon Bonaparte.

It is the oldest sons from the second marriages who are the heir apparents for Logan and Rupert: Kendall and Lachlan, respectively.

The Times piece describes the relationship between Rupert and his two sons this way:

Over the years, Lachlan and James had traded roles, more than once, as heir apparent and jilted son. It was no secret to those close to the family that Murdoch had always favored Lachlan. (“But I love all of my children,” Murdoch would say when people close to him pointed out his clear preference for Lachlan.)

In Succession , Kendall has a tense and competitive relationship with his father, but it’s obvious he’s the one groomed to take over the company. In the show, Kendall leaves the family business only to come back, desperately wanting his father’s approval. It seems his desire to run Waystar is more about proving to himself that his father thinks he can do it‚ rather than a drive to run the empire.

Like Kendall, Lachlan also left the family business when, in 2005, he took a $100 million payout from the family trust. A decade later, Lachlan returned after Rupert reportedly deemed him his successor.

But the makers of Succession also seem to blend some of the biography and characteristics of the two Murdoch sons with those of the Roys. For instance, the Times says of Lachlan, “As James saw it, his brother was mainly interested in the unique fringe benefits and trappings of power that came with the job.” In Succession , Roman's character is more interested in having a powerful job than actually doing it. Lachlan was named deputy chief operating officer of News Corp. at age 33; Roman is named chief operating officer of Waystar, while Kendall is acting CEO during his dad's recovery. Lachlan left News Corp. in 2005 after he reportedly “clashed repeatedly with seasoned executives who viewed him as an entitled princeling.” Prior to the events portrayed in Succession , Roman left Waystar after sparring with at least one seasoned executive, Frank Vernon, his father's top deputy.

In a more pronounced deviation, Logan’s daughter Siobhan is in many ways the Roy who may end up wielding the most power. Siobhan, who works in politics, is working her influence from outside the company, though.

The push to digital

While Lachlan most closely mirrors Kendall in terms of family dynamics, when it comes to business strategies, James and Kendall have a lot in common.

In Succession , Kendall tries to convince his dad to drop the local TV deal and to, instead, focus on a push into digital properties. (When that doesn’t work, he stages a coup, which fails spectacularly.)

James “spent the first decades of the 21st century helping reposition the company for the digital future—exploiting new markets around the world, expanding online offerings, embracing broadband and streaming technology,” according to The Times .

Family therapy sessions

After tensions reach a breaking point for the Roys, the family has a group therapy session at Connor’s New Mexico ranch in episode seven.

Rupert Murdoch tried a similar tactic with his own family. From the Times :

Murdoch tried to manage the tensions, arranging for group therapy with his children and their spouses with a counselor in London who specialized in working with dynastic families. There was even a therapeutic retreat to the Murdoch ranch in Australia. But these sessions provided just another forum for power games and manipulation.

Playing to conservative audiences

It’s been clear that Fox News is seen as the most powerful messaging tool of the Trump White House, but the Times story spells out how Rupert has built brands in the U.S., Europe, and Australia which have, more than any other media company, “enabled it, promoted it and profited from” the current right-wing populist movement.

In Succession , Logan tries to get around antitrust laws to purchase local TV stations to further push conservative messaging (a strategy that more closely mirrors the Sinclair family, which owns a number of local TV channels and pushes it's own version of conservative politics and values on viewers).

In terms of the sons' politics, Kendall Roy seems more in line with James Murdoch, while Roman Roy would likely get along with Lachlan Murdoch. According to the Times , James wants the family media business to be "sensible to any attendee of Davos or reader of The Economist ," which suggests his politics are right of center. Lachlan, on the other hand, wants to steer the company towards "an unabashedly nationalist, far-right and hugely profitable political propaganda machine," the Times reports .

In Succession , the politics of Kendall and Roman are less clear. (Siobhan, on the other hand, is a Democrat, or at least works for Democratic politicians; Connor seems to be a Libertarian, because he advocates doing away with all federal aid.) Still, Kendall would feel more comfortable rubbing elbows with the Davos crowd, while Roman, who is often cruel to those he deems beneath him, would likely espouse the politics of the far right—if he wasn't preoccupied with his hedonism.

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James Murdoch, Rebellious Scion

Increasingly uncomfortable with News Corp’s politics and profit motives, Rupert’s younger son chose chickens and sheep over Fox, and insists he doesn’t watch ‘Succession.’

Making a break: Mr. Murdoch in Georgetown. Credit... Jared Soares for The New York Times

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By Maureen Dowd

• Published Oct. 10, 2020 Updated Oct. 12, 2020

WASHINGTON — As we sat down to lunch in my garden, I mentioned to James Murdoch that I’ve been reading a lot of classical plays lately and a popular theme is the rancorous battle between two brothers over a kingdom.

“But these plays end in cannibalism and civil war, so at least your family hasn’t gone there yet,” I said brightly.

Above his mask and behind his Kingsman glasses, Mr. Murdoch’s brown eyes widened with alarm.

The issue of dynastic succession — the real one and the one in “Succession,” the Emmy-winning HBO drama that is inspired by the Murdochs — was definitely on the menu, along with fried calamari.

Mr. Murdoch, 47, resigned from the board of News Corp this summer with an elliptical statement, saying he was leaving “due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.”

Rupert Murdoch’s youngest child with his second wife, Anna, is loath to get into the epic family drama that found its climax in the 15 months between pushing a deal to sell 21st Century Fox to Disney and ankling the family business he once hoped to lead.

But in his briskly analytical way, over lunch and a subsequent phone call, he tried to explain why he “pulled the rip cord,” as he put it, after deepening estrangement with his father and brother and growing discomfort over the toxicity of Fox News and other conservative News Corp properties.

“I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important,” he told me. “But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas. A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact, if you will.

“And I just felt increasingly uncomfortable with my position on the board having some disagreements over how certain decisions are being made. So it was actually not that hard a decision to remove myself and have a kind of cleaner slate.”

The younger Mr. Murdoch’s disgust had flashed publicly before on a few occasions: He showed the disdain for Roger Ailes he shared with his more conservative, older brother Lachlan, 49.

In 2017, President Trump’s praise for white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., as “ very fine people ” spurred James Murdoch to give $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League. In an email to friends obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Murdoch rebuked Mr. Trump and wrote: “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists.” The email stood in sharp relief, given Fox’s fetid racism-by-night routine.

In January, James and his wife, Kathryn, expressed “ frustration ” about News Corp’s peddling of climate change denialism in the face of apocalyptic Australian wildfires that incinerated 46 million acres. Fox nighttime anchors picked up a false story line about arson from The Australian, a Murdoch-owned newspaper in Oz.

Once, James Murdoch thought he could reshape Fox. But in the summer of 2016, he failed to get his father to sign off on replacing Roger Ailes — embroiled in the sexual harassment scandals at Fox News — with David Rhodes, the former president of CBS News.

When Rupert, the chairman of the company, decided to run the network himself, the writing was on the wall. Rupert and Mr. Trump stepped up their dangerous tango and James, those who know him say, eventually decided it was time to get out of his Faustian deal.

At times, over the years, it looked like James and Kathryn might be bringing around Rupert Murdoch on climate change. But that was not to be, either.

“We’ve been arguing about politics since I was a teenager,” James told me.

So it wasn’t possible to change News Corp from the inside?

“I think there’s only so much you can do if you’re not an executive, you’re on the board, you’re quite removed from a lot of the day-to-day decisions, obviously,” he said. “And if you’re uncomfortable with those decisions, you have to take stock of whether or not you want to be associated and can you change it or not. I decided that I could be much more effective outside.”

‘His Better Angels’

James Murdoch was on top for long enough to get more than his share of headlines about the rising son of the Sun King. But then, while he was overseeing the operation in London, Rupert’s lieutenant and spiritual daughter, Rebekah Brooks, and her former deputy and lover Andy Coulson, got ensnared in the British phone hacking scandal. (Ms. Brooks was acquitted and Mr. Coulson convicted in the case that followed .)

The slime splashed on the son who had been seen as a clean-as-a-whistle smarty pants. British regulators faulted him for failing to get to the bottom of serious accusations that it had taken place — despite his claim that he didn’t read an entire email chain that would have clued him in — but also found no “reasonable basis to conclude that James Murdoch deliberately engaged in any wrongdoing.” A New York Times Magazine investigation into the Murdochs last year by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg reported that James’s sister Elisabeth urged her father to fire James and replace him with her. (She denied it.)

Some Murdoch familiars say that it was only when it was clear that James had lost the succession war that he showed more leg in expressing qualms and pushed the $71.3 billion Disney deal — with the effect of ensuring that Lachlan, seen as his father’s darling, was left with a hollowed-out empire.

Though the kids each walked away with billions in cash and stock, the deal bared all the competing interests in the family. Lachlan was, by all accounts, aghast to be left merely with the rump — the part James had dismissed to friends as an “American political project.” Rupert Murdoch did not try to make a top job for James at Disney a condition of the deal. He looked at James objectively vis a vis the deal, Disney insiders said, not with a father’s protective instinct.

“James was nothing but a gentleman in the whole process,” Bob Iger , the chairman of Disney, told me.

James said he pressed the deal because he knew, as the great digital transformation of Tinseltown got underway, that the Murdochs’ collection of old-school media assets had to be combined with a company like Disney to have the heft to compete against behemoths like Netflix.

News reports at the time suggested James harbored a fantasy about succeeding Mr. Iger, and the two talked about a possible role. But, James told me, “I decided pretty soon after we closed it that I didn’t want to stay on in the business. So if you think about it, I mean, your ego talks to you a little bit or somebody writes a story that says, ‘Oh, they don’t have a succession plan. James Murdoch can do X, Y and Z.’ And your ego goes, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ But then, you have to sit back and go, ‘That’s not me defining that. That’s some media journalist somewhere making up what they think success or failure is.’

“The idea, at my age, with a long career ahead of me, of going into a place where it’s a big corporate structure. You don’t really know what the future’s going to hold. And the other side is absolute self-determination and agency. It was a pretty simple choice. We never really even took talks very far at all about going to Disney because I informed them, because they were really trying to figure, ‘OK, what does the structure look like? Et cetera.’ I called Bob and said, ‘Look, you need to design that without me.’”

Friends say that James has been on a collision course with his family for 15 years. His evolution has been profoundly influenced by his wife, a former communications executive. He is, as one friend puts it, “living much more in his own skin, realizing his better angels and his better instincts.”

But when your last name is Murdoch and those billions sloshing around in your bank account come from a juggernaut co-opting governments across the English-speaking world and perpetuating climate-change denial, nativism and Sean Hannity, can you ever start fresh? As a beneficiary of his family’s trust, James is still reaping profits from Rupert Murdoch’s assets. Can he be the anti-venom?

And is the great game of Murdoch succession truly over? Murdoch watchers across media say James is aligned with his sister Elisabeth and his half sister, Prudence, even as he is estranged from his father and brother.

When Rupert, 89, finally leaves the stage and his elder children take over, that could make three votes in the family trust against one. Is there still time to de-Foxify Fox News — labeled a “hate-for-profit racket” by Elizabeth Warren — and other conservative News Corp outlets? Would Fox and its kin — downscale, feral creatures conjured by Rupert to help the bottom line — be the huge moneymakers they are if they went straight?

Eschewed Newspapers

For a long time, people have referred to James as “the smart brother,” the more strategic one, the more interesting one, the harder working one, the more enlightened one.

He is nothing like the hopeless sons on “Succession.” He came into his own at Star TV in Asia and then deftly entered the broadband market and positioned Sky TV as more than a satellite television provider. He says he is very proud of helping to restructure the National Geographic partnership, which caused the society’s endowment to swell to nearly $1 billion.

Unlike his father and grandfather — who broke the story of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign and later become an Australian regional newspaper magnate — James wasn’t interested in the romance of newspapers. He has always been looking around the corner for new technologies.

In 2006, he promised to make Sky carbon neutral. (He invited Al Gore to give his climate slide show at a corporate retreat in Pebble Beach, Calif., a talk that inspired Kathryn Murdoch to become an eco-warrior.) He drove a Prius around London and then switched to an early model of the Tesla roadster; he later joined Tesla’s board.

A Harvard dropout, James has long been teased for his techno argot, a contrast to Lachlan’s rock-climbing, red meat, good ol’ Aussie boy style. James’s look was more mogul-casual at lunch: a Loro Piana navy jacket, slim-fit jeans and Common Projects white sneakers. His hair, flecked with a few strands of gray, is longer than it has been since college. “I haven’t been to the barber since March,” Mr. Murdoch said. “Now it catches leaves and stuff.”

His Panama hat from San Juan — he wears straw hats year round — was attached to his attaché case.

He has set up offices for a new company, Lupa Systems, in downtown Manhattan and Mumbai. It is named for the she-wolf who suckles twin boys in Rome’s origin myth. When they grow up, Remus is killed by Romulus, who goes on to found the city — which James says is his favorite — and become its first king. (In “Succession,” Brian Cox’s character, the Rupert of the show, refers to his younger son, Roman, as Romulus.)

So far, Mr. Murdoch has made investments in the Tribeca Film Festival, Art Basel, Vice Media and in a comic book company whose publisher once worked for Marvel. The dream there is to create another Marvel-like universe of characters who could cavort across different platforms.

He is particularly excited about investing in start-ups created to combat fake news and the spread of disinformation, having found the proliferation of deep fakes “terrifying” because they “undermine our ability to discern what’s true and what’s not” and it “is only at the beginning as far as I can tell.” He’s funding a research program to study digital manipulation of societies, hoping to curtail “the use of technology to promulgate totalitarianism’’ and undermine democracies.

“So everything from the use of mass surveillance, telephone networks, 5G, all that stuff, domestically in a country like China, for example,” he said.

I wonder if this is some sort of expiation, given all the disinformation that News Corp has spewed. (Shades of Melania fighting cyberbullying ?)

Mr. Murdoch did not really answer. But later, when I talked to Kathryn Murdoch over Zoom from their farm in Connecticut, where they live with their three teenagers, chickens and sheep, she was more direct about the issue of using money made from disinformation to combat disinformation.

“I think that what’s important about what we’re doing is that we’re in control of ourselves,” she said, adding: “I’m in control of what I do, he is in control of what he does. We should be held accountable for those things. It’s very hard to be held accountable for things that other people do or are in control of. And I think that’s what was untenable.”

I asked her if they are happy with their liberation. “It’s nice to be able to do our own thing and just to have James be free of that tension,” she said with a broad smile. “It’s good for him.”

She added: “When a family is very involved in the business, it’s a big decision to leave that. I don’t know if it’s ever ending. It’s always, you know, ongoing.” She gave a wry chuckle.

Sneaking Smokes With Jerry

CNBC has called Kathryn and James “a political power couple in the Trump era” and James says his wife is “a force of nature.” “She’s encouraged me to take risks, to do things,’’ he said. “She’s encouraged me to speak up about things. I’m very lucky.”

Their foundation, Quadrivium, has supported voter participation, democracy reform and climate change projects. “I never thought that we would actually be at the point where we would have climate change effects and people would still be denying it,” Ms. Murdoch said.

Mr. Murdoch donated to Pete Buttigieg in the primary, and the couple has given $1.23 million to Joe Biden. So that’s who he’ll be voting for in November then? “Hell yes,” he said with a smile.

I noted to Ms. Murdoch that the effect of News Corp on the world is astounding when you think about it, from Brexit to Trump to the Supreme Court we may be heading toward.

“I’m not sure if I would give it that much credit,” she said. “Rupert’s talent was always in understanding what the public wanted and I think it much more follows or echoes what’s going on as opposed to leads. That’s not to say it doesn’t have responsibility. It does. But I think sometimes, inside the journalism world, it gets a little more credit than it deserves on that.”

I wondered if Rupert Murdoch ever got mad at her for pulling James to the light side on the environment and other issues. Was it daunting to argue with him?

“We’ve had plenty of very good dinners and very good discussions,” she said. “He relishes an argument. If you’re well prepared and you have your facts, it’s a really good debate practice. We’ve always gotten along even if we disagree. I actually have friends whose fathers are far scarier. Rupert actually told James to marry me as soon as he possibly could.”

Like James, she thinks Jerry Hall, the patriarch’s wife since 2016, is really fun. “Rupert is so lucky,” she said. “She’s just always wanting to, you know, sneak over and have a drink or smoke with you. ‘Just don’t tell Rupert I’m smoking.’”

Kathryn Murdoch has been tempted to watch “Succession.” But Mr. Murdoch said he doesn’t watch it, possibly so he doesn’t have to answer pesky questions about the portrayal of sons who veer between feeling entitled and feeling unworthy because they fear everything they get is only because of their name.

Asked how he could possibly not watch a buzzy show about his family, he smiled and replied: “I think you’d find it really easy. The other thing is, the dramatization of family affairs is as old as anything. It’s always built in a certain construct, back in Shakespeare or back in Homer.

“I think the reality, my reality anyways, is that I’ve never felt that comfortable drawing any parallels, because I don’t feel as if I live solely in a needy orbit of approval or whatever from the charismatic mega-fauna. Not at all. I’m entirely my own person. I think having agency from the beginning when I left school and started on my own, to set up with some partners, a tiny hip-hop record label, to moving with Kathryn to Hong Kong a few years later.”

Five years after that he went to Sky. “I feel like every few years I set out on something new and it’s not this drama that other people try to make about it,” he said. “But I don’t know anything about the show.”

After so much time in the executive suite, Mr. Murdoch seems genuinely excited to be in a smaller shop. He said last year, just for the hell of it, he thought of becoming an architect, going back to school.

“The outside world,” he continued, “it looks at you and says, ‘Well, these are the runners and riders. This person is up and down and this is success and this is failure.’ I think that that has to come much more from yourself. I’m incredibly grateful to be able to be just a totally free agent.”

When he looks back at the searing hacking scandal, to that painful moment sitting in front of a parliamentary committee in London with his father, who called it “the most humble day of my life,” how does he feel? Was James angry to be left holding the bag for the hacking, which was the ultimate end of the tabloid culture his father created?

“Going through something so intense like that, you definitely learn a lot of different lessons,” he said, adding: “It was very much about some stuff that had gone on at the newspapers before I was there, by the way.”

I wondered what he made of Fox and Mr. Trump playing down the coronavirus, even after the president was hospitalized.

“Look, you do worry about it and I think that we’re in the middle of a public health crisis,” Mr. Murdoch said. “Climate is also a public health crisis.” He continued: “Whatever political spin on that, if it gets in the way of delivering crucial public health information, I think is pretty bad.”

He added that Mr. Trump’s likening Covid-19 to the flu has been “his message from Day 1,” and is “craziness.” He thinks that “companies have a responsibility to their customers and their communities” and “that responsibility shouldn’t be compromised by political point scoring, that’s for sure.”

Did he catch that bananas moment on Fox after the president’s loony Evita balcony star turn , when Sean Hannity compared D.J.T. to F.D.R.?

Mr. Murdoch, who doesn’t usually watch Fox, said he didn’t see that show and doesn’t like to criticize specific Fox personalities, but added dryly, “I think comparing that kind of personal behavior to F.D.R., it’s a little much, you know?”

I noted that his father had a very dim view of Mr. Trump — in 2015, he tweeted “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” — before the pragmatic Rupert came around to the president.

“I’m just concerned that the leadership that we have, to me, just seems characterized by callousness and a level of cruelty that I think is really dangerous and then it infects the population,” he said, referring to the Trump administration. “It’s not a coincidence that the number of hate crimes in this country are rising over the last three years for the first time in a long time.”

With Mr. Trump and Fox, who is the dog and who is the tail?

“It looks to me, anyway, like it’s going to be a hard thing to understand because it probably goes back and forth,’’ he said. “I don’t think you’re going to get one pristine, consistent analysis of that phenomenon.”

I asked if he was friends with Ivanka and Jared Kushner. Ivanka was at one point a trustee for the fortune of the two daughters of Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng.

“She and Jared are both close with Wendi,” he said, adding: “I don’t know them well. I wasn’t in New York, you have to remember. I came back from abroad after over 10 years and I didn’t know a lot of things. I missed the whole ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians,’ the whole origin story of that.”

(The Times Magazine report included the detail that James and Lachlan tried to dissuade Pops, as they call him, from marrying Ms. Deng; James was worried, based on information he had received from senior foreign officials, that she was a Chinese asset; she has denied that.)

Mr. Murdoch’s friends describe him as “happy as a clam,” “giddy” and far more relaxed now that he has shaken off the King Lear machinations he has dealt with his whole life, as his father pitted the siblings against each other for the golden crown.

Mr. Murdoch’s friend Matthew Vaughn, an English producer and writer who did both “Kingsman” movies, believes that James will now start his own empire.

“James’s next chapter is going to be a damn good one, and it will surprise so many people,” Mr. Vaughn said. “He’ll be released from the blessing and the curse of the name Murdoch.”

I asked Mr. Murdoch if he will create his own “Game of Thrones” and bring in his own children — a daughter and two sons — to help run it.

“There’s no empire,” he replied, laughing a bit ruefully. “There’s no future dynasty.”

Confirm or Deny

Maureen Dowd: Judge Jeanine Pirro is really fun at the company Christmas party.

James Murdoch: I have no knowledge of that.

When you were 18, you had a summer job as a production assistant on “Rising Sun” and you held a giant duct of personal air-conditioning on Sean Connery wherever he was on the set.

Yes, I held the air-conditioning behind Sean Connery. The most interesting thing was, if he wanted the tube moved to a different spot he wouldn’t tell me. He would tell the director, who would tell the first assistant director, who would tell the second assistant director, who would tell me. It was a very hierarchical management of the air-conditioning tube.

You’ve never filled out a job application.

No, not true. When I went to Sky, for example, it was pretty controversial. It had to be voted on by all the shareholders. It was like months of job application in full public glare with psychological tests. Psychometric testing.

You know how much a gallon of milk costs.

Confirm. I just bought one the other day. It depends on where you get it, I guess. It’s like $4.

You’re tatted up.

I have a few. I drew them myself. One of them is a weird shape I drew when I was a kid. The other is actually a light bulb. I feel like tattoos should never have stories attached to them. You always regret it.

After you quit the board, you considered bleaching your hair again just for the hell of it.

Your father made you and your siblings watch “Gallipoli” on every family vacation.

No. Great movie, though.

When you had a hip-hop record company after college, you slept with a gun under your bed.

It’s an urban myth.

You were childhood friends with Ghislaine Maxwell.

Nope. Absolutely not.

You bought a 445-acre “end of times” house in a remote part of Canada with its own water and solar energy supply.

Oh, it’s just a fishing cabin. But the borders got shut so I haven’t been. I don’t know why we didn’t think that through.

You wrote a column in the Harvard Lampoon titled “Albrecht the Atypical Hun.”

Yes. It was a cartoon that I wrote with a friend. I am not great at it, but I can draw.

You love Blade, the Uber of helicopters.

No. I don’t go to the Hamptons.

Lachlan is not very good at rock climbing.

I have no knowledge of that. I think he’s probably pretty good.

Trump has handled the TikTok situation perfectly.

It doesn’t look very handled right now.

You do your best thinking about climate change on your father’s yacht.

You were the driving force behind Fox’s Myspace acquisition in 2005.

No, I wasn’t there at the time.

Prince Harry reached out to you about how he should deal with Prince William.

You have a black belt in karate.

You are extremely fastidious.

I have a bad habit of straightening other people’s pictures on their walls, yes. I’m just trying to be helpful.

Most of your success has come from hard work, not luck.

Isn’t that what they say — the harder you work, the luckier you get?

You make your children call you “Dottore.”

I got an honorary doctorate from the American University of Rome, and I continue to insist that I’m called “Dottore” but it’s not working.

You don’t watch Fox News.

Sometimes I watch, if there’s an important thing, like an important interview or something like that, sometimes.

Wendi Deng dated Vladimir Putin.

You can’t ask me those questions.

An earlier version of this article referred incompletely to the findings of British regulators after they investigated phone hacking by British tabloids. The regulators faulted James Murdoch for failing to get to the bottom of serious accusations that the hacking had taken place, not for failing to stop the hacking.

How we handle corrections

Maureen Dowd , winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and author of three New York Times best sellers, became an Op-Ed columnist in 1995. More about Maureen Dowd

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Rupert Murdoch: Huge success, profound influence and deep controversy - the story of his 70-year career

Remarkably, Murdoch concluded the biggest deals of his life in his late 80s, estimated to have netted him $4bn personally and a further $2bn to each of his adult children.

Business correspondent @pkelso

Saturday 23 September 2023 13:25, UK

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Rupert Murdoch's resignation as chairman of Fox and News Corporation brings a formal end to a 70-year career that brought him huge commercial success, profound political influence and deep controversy.

A disruptive and divisive figure, Murdoch's talent for innovation and appetite for confrontation broke new ground in newspapers, broadcasting and entertainment, and with mass audiences came the ability to shape politics in the UK, the US and his native Australia.

As a consequence his professional legacy is contentious. To his supporters, Murdoch is a champion of popular entertainment, accessible news and a free and fearless press; to his detractors, he has been a malign influence who coarsened public debate, enabled a new wave of populism, and whose business was tainted by criminality.

Few would argue however that he has been one of the most significant business and political figures of the age.

Foundations of an empire

Keith Rupert Murdoch, born in Melbourne in 1931, has always presented himself as an outsider with no time for elites, but he is a child of the Australian media establishment.

His father was reporter and newspaper proprietor Keith Murdoch, who made his name evading military censors to report on the chaotic and deadly Gallipoli campaign, which cost the lives of more than 40,000 Allied troops, many of them from Australia and New Zealand.

Eventually knighted for his services to journalism, Sir Keith passed on to his son a love of newspapers, a taste for the power of journalism and a platform to exercise it.

Sir Keith would become editor, managing director and finally chairman of the Melbourne-based Herald Group, and then bought his own papers including The News in Adelaide, a title with 75,000 readers that he left to his son when he died in 1952.

It was the foundation stone of an empire that today still includes two-thirds of Australian media.

'Sex, sport and contests'

By the 1960s, having completed an Oxford degree (PPE) and served a proprietor's apprenticeship at home, Murdoch turned his attention to international expansion, starting in London.

In 1969 he bought the News Of The World and then, wanting a daily paper to share the overheads, The Sun - at the time a nondescript broadsheet that cost him barely £1m.

He was a genuine outsider in a British newspaper establishment dominated by editorial giants like Hugh Cudlipp and William Beaverbrook, editor and proprietor respectively of the Mirror and the Daily Express, who claimed close to eight million readers a day between them. Within a decade, Murdoch's papers would eclipse them both.

He set out his priorities in an early meeting, telling Sun staff that "sex, sport and contests" would revive circulation. Rebranded in tabloid format with a distinctive red masthead, with topless models featuring daily on Page 3 from 1970, it was a wildly successful formula that pushed its rivals to compete in similar vein.

Driven by an aggressive price war with Robert Maxwell's Mirror Group, the tabloid culture reached its apogee in the 1980s and 1990s, with no area of public life spared. Sensation sold, whether it was the breakup of Charles and Diana, reported in excruciating detail, or endless celebrity transgressions.

Murdoch's popular papers were patriotic to the point of jingoism - cheering British troops off to the Falklands in 1982, and celebrating the sinking of Argentine warship the General Belgrano with the infamous headline "GOTCHA". They also nurtured an intolerant streak, demonising homosexuality at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

The tone chimed with the times and the government of Margaret Thatcher, for whom The Sun was a champion and cheerleader, praising her transformational economic policies and relentlessly attacking Labour to its four million readers.

When Thatcher's successor John Major won an unlikely majority at the 1992 general election, The Sun claimed victory for a polling day front page ridiculing Labour leader Neil Kinnock, running the follow-up "IT WAS THE SUN WOT WON IT!"

The paper also tapped into Thatcher's growing euroscepticism at the turn of 90s, running regular critiques of perceived EU meddling and turning previously anonymous Brussels bureaucrats into pantomime villains.

Notoriously, EU Commission President Jacques Delors was dismissed with the headline "UP YOURS DELORS!"

Support for Thatcher smoothed the way for expansion. While The Sun and News Of The World scandalised, Murdoch furthered his influence by purchasing the ultimate establishment title, The Times, in 1981 - adding The Sunday Times when the prime minister decided not to refer the takeover to the Monopoly Commission.

With a stable of titles under his News International brand all dependent on the goodwill of print unions still operating with almost comically restrictive working practices, Murdoch executed perhaps his most audacious and impactful intervention in the UK market.

Secretly he constructed new printworks at Wapping in east London, where electronic composition would replace the labour-intensive hot metal process. After a redundancy offer was refused and a strike announced by union staff in January 1986, at a stroke he switched all production to the new plant.

A protracted and sometimes violent dispute followed, lasting more than a year but ending in victory for Murdoch, enabled by the Thatcher government's legislation to curb union power. Coming a year after the miners' strike, it helped embed a fundamental shift in industrial relations.

Within two years the rest of Fleet Street had followed Murdoch's lead, but politically he proved himself a pragmatist as the Conservatives' star waned. After 20 years of enthusiastic support for the Conservatives, Murdoch's titles switched their support to Tony Blair in 1997, when it was clear New Labour was on course for victory.

Despite a consistent backing for right-of-centre politicians around the world, Murdoch above all backed winners, mindful of the benefits they could bring him.

Reach for the sky

While newspapers were in Murdoch's blood they were just one arm of the media, and in the 1980s he sought expansion into broadcasting and competition with another establishment brand, this time the BBC.

When the government auctioned a single satellite broadcasting licence, Murdoch lost out to British Satellite Broadcasting. He went ahead anyway - founding Sky on a brownfield site near Heathrow in west London, but broadcasting initially from Luxembourg.

It was a scrappy start-up operation led largely by veterans of Murdoch's Australian operations, and one that could have cost him everything.

He claimed to have "bet the farm" on a package that began with Sky News, movies and a handful of American channels, but sport was to prove the game changer.

In 1992, Sky won the rights to air top-flight football - with the first division rebranded as the Premier League and matches broadcast live across the week.

It transformed the company and the game, spawning a rights market now worth almost £2bn a year to the clubs, and becoming the foundation of a subscription model that in 2018 saw Sky, by now Europe's largest broadcaster, valued at $39bn in a takeover by American cable giant Comcast.

Breaking America

Murdoch's restless drive for empire building had taken him to America in the 1970s, where expansion followed a familiar pattern.

He bought the New York Daily Post in 1976, fashioned it into a rambunctious tabloid in keeping with the city's character, then turned it to political effect.

He nurtured links with Ronald Reagan's campaign for the presidency, who reportedly appreciated his support in helping win New York state for the Republicans, and in 1994 Murdoch bought a stake in 20th Century Fox, expanding his empire into Hollywood movies and entertainment as well as a network of local television stations.

Regulatory obstacles to co-ownership of newspapers and television stations in the same city melted away, thanks in part to Murdoch's ability to deliver favourable coverage of political candidates or incumbents.

That ability moved into another gear in 1996 when Murdoch founded Fox News with former Richard Nixon adviser Roger Ailes.

With President Reagan having revoked the "Fairness Doctrine", requiring broadcasters to present both sides of the story, Murdoch and Ailes were free to create a partisan platform the likes of which had never been seen.

In direct competition with the orthodox, liberal and self-consciously even-handed CNN, Fox News tacked hard to the right, making primetime stars of bellicose anchors and moving the political dial. Research showed that, when Fox began airing on local cable networks, support for Republican candidates rose. And it was profitable, generating billions of dollars in revenue.

The model reached its zenith with Fox's support for Donald Trump, the reality show businessman who became president thanks in part to a base activated by Fox's support.

It is an association Murdoch came to regret. He is reported to have thought Trump "a f****** idiot", but that did not prevent the businessman occupying a regular Monday morning slot on the Fox & Friends breakfast show.

Trump used that to routinely attack then President Obama with baseless conspiracies about his place of birth, before parlaying that popularity into a presidential campaign.

Fox's role in enabling Trump's successful 2016 campaign and its coverage of the aftermath of his 2020 defeat, in which it amplified entirely false conspiracies that the election was stolen , is perhaps Murdoch's most contentious career legacy.

The reckoning

Murdoch's greatest successes were also the source of his greatest scandals, leading to the closure of his most notorious paper, and the shaming of Fox News.

In 2006 it was revealed that the News Of The World had "hacked" the mobile phone of Prince William, using a simple override to listen to voice messages and using what they heard as the basis of stories in the paper.

The paper's royal editor and a private investigator were jailed - but in 2009 and 2010, The Guardian reported that hacking was more widespread, and that News International had reached multimillion-pound settlements with a number of celebrities.

The following year, just as Murdoch was plotting a full takeover of Sky, The Guardian revealed that reporters at the News Of The World had hacked the phone of Milly Dowler, a murdered schoolgirl.

Amid public outrage, with Prime Minister David Cameron announcing a public inquiry and his communications director, former News Of The World editor Andy Coulson, arrested, Murdoch closed the paper.

It was a ruthless act of self-preservation, sacrificing a lucrative and successful title to try and confine the damage to his newspaper division, and protect - unsuccessfully as it turned out - his bid for full ownership of Sky. His son James, the third of Murdoch's six children, was forced to resign as chief executive.

At a subsequent parliamentary hearing, Murdoch described his appearance as "the most humble day of my life", shortly before a protester shoved a plate of shaving foam in his face.

Almost 20 years on, News International is estimated to have privately paid hundreds of millions in damages, and the case rumbles on. In 2023, Prince Harry was among a host of public figures and celebrities seeking damages for hacking by the Sun, which always denied wrongdoing.

Read more: Murdoch abandons bid to reunite News Corp and Fox Corp Fox News agrees settlement in vote-rigging claims lawsuit

In the US a reckoning for Fox News' excesses took a little longer, but finally came in 2023, the result of a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, a manufacturer of vote counting software used in the 2020 election.

In the aftermath of Trump's defeat, Fox anchors repeated his false claims that the machines had been instructed to switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden. In pre-trial discovery it emerged that they, and Murdoch, did not believe the former president but broadcast the claims anyway, in part from fear of alienating their loyalist audience.

Murdoch was said to have called it "really crazy stuff" and described comments from Trump loyalists on the channel as "terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear".

Facing giving evidence in person, he authorised a $787.5m (£641m) payment to settle the case. Tucker Carlson, Fox's most popular presenter, was fired without notice.

The empire cuts back

By the 2020s and the nadir of Trump's defeat, Murdoch's empire was, for the first time, smaller. In 2018 he took the momentous decision to sell his prize asset 21st Century Fox, concluding that even he could not muster the scale to compete with the new social media and streaming giants.

His first choice was a sale to Disney, the home of the permanently smiling Mickey Mouse - apparently the polar opposite of Fox's snarl. A deal was done in principle with Disney boss Bob Iger that would see the entertainment division sold, while Murdoch hung on to Fox News and Fox Sports, as well as his American papers, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal.

In Europe, Fox's 39% stake in Sky would be sold too, subject to regulatory approval that had twice proved impossible for Murdoch to clear when he wanted to take full control.

The sale turned into an auction however, with NBC owner Comcast joining the bidding, driving Disney's eventual price to $71bn from an original $52bn. In the UK, Comcast did outbid Disney and took control of Sky, leaving Murdoch with his British newspapers.

Murdoch's private life and the roles of his children in the business empire have long been subject to the sort of scrutiny his titles reserve for other people.

Married and divorced four times, he has six children.

The eldest Prudence was born to his first wife Patricia and has the lowest profile, and he has two children from his third marriage to Chinese television executive Wendi Deng, Grace and Chloe.

His second marriage to Anna brought three children, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James, the three of them cast in a real-life soap opera that is an obvious inspiration for the HBO drama Succession, broadcast, with some irony, by Sky in the UK.

(Murdoch's 2022 divorce settlement from his fourth wife, model Jerry Hall, is reported to stipulate she is not allowed to pass information to the show's writers.)

While Elisabeth built her own successful production company, James and Lachlan worked within the family business in Australia, the US and the UK, their stars rising and falling apparently at their fathers' whim.

James was chief executive of Sky until the phone hacking scandal forced him out, and after a brief period as joint chiefs of 21st Century Fox beginning in 2015, Lachlan appeared to have emerged as the successor, running the US business as James stepped away to pursue his own ventures.

Lachlan's victory in the sibling race appears to be confirmed by his appointment as his father's replacement as chair of News Corporation and sole executive chair of Fox, but this may still be a turning point for the empire.

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While Rupert Murdoch's grasp of operations and decision making at 92 has been questioned in recent years, not least by his biographer Michael Wolff in an impending book, his presence has mattered.

His absence from day-to-day operations, no matter how theoretical that has become in practice, may threaten family control.

Crucial will be what happens to the voting rights over the family shares he has divided with tantalising balance between himself and his four eldest children.

Under the terms of the Murdoch Family Trust, which owns the controlling stake in each business, he has four votes and the children one each. The corporate succession battle may not end with his resignation.

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Inside Rupert Murdoch’s Succession Drama

By Gabriel Sherman

O n the afternoon of July 2, 2022, Rupert Murdoch ’s black Range Rover pulled up to a 12th-century stone church in Westwell, a storybook Cotswolds village 75 miles west of London. The then 91-year-old Fox Corporation chairman traveled to the Oxfordshire countryside to attend his 21-year-old granddaughter Charlotte Freud’s wedding. Invitations instructed the 70 guests to wear “formal theatrical” attire. Murdoch emerged from his SUV looking like Tom Wolfe in a white suit, red suede shoes, and red tie. Then he nearly collapsed. 

A day earlier, Murdoch was in a bed at Cromwell Hospital in London battling a serious case of COVID-19, two sources close to him said. Over the course of a week, doctors treated Murdoch’s symptoms—labored breathing and fatigue—with supplemental oxygen and antibodies, one of the sources said. His recovery was frustratingly slow. At the wedding, Murdoch needed the help of his oldest son, Lachlan, to keep him on his feet. “Rupert was very weak. Lachlan was holding him up to get from place to place,” a guest recalled. 

COVID was only the most recent medical emergency that sent Murdoch to the hospital. In recent years, Murdoch has suffered a broken back, seizures, two bouts of pneumonia, atrial fibrillation, and a torn Achilles tendon, a source close to the mogul told me. Many of these episodes went unreported in the press, which was just how Murdoch liked it. Murdoch assiduously avoids any discussion of a future in which he isn’t in command of his media empire. “I’m now convinced of my own immortality,” he famously declared after beating prostate cancer in 1999 at the age of 69. He reminds people that his mother, Dame Elisabeth, lived until 103 (“I’m sure he’ll never retire,” she told me when I interviewed her in 2010, a day after her 101st birthday). But unlike the politicians Murdoch has bullied into submission with his tabloids, human biology is immovable. “There’s been a joke in the family for a long time that 40 may be the new 30, but 80 is 80,” a source close to Murdoch said. On March 11, he turned 92. 

Although he is a nonagenarian intent on living forever, Murdoch has been consumed with the question of his succession . He long wanted one of his three children from his second wife, Anna—Elisabeth, 54, Lachlan, 51, and James, 50—to take over the company one day. Murdoch believed a Darwinian struggle would produce the most capable heir. “He pitted his kids against each other their entire lives. It’s sad,” a person close to the family said. Elisabeth was by many accounts the sharpest, but she is a woman, and Murdoch subscribed to old-fashioned primogeniture. She quit the family business in 2000 and launched her own phenomenally successful television production company. Lachlan shared Murdoch’s right-wing politics and atavistic love for newsprint and their homeland, Australia. “Lachlan was the golden child,” the person close to the family said. But Murdoch worried that his easygoing son, who seemed happiest rock climbing, did not want the top job badly enough. In 2005, Lachlan, then News Corp’s deputy chief operating officer, quit and moved back to Sydney after clashing with Fox News chief Roger Ailes and chief operating officer Peter Chernin. That left James as the heir apparent. For the next decade, James climbed the ranks, vowing to make the Murdoch empire carbon-neutral and investing in prestige media brands like Hulu and the National Geographic Channel. But James’s liberal politics and desire to make News Corp respected in elite circles rankled Murdoch, who continued to woo Lachlan with Ahab-like determination. In 2015, the older son agreed to return from Australia as his father’s heir. “It was a big slap in the face,” a person close to James said.

Ascending to the throne and holding on to it are different propositions. Lachlan’s future will be decided by his siblings, all of whom sit on the board of the trust that controls the company through a special class of stock. According to sources briefed on the trust’s governance, Murdoch has four votes while Elisabeth, Lachlan, James, and Prudence, Murdoch’s daughter from his first marriage, each have one. Murdoch’s daughters Chloe and Grace from his third marriage, to Wendi Deng, have a financial stake but no voting rights. After Murdoch’s death, his votes will be distributed equally among the four eldest children, the source said. “The question is, when Rupert dies, how are the kids aligned?” said a former News Corp executive.

The central fault line remains the rift between James and Lachlan. According to sources, the brothers no longer speak. James is horrified by Fox News and tells people the network’s embrace of climate denialism, white nationalism, and stolen election conspiracies is a menace to American democracy. But to overthrow Lachlan and get control of Fox, James needs Elisabeth and Prudence to back him—and that is hardly assured. “James is a lone wolf,” the former News Corp executive said. Politically, Elisabeth is liberal, but she has remained close with Rupert and Lachlan; she sat in a box with the pair at the Super Bowl. A person close to Elisabeth says she wants to enjoy the time she has left with her father. “She’s terrified of Rupert dying mad at her,” the source said. Prudence, who has stayed out of the family business, “is a wild card,” the former News Corp executive said. 

While the finale unfolds, Murdoch is trying to prove he has one last act in him. But his erratic performance, which has thrown his personal life and media empire into disarray, has left even those in his orbit wondering if he’s lost the plot. Last June, Murdoch abruptly left his fourth wife, model-actor Jerry Hall. For two brief weeks this spring, he was engaged to Ann Lesley Smith , a 66-year-old former dental hygienist turned conservative radio host with QAnon-style politics. (Smith told an interviewer in 2022 that COVID was a “plandemic” hatched by Bill Gates at Davos.) “Rupert has been radicalized by his own echo chamber,” said a person close to him, explaining his initial attraction to Smith. In January, Murdoch scuttled a plan to merge Fox and News Corp—which would have centralized Lachlan’s control over the television and publishing divisions—after major shareholders balked. “It was a harebrained scheme. They got their ass handed to them by investors,” said a person close to the Murdochs. 

Murdoch’s most damaging error, though, has been Fox News’s coverage of President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat and its aftermath. The crisis has led to an existential threat: the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems brought against Fox News. The blockbuster trial is set to begin in April, but even if the parties settle before then, Dominion’s legal filings have already publicized internal communications that revealed those at the highest levels of Fox News didn’t believe Trump’s stolen election conspiracies even as the network was cravenly promoting the lies for ratings. (In one email, Murdoch called Trump’s fraud claims “really crazy stuff.”) I’ve covered Fox News for more than a decade and wrote a 2014 biography of Ailes , its longtime chairman and CEO. The Dominion lawsuit is the worst crisis at the network I’ve seen. In their own words, Fox hosts have been exposed as propagandists. “If we lose this suit, it’s fucking bad,” a senior Fox staffer told me. 

There is an irony to Murdoch’s current woes. He monetized outrage and grievance to build a conservative media empire that influenced politics on three continents for the last half century. Now these same forces are threatening to destroy his legacy, his still-vast media empire, and the family that stands to inherit it. 

T o understand how Murdoch got to this embattled chapter of his reign, it’s helpful to go back to 2015 and a brief moment when he had everything he wanted. He had recruited his favorite son, Lachlan, back to News Corp after a 10-year absence to be his heir apparent. He had rehired Rebekah Brooks , the former CEO of his British tabloids, whom Murdoch treated like a surrogate daughter, after a London jury acquitted her of four criminal charges related to the phone-hacking scandal that roiled his UK business a few years earlier. An American election was on the horizon, and Fox News was primed to put a Republican in the White House after eight years of Barack Obama. At the age of 84, newly divorced from Deng , Murdoch fell in love with the supermodel Jerry Hall. 

Murdoch seemed like the last man Hall would go out with. The 1970s fashion icon was a BBC-watching liberal 25 years Murdoch’s junior. She previously dated rock stars Bryan Ferry and Mick Jagger, her longtime partner with whom she has four children. In 2013, Hall was in Melbourne playing Mrs. Robinson in the stage version of  The Graduate when her friend Penny Fowler, Murdoch’s niece, suggested they meet. Murdoch and Hall spent months emailing and talking on the phone before she agreed to a lunch date in New York. When Hall arrived, her hotel room was filled with flowers and chocolates. “He was an old-fashioned gentleman. We laughed together nonstop,” she told friends. A couple of nights later, Murdoch took her to see  Hamilton.  

Soon they were a couple. “They seemed to our surprise very happy and a wonderful fit,” recalled Hall’s close friend Tom Cashin, who socialized with the pair. After a few weeks of dating, Murdoch and Hall flew on his private G650 jet to Texas to meet Hall’s Fox News–loving family. Hall left Texas at 16 to model in Europe, but as she watched her relatives line up to receive Murdoch like he was the king of red America, she realized that her family’s approval meant a lot. Six months into the relationship, Murdoch proposed. “Mick was so unfaithful to you, I’d never be unfaithful,” Murdoch told Hall, according to a person briefed on the conversation. They wed at an 18th-century mansion in London in March 2016, seven days before Murdoch’s 85th birthday. “No more tweets for ten days or ever! Feel like the luckiest AND happiest man in world,” he posted after the ceremony.

Murdoch’s luck quickly ran out. He came down with a bad flu on their honeymoon in the South of France, according to a source. Then, in July, former  Fox & Friends  host Gretchen Carlson sued Ailes for sexual harassment. Murdoch desperately wanted to protect a longtime lieutenant and the $1 billion in annual profits he delivered. But after Carlson’s suit spurred dozens of women to come forward with horrific accounts of sexual abuse at Fox News, James and Lachlan, longtime Ailes antagonists, forced Murdoch to push Ailes out . James seized an opportunity to steer Fox to the center and recruited then CBS News president David Rhodes as Ailes’s replacement. Rupert and Lachlan blocked the plan, with Rupert taking the Fox News CEO title instead. The message was clear: Ailes was gone, but Fox News wouldn’t change. 

With a background in newspapers, not TV, Murdoch delegated decisions to lower-ranking Fox News executives. But the network was in chaos. For the first time since it launched in 1996, producers had to make programming calls without Ailes’s daily directives. As they grasped for a strategy, they saw one topic boosted ratings more than anything else: Trump. 

It’s ironic that Murdoch’s fortunes would become entwined with Trump’s, because Murdoch found Trump appalling. “Rupert knew he was an idiot,” a person close to Murdoch said. Murdoch was a longtime champion of immigration reform and free trade and loathed Trump’s nativism and know-nothingism. During the Republican primary, Murdoch waged a media campaign in the pages of  The Wall Street Journal  and on Fox News to deny Trump the nomination. Once Trump was in the White House, however, Murdoch went all in. Fox News became de facto state TV. It was a continuation of Murdoch’s time-tested strategy of forging alliances with politicians across the ideological spectrum as long as they advanced his interests. (His UK papers had backed both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.) 

Trump more than delivered. One source with direct knowledge of their conversations told me Murdoch lobbied Trump to punish Facebook and Google for siphoning his newspapers’ advertising revenue. In 2019, Trump’s Justice Department launched an antitrust investigation of Google. In 2021, Google settled and struck a lucrative content-sharing deal with Murdoch. The source also said Murdoch pushed Trump to open up land for fracking to boost the value of Murdoch’s fossil fuel investments. The Trump administration released nearly 13 million acres of federally controlled land to fracking companies. Murdoch, who sources say has become more pro-life in recent years, encouraged Trump to appoint judges who would overturn  Roe v. Wade. “Rupert wanted Trump’s Supreme Court justices in so they could make abortion illegal,” a source who spoke to Murdoch said. Murdoch’s alliance with Trump made Murdoch more powerful than ever but carried a personal cost.

F or many American families during the Trump years, politics became a third rail. And so it was for the Murdochs. Among Murdoch’s adult children, Elisabeth and James tilted #resistance, whereas Lachlan was hard-core MAGA. (The eldest Murdoch son was particularly close with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, sources said.) Meanwhile, Murdoch’s new wife despised Trump—and let Murdoch know it. “During dinners we had with Jerry and Rupert, Jerry wouldn’t hold back,” Cashin, Hall’s friend, said. According to a source, Murdoch wanted to buy a house in Florida to be closer to Mar-a-Lago, but Hall refused. Hall told friends she was alarmed by Trump’s lack of qualifications or respect for the office. At a lunch shortly after the 2016 election, Hall asked Trump to reroute the Dakota Access Pipeline away from Native American reservations that were protesting the project. Trump responded by asking if she wanted to serve in his administration as head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “It was horrible. I couldn’t wait to get away,” she later told friends. 

Discontent among the Murdochs simmered for the first months of Trump’s term. But after the August 2017 neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, tensions boiled over. James and his wife, Kathryn, a former marketing communications professional turned philanthropist, were aghast that Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comment drew a moral equivalency between tiki-torch-wielding neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and the counterprotesters standing up to them. James confronted Rupert and Lachlan about Fox News’s full-throated defense of Trump’s remarks. They rebuffed him. “They were both in denial. They didn’t want to see it for what it was,” a source briefed on the conversations said. Stymied, James took his criticism public. Days after the march, he donated $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League and sent an email to friends, which promptly leaked to the press, that denounced Trump’s refusal to condemn white supremacy. “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists,” James wrote. It was an inflection point for James. He wanted out. At that very moment, Murdoch set in motion a media deal that would give the younger son a graceful and lucrative exit strategy. 

Two days before the Charlottesville rally, Murdoch hosted Disney CEO Bob Iger for a glass of wine at his $28.8 million Bel Air vineyard Moraga, one of the only vineyards in Los Angeles. As the two moguls discussed the rapidly shifting media landscape, Iger floated that Disney would be interested in buying 21st Century Fox, Murdoch’s movie studio and entertainment assets. Murdoch would have flatly dismissed the overture in the past. He was, after all, a pirate who conquered media companies, not dispensed with them. But in the streaming age, legacy Hollywood players like Murdoch and Iger lacked the scale to compete with tech giants like Apple, Amazon, and Netflix. The logic of selling 21st Century Fox to Disney made a lot of sense. Plus, Murdoch would get to keep Fox News and his beloved newspapers, the source of his political influence. Disney certainly wanted no part of those. 

James and Lachlan went to war with each other over the deal. James championed it for business reasons, but also because he and Iger discussed the possibility of James taking a high-level job at Disney after the acquisition. “James thought about what it might be like to have a boss who appreciates you for what you can do instead of a father that just sees you as the child where, no matter what you do, the other son is always better,” a person close to James said. Lachlan, meanwhile, felt Rupert and James were rushing into a deal that undervalued Fox’s assets. On top of that, the deal seemed like a massive bait and switch. A year earlier, Lachlan had moved his family from Australia to Los Angeles to be Rupert’s successor. Now his father and younger brother wanted to sell off a huge swath of  his future kingdom. It would leave Lachlan to run a rump state comprising Fox News, a dying broadcast network, Fox Sports, book publisher HarperCollins, and some newspapers. “Lachlan’s whole self-image was that he was going to be the next Rupert,” a person close to him said. 

As James and Rupert pushed the deal forward in the fall of 2017, Lachlan seemed intent on derailing it. At a dinner with Iger, Lachlan unspooled a rant about illegal immigration that made Iger, an outspoken Democrat who flirted with his own presidential run, very uncomfortable, according to two sources briefed on the dinner. At another dinner in New York, Lachlan exploded at Rupert and James. “He said, ‘If you do this deal, I’m never speaking to either of you again!’ ” recalled a person briefed on the conversation. (Another person close to Lachlan denies this.) Unable to quash it, Lachlan reached a breaking point. According to three sources, he suffered a panic attack about the merger and was briefly treated at an LA-area hospital. (The person close to Lachlan denied this.) 

Eleven days before Christmas 2017, Disney and Murdoch announced they had reached a $52.4 billion deal. Lachlan would stay on to run Fox News and the family’s remaining assets. In 2019, Lachlan paid a reported $150 million—the highest price in California history—for the 25,000-square-foot Bel Air estate featured in  The Beverly Hillbillies.  James took his walk-away money and launched a media fund called Lupa Systems, investing in liberal-leaning companies like Vice and Tribeca Enterprises. ( Lupa is Italian for “she-wolf”—as in the one that raised brothers Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, before Romulus murdered Remus.) 

For Murdoch, the Disney deal was a career triumph. It solved his succession problems. James was out. Lachlan was in. And the price that Disney ultimately paid climbed to $71.3 billion, now seen as a high-water mark of the streaming content boom. The thrill didn’t last. In early January 2018, Murdoch and Hall were sailing the Caribbean aboard Lachlan’s 140-foot carbon-fiber yacht when disaster struck.

H all was asleep in the stateroom aboard  Sarissa when she bolted awake at the sound of Murdoch moaning in agony. She later told friends she found her 86-year-old husband in excruciating pain on the cabin floor. He said he fell down a step trying to get to the bathroom and couldn’t get up. Hall alerted the captain. He quickly gave Murdoch a shot of a painkiller that allowed Murdoch to sleep fitfully while they sailed through the night to the nearest port, Pointe-à-Pitre, on the French island of Grande-Terre, in Guadeloupe. But the crisis kept getting worse. Lachlan’s massive boat towered over the pier, and it was perilous to lower Murdoch in a stretcher. Once they managed to get Murdoch off the boat, they discovered the island’s hospital was closed after a recent fire. Murdoch had to spend the night on a gurney under a tent in the parking lot until James’s private jet landed with a medevac team. By the time Murdoch flew to a UCLA hospital, he was in critical condition. “He kept almost dying,” a person close to the family said. Doctors diagnosed Murdoch with arrhythmia and a broken back. While examining the X-ray, they saw Murdoch had fractured vertebrae before, the person said. Murdoch explained it must have been from the time his ex-wife Deng pushed him into a piano during a fight, after which he spent weeks on the couch. (Deng did not respond to requests for comment.) 

Murdoch’s PR team scrambled to spin the sailing accident when reporters started calling. They leaked an email to show he was in command. “I have to work from home for some weeks. In the meantime, you’ll be hearing from me by email, phone and text!” it said. But in reality, Murdoch was in terrible shape and required Hall to spoon-feed him for months. “Jerry was as sensitive with him as a full-time nurse would have been,” her friend Cashin said. Then, in March 2019, Murdoch had another fall in his Bel Air home. This time, he tore his Achilles tendon tripping over the box of a chessboard Lachlan had given him for his 87th birthday. The injury confined Murdoch to a wheelchair for months, a source familiar with the incident said. Murdoch was in and out of the hospital with pneumonia and seizures. When COVID-19 emerged in early 2020, Murdoch’s doctors told him he needed to take extreme precautions to protect himself. 

While Fox News hosts railed against lockdowns and pushed dubious treatments like hydroxychloroquine, Murdoch followed the science. “He was scared for himself and was very careful,” a person who spoke to Murdoch at the time recalled. According to sources, Murdoch and Hall quarantined in Bel Air without any staff for months. Hall bought robot vacuums to clean the floors, baked sourdough bread, and cooked simple meals of roast chicken, leg of lamb, and vegetarian pasta. During the day, Murdoch watched the stock market and took Zoom calls while Hall took online courses in UC Davis’s winemaking program. (Hall told friends Murdoch wanted her to do it so he could write off $3 million of vineyard expenses as long as she worked 500 hours a year on winemaking.) At night, she and Murdoch played chess, backgammon, and gin rummy. She usually won, she told friends, except when they played Liar’s Dice. “He’s a good liar!” she told them. 

Murdoch was one of the first people in the world to be vaccinated in December 2020. As the months dragged on, Murdoch grew increasingly irate with Trump’s erratic pandemic policies, like the time Trump suggested Americans inject themselves with bleach to kill the virus. “Rupert had a strong view about how things were being mishandled,” a former Trump administration official said. Through Fox News, Murdoch had more power than anyone in America to pressure Trump to take the pandemic seriously. He did nothing. In fact, he took no responsibility for the COVID misinformation Fox News pumped out day after day. When a friend told Murdoch that the channel was literally killing its elderly audience, Murdoch replied, “They’re dying from old age and other illnesses, but COVID was being blamed,” said a source briefed on the conversation. Having milked Trump for ratings and profit, Murdoch was looking toward a post-Trump future. Shortly before the 2020 election, according to the source, Murdoch invited Florida governor Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey, for lunch at Murdoch’s vineyard. As they dined outside on steak, Murdoch told DeSantis that Fox News would support him for president in 2024. 

Murdoch was over Trump, but the Fox News audience most certainly wasn’t. The disconnect would soon ignite the biggest journalistic scandal in Fox’s history. On election night, according to a source, Murdoch was home in Bel Air following the results on television and fielding calls. At 11:20 p.m. Eastern, Fox News was the first major network to declare Arizona, a crucial battleground state, for Joe Biden, which would all but ensure his election. The Trump voters’ official safe space was the first to break the bad news. 

The call exploded like a bomb inside the Trump campaign and sent shock waves ripping through Fox News. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner called Murdoch and implored him to retract the Arizona call. Murdoch later testified he told Kushner, “Well, the numbers are the numbers.” The call became a target of Trump’s rage. “This is an embarrassment to this country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump declared at an angry early morning press conference in the East Room of the White House as Biden led Arizona by 10,000 votes. As Trump cried fraud, Murdoch told Fox executives that it was “bullshit and damaging” that Trump refused to concede. Murdoch told Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott that Fox shouldn’t promote Trump’s stolen election claims, according to court documents. “If Trump becomes a sore loser we should watch Sean [Hannity] especially and others don’t sound the same. Not there yet but a danger,” Murdoch emailed Scott.

But in the post-truth world Fox News viewers inhabited, numbers didn’t matter. Fox viewers believed Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen because Trump said so. What’s more, many loyal Fox News watchers and Trump diehards bristled that the network had seemingly had a hand in delivering their president’s election night defeat. The irony of a news outlet being punished by its most ardent audience members for committing an act of journalism didn’t have much time to settle, as a siege mentality quickly set in. In the days after the election, Fox News hosts and executives panicked as they watched viewers flip to rival channels Newsmax and One America News, whose programs were hyping Trump’s stolen election conspiracies. “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire…An alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us,” Tucker Carlson texted his producer the day Fox declared Biden the president-elect. In an email conversation, Scott told Murdoch that Fox News needed to appease Trump’s base immediately. “We need to make sure they know we aren’t abandoning them and still champions for them,” she wrote. Murdoch told her he agreed. 

What Murdoch did next, or more accurately  didn’t  do, formed the core of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News . According to Dominion’s court filings, Murdoch protected Fox News’s ratings by allowing the network’s hosts and guests to promote a batshit-crazy theory that algorithms inside Dominion machines secretly switched votes to Biden to steal the election, somehow at the behest of the Venezuelan government. Meanwhile, Murdoch looked for other measures to mollify Trump’s audience. On November 20, Murdoch suggested to Scott that Fox fire its Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon, who was a senior executive on the Decision Desk that made the Arizona call. “Maybe best to let Bill go right away which would be a big message with Trump people,” Murdoch said, according to court filings. Sammon retired in January 2021, the same month Fox let go of Chris Stirewalt, another Decision Desk member. According to court documents, Murdoch even discussed buying the rights to  The Apprentice .

By mainstreaming Trump’s stolen election conspiracy, Murdoch and Fox had unleashed dangerous authoritarian forces. Just how dangerous became apparent on January 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob rampaged through the Capitol trying to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s election. Murdoch was horrified as he and Hall watched the attack unfold from home. Murdoch told Hall that Trump was “trying to kill Mike Pence because he was passing the presidency to Biden,” said a source who spoke with Murdoch that day. “Rupert kept calling the White House, Trump, Jared, Sean Hannity, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, trying to get Trump to stop it,” said the source. But then, like a passing storm, Murdoch’s outrage gave way to a sunnier view of the events. He later told Hall the rioters were just good old boys who got carried away, the source said. Murdoch’s ability to blithely rationalize the violence on January 6 is a microcosm of how he evaded any responsibility for the immense damage his media empire has done to the public square over the past 50 years.

A s chaos engulfs Murdoch’s empire, a shadow war over its future is playing out inside the family. Who among the Murdoch siblings will control the spoils, though, remains an open question. Two people close to James told me he is biding his time until he and his sisters can wrest control from Lachlan after Rupert is gone. “James, Liz, and Prudence will join forces and take over the company,” a former Fox executive said. Some think James would purge Fox News and transform the network into a center-right alternative to CNN. Others think James would opt to sell Fox News to a private equity firm just so he could be rid of a toxic asset. Inside the network, there’s a visceral fear of what a James-led future would mean. “James sees destroying Fox News as his mission in life,” a senior Fox staffer told me. 

Then again, does Lachlan even want the throne? Several sources speculated the elder Murdoch son may be running the company out of filial duty. When his father is gone, he may prefer to live the good life in Sydney. “Lachlan goes to the rock climbing gym every day. I think he has kind of lost interest since James left, but he is still trying to impress his dad,” a person close to Lachlan told me. Other people I spoke to aren’t convinced Lachlan would cede the crown. “Lachlan tells people he’s determined to keep the company,” the Fox staffer said. The person close to Lachlan said he’s fully engaged in the job. 

Of course, none of these scenarios are sure bets in a family as volatile as the Murdochs, in which allegiances can shift on a day-to-day basis and brute expedience often rules the day. Even though James and his sisters are politically aligned, it might not be enough to win their favor. James and Elisabeth have a complicated history. When James was in the crosshairs at the height of the UK phone-hacking scandal in 2011, Elisabeth told Rupert that James should be fired. When the Murdochs celebrated Lachlan’s 40th birthday on Rupert’s 184-foot yacht  Rosehearty that September, Elisabeth left before James and Kathryn arrived.

After interviewing dozens of people for this story, I was struck by how sad all the Murdochs seem. Some Murdoch profiles liken his late career arc to Shakespeare’s  King Lear. Murdoch as the aging monarch confronting his mortality. I think the tale of King Midas is more accurate. Murdoch built a $17 billion fortune out of a small newspaper company he inherited from his father. The only thing that mattered was profit. But amassing that wealth required Murdoch to destroy virtually anything he touched: the environment, women’s rights, the Republican Party, truth, decency—even his own family. One source said Rupert got word to James that it would mean a lot if James attended his 90th birthday party, but James didn’t go. According to another source, Lachlan told Rupert that James was leaking stories to the writers of  Succession, HBO’s acclaimed drama about a Murdoch-like media dynasty. (The person close to Lachlan denies Lachlan told Rupert this.) A person close to James said he and Kathryn believed PR operatives aligned with Rupert and Lachlan were digging up dirt on them. Lachlan, meanwhile, had to flee Los Angeles because the Murdoch legacy was so toxic. According to two sources, Lachlan’s family was ostracized in LA because of Fox News’s climate change denialism. Lachlan moved his family back to Australia in March 2021. Elisabeth had crises of her own. In 2014, she and PR guru Matthew Freud filed for divorce after 13 years of marriage.  

At the age of 91, Murdoch blew up his fourth marriage. Hall was waiting for Murdoch to meet her at their Oxfordshire estate last June when she checked her phone. “Jerry, sadly I’ve decided to call an end to our marriage,” Murdoch’s email began, according to a screenshot I read. “We have certainly had some good times, but I have much to do…My New York lawyer will be contacting yours immediately.” Hall told friends she was blindsided. “Rupert and I never fought,” she told people. There had been disagreements over his antiabortion views and some friction with the kids over Hall’s rules about masking and testing before they saw Murdoch, according to sources. But Hall never felt Murdoch treated these as major issues. Hall and Murdoch finalized their divorce two months later. (One of the terms of the settlement was that Hall couldn’t give story ideas to the writers on  Succession. ) Hall told friends she had to move everything out of the Bel Air estate within 30 days and show receipts to prove items belonged to her. Security guards watched as her children helped her pack. When she settled into the Oxfordshire home she received in the divorce, she discovered surveillance cameras were still sending footage back to Fox headquarters. Mick Jagger sent his security consultant to disconnect them. 

Four months later, Hall got a potential answer for why Murdoch broke off the marriage. Newspapers around the world printed photos of Murdoch vacationing in Barbados with a new girlfriend, Smith. Murdoch and Hall had hosted Smith for dinner at their ranch in Carmel, California, about a year earlier. Smith was dating the ranch manager. At the time, Hall didn’t think anything of it when Smith told Murdoch that he and Fox News were saving democracy. Or when she offered to give Murdoch a teeth cleaning. Or when Murdoch began making trips alone to Carmel, which he explained was because his daughter Grace wanted one-on-one time with him there. (A source close to Murdoch said such a dinner did not happen.) Looking back, Hall told friends that Murdoch had simply moved on, the way he had ended previous marriages. “She was devastated, mad, and humiliated,” Cashin told me. On the first day of Lent in February, Hall told friends she made an effigy of Murdoch, tied dental floss around its neck, and burned it on the grill. 

In March, Murdoch announced he was marrying Smith, whose life has been a series of operatic ups and downs. In her 20s, Smith married John B. Huntington, a descendant of a California railroad fortune. They divorced, she has said, when he became an abusive alcoholic. She was suicidal, then found Jesus in a coffee shop and became a street preacher in Marin County. She married the country music singer and broadcast entrepreneur Chester Smith, who died in 2008. On Facebook, Smith shares a mix of inspirational self-help talk with Christian nationalism and right-wing conspiracy theories. “The voting process may be so corrupted we may live in a de facto dictatorship with oligarchal [ sic ] control by the party in charge now,” one post said.

Murdoch and Smith had planned to marry this summer. He proposed with an 11-carat diamond engagement ring said to be worth upwards of $2.5 million. Then, a little more than two weeks after rolling out news of their engagement, the pair abruptly called it off. One source close to Murdoch said he had become increasingly uncomfortable with Smith’s outspoken evangelical views. “She said Tucker Carlson is a messenger from God, and he said nope,” the source said. A spokesperson for Murdoch declined to comment. (Smith did not respond to requests for comment on social media.) Still, the future of Murdoch’s hobbled empire depends on viewers who share Smith’s very outlook. What struck me most as I read the Dominion court filings was the fear that Fox executives and hosts expressed of losing their audience if they reported the truth, that Trump lost. I was also struck by how diminished Murdoch’s own influence was. After the election, Murdoch told Lachlan and Suzanne Scott that Fox hosts should say Biden won and move on, according to a source who spoke to Murdoch. “I told Rupert privately they are all there,” Scott wrote in an ensuing email to a colleague. “We need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers but they know how to navigate.”  

At one point, Murdoch even lobbied Trump to concede. “Rupert called Trump before Biden’s inauguration to tell him to accept defeat graciously and that he had left a good legacy and that this stolen election stuff would drag everyone down,” the source said. Trump refused. “Trump threatened to start his own channel and put Fox out of business,” the source said. Murdoch seemed trapped by the people he radicalized, like an aging despot hiding in his palace while the streets filled with insurrectionists.  This story has been updated.

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James Murdoch: Why I pulled the rip cord and resigned from News Corp

After deepening estrangement with his father and brother and growing discomfort over the toxicity of fox news, the son of rupert murdoch tells maureen dowd why he walked away, article bookmarked.

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A s we sat down to lunch in my garden, I mentioned to James Murdoch that I’ve been reading a lot of classical plays lately and a popular theme is the rancorous battle between two brothers over a kingdom.

“But these plays end in cannibalism and civil war, so at least your family hasn’t gone there yet,” I said brightly.

Above his mask and behind his Kingsman glasses, Murdoch’s brown eyes widened with alarm.

The issue of dynastic succession – the real one and the one in Succession , the Emmy-winning HBO drama that is inspired by the Murdochs – was definitely on the menu, along with fried calamari.

Murdoch, 47, resigned from the board of News Corp this summer with an elliptical statement, saying he was leaving “due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.”

Rupert Murdoch ’s youngest child with his second wife, Anna, is loath to get into the epic family drama that found its climax in the 15 months between pushing a deal to sell 21st Century Fox to Disney and ankling the family business he once hoped to lead.

• James Murdoch left news empire because it legitimises ‘disinformation’

But in his briskly analytical way, over lunch and a subsequent phone call, he tried to explain why he “pulled the rip cord,” as he put it, after deepening estrangement with his father and brother and growing discomfort over the toxicity of Fox News and other conservative News Corp properties.

“I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important,” he told me. “But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas. A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimise disinformation . And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organisations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt – not to sow doubt to obscure fact, if you will.

“And I just felt increasingly uncomfortable with my position on the board having some disagreements over how certain decisions are being made. So it was actually not that hard a decision to remove myself and have a kind of cleaner slate.”

The younger Murdoch’s disgust had flashed publicly before on a few occasions: he showed the disdain for Roger Ailes he shared with his more conservative, older brother, Lachlan, 49.

In 2017, President Donald Trump’s praise for white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people” spurred James Murdoch to give $1m to the Anti-Defamation League. In an email to friends obtained by The New York Times , Murdoch rebuked Trump and wrote: “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists.” The email stood in sharp relief, given Fox News’ fetid racism-by-night routine.

In January, James and his wife, Kathryn, expressed “frustration” about News Corp’s peddling of climate change denialism in the face of apocalyptic Australian wildfires that incinerated 46 million acres. Fox News nighttime anchors picked up a false storyline about arson from The Australian , a Murdoch-owned newspaper in Oz.

Once, James Murdoch thought he could reshape Fox News. But in the summer of 2016, he failed to get his father to sign off on replacing Roger Ailes – embroiled in the sexual harassment scandals at Fox News – with David Rhodes, the former president of CBS News.

When Rupert, the chairman of the company, decided to run the network himself, the writing was on the wall. Rupert and Trump stepped up their dangerous tango, and James, those who know him say, eventually decided it was time to get out of his Faustian deal.

‘His better angels’

James Murdoch was on top for long enough to get more than his share of headlines about the rising son of the Sun King. But then, while he was overseeing the operation in London, Rupert’s lieutenant and spiritual daughter, Rebekah Brooks, and her former deputy and lover, Andy Coulson, got ensnared in the British phone hacking scandal. (Brooks was acquitted and Coulson convicted in the case that followed.)

The idea, at my age, with a long career ahead of me, of going into a place where it’s a big corporate structure, you don’t really know what the future’s going to hold

The slime splashed on the son who had been seen as a clean-as-a-whistle smarty-pants. British regulators faulted James for not stopping the hacking, despite his claim that he didn’t read an entire email chain that would have clued him in. A New York Times Magazine investigation into the Murdochs last year by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg reported that James’ sister Elisabeth urged her father to fire James and replace him with her. (She denied it.)

Some Murdoch familiars say that it was only when it was clear that James had lost the succession war that he showed more leg in expressing qualms and pushed the $71.3bn Disney deal – it ensured that Lachlan, seen as his father’s darling, would be left with a hollowed-out empire.

Though the kids each walked away with billions in cash and stock, the deal bared all the competing interests in the family. Lachlan was, by all accounts, aghast to be left merely with the rump – the part James had dismissed to friends as an “American political project”. Rupert Murdoch did not try to make a top job for James at Disney a condition of the deal. He looked at James objectively vis-a-vis the deal, Disney insiders said, not with a father’s protective instinct.

“James was nothing but a gentleman in the whole process,” Bob Iger, the chairman of Disney, told me.

James said he pressed the deal because he knew, as the great digital transformation of Tinseltown got underway, that the Murdochs’ collection of old-school media assets had to be combined with a company like Disney to have the heft to compete against behemoths like Netflix.

News reports at the time suggested James harboured a fantasy about succeeding Iger, and the two talked about a possible role. But, James told me: “I decided pretty soon after we closed it that I didn’t want to stay on in the business. So if you think about it, I mean, your ego talks to you a little bit or somebody writes a story that says, ‘Oh, they don’t have a succession plan. James Murdoch can do X, Y and Z.’ And your ego goes, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ But then, you have to sit back and go, ‘That’s not me defining that. That’s some media journalist somewhere making up what they think success or failure is.’

“The idea, at my age, with a long career ahead of me, of going into a place where it’s a big corporate structure, you don’t really know what the future’s going to hold. And the other side is absolute self-determination and agency. It was a pretty simple choice. We never really even took talks very far at all about going to Disney because I informed them, because they were really trying to figure, ‘OK, what does the structure look like? Et cetera.’ I called Bob and said, ‘Look, you need to design that without me.’”

Friends say that James has been on a collision course with his family for 15 years. His evolution has been profoundly influenced by his wife, a former communications executive. He is, as one friend puts it, “living much more in his own skin, realising his better angels and his better instincts.”

But when your last name is Murdoch and those billions sloshing around in your bank account come from a juggernaut co-opting governments across the English-speaking world and perpetuating climate-change denial, nativism and Sean Hannity, can you ever start fresh? As a beneficiary of his family’s trust, James is still reaping profits from Rupert Murdoch’s assets. Can he be the anti-venom?

And is the great game of Murdoch succession truly over? Murdoch watchers across media say James is aligned with his sister Elisabeth and his half sister, Prudence, even as he is estranged from his father and brother.

When Rupert, 89, finally leaves the stage and his elder children take over, that could make three votes in the family trust against one. Is there still time to de-Foxify Fox News – labelled a “hate-for-profit racket” by Elizabeth Warren – and other conservative News Corp outlets? Would Fox News and its kin – downscale, feral creatures conjured by Rupert to help the bottom line – be the huge money-makers they are if they went straight?

Eschewed newspapers

For a long time, people have referred to James as “the smart brother”, the more strategic one, the more interesting one, the harder working one, the more enlightened one.

He is nothing like the hopeless sons on Succession . He came into his own at Star TV in Asia and then deftly entered the broadband market and positioned Sky TV as more than a satellite television provider. He says he is very proud of helping to restructure the National Geographic partnership, which caused the society’s endowment to swell to nearly $1bn.

Unlike his father and grandfather – who broke the story of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign and later become an Australian regional newspaper magnate – James wasn’t interested in the romance of newspapers. He has always been looking around the corner for new technologies.

In 2006, he promised to make Sky carbon neutral. (He invited Al Gore to give his climate slide show at a corporate retreat in Pebble Beach, California, a talk that inspired Kathryn Murdoch to become an eco-warrior.) He drove a Prius around London and then switched to an early model of the Tesla roadster; he later joined Tesla’s board.

A Harvard dropout, James has long been teased for his techno argot, a contrast to Lachlan’s rock-climbing, red meat, good ol’ Aussie boy style. James’ look was more mogul-casual at lunch: a Loro Piana navy jacket, slim-fit jeans and Common Projects white sneakers. His hair, flecked with a few strands of grey, is longer than it has been since college. “I haven’t been to the barber since March,” Murdoch said. “Now it catches leaves and stuff.”

His Panama hat from San Juan – he wears straw hats year-round – was attached to his attache case.

He has set up offices for a new company, Lupa Systems, in downtown Manhattan, New York, and Mumbai. It is named for the she-wolf who suckles twin boys in Rome’s origin myth. When they grow up, Remus is killed by Romulus, who goes on to found the city – which James says is his favourite – and become its first king. (In Succession , Brian Cox’s character, the Rupert of the show, refers to his younger son, Roman, as Romulus.)

So far, Murdoch has made investments in the Tribeca Film Festival, Art Basel, Vice Media and a comic book company whose publisher once worked for Marvel. The dream there is to create another Marvel-like universe of characters who could cavort across different platforms.

He is excited about investing in startups created to combat fake news and the spread of disinformation, having found the proliferation of deep fakes “terrifying” because they “undermine our ability to discern what’s true and what’s not” and it “is only at the beginning, as far as I can tell.” He’s funding a research programme to study digital manipulation of societies, hoping to curtail “the use of technology to promulgate totalitarianism’’ and undermine democracies.

“So everything from the use of mass surveillance, telephone networks, 5G, all that stuff, domestically in a country like China, for example,” he said.

I wonder if this is some sort of expiation, given all the disinformation that News Corp has spewed. (Shades of Melania fighting cyberbullying?)

Murdoch did not really answer. But later, when I talked to Kathryn Murdoch over Zoom from their farm in Connecticut, where they live with their three children, chickens and sheep, she was more direct about the issue of using money made from disinformation to combat disinformation.

“I think that what’s important about what we’re doing is that we’re in control of ourselves,” she said, adding: “I’m in control of what I do, he is in control of what he does. We should be held accountable for those things. It’s very hard to be held accountable for things that other people do or are in control of. And I think that’s what was untenable.”

I asked her if they are happy with their liberation. “It’s nice to be able to do our own thing and just to have James be free of that tension,” she said with a broad smile. “It’s good for him.”

She added: “When a family is very involved in the business, it’s a big decision to leave that. I don’t know if it’s ever ending. It’s always, you know, ongoing.” She gave a wry chuckle.

Sneaking smokes with Jerry Hall

CNBC has called Kathryn and James “a political power couple in the Trump era”, and James says his wife is “a force of nature”. “She’s encouraged me to take risks, to do things,” he said. “She’s encouraged me to speak up about things. I’m very lucky.”

Their foundation, Quadrivium, has supported voter participation, democracy reform and climate change projects. “I never thought that we would actually be at the point where we would have climate change effects and people would still be denying it,” Murdoch said.

Murdoch donated to Pete Buttigieg in the primary, and the couple has given $1.23m to Joe Biden. So that’s who he’ll be voting for in November then? “Hell, yes,” he said with a smile.

Was James angry to be left holding the bag for the hacking, which was the ultimate end of the tabloid culture his father created?

I noted to Kathryn Murdoch that the effect of News Corp on the world is astounding when you think about it, from Brexit to Trump to the Supreme Court we may be heading toward.

“I’m not sure if I would give it that much credit,” she said. “Rupert’s talent was always in understanding what the public wanted, and I think it much more follows or echoes what’s going on as opposed to leads. That’s not to say it doesn’t have responsibility. It does. But I think sometimes, inside the journalism world, it gets a little more credit than it deserves on that.”

I wondered if Rupert Murdoch ever got mad at Kathryn for pulling James to the light side on the environment and other issues. Was it daunting to argue with him?

“We’ve had plenty of very good dinners and very good discussions,” she said. “He relishes an argument. If you’re well prepared and you have your facts, it’s a really good debate practice. We’ve always gotten along even if we disagree. I actually have friends whose fathers are far scarier. Rupert actually told James to marry me as soon as he possibly could.”

Like James, she thinks Jerry Hall, the patriarch’s wife since 2016, is really fun. “Rupert is so lucky,” she said. “She’s just always wanting to, you know, sneak over and have a drink or smoke with you. ‘Just don’t tell Rupert I’m smoking’.”

Kathryn Murdoch has been tempted to watch Succession . But Murdoch said he didn’t watch it, possibly so he didn’t have to answer pesky questions about the portrayal of sons who veer between feeling entitled and feeling unworthy because they fear that everything they get is only because of their name.

Asked how he could possibly not watch a buzzy show about his family, he smiled and replied: “I think you’d find it really easy. The other thing is, the dramatisation of family affairs is as old as anything. It’s always built in a certain construct, back in Shakespeare or back in Homer.

“I think the reality, my reality anyways, is that I’ve never felt that comfortable drawing any parallels, because I don’t feel as if I live solely in a needy orbit of approval or whatever from the charismatic megafauna. Not at all. I’m entirely my own person. I think having agency from the beginning when I left school and started on my own, to set up with some partners, a tiny hip-hop record label, to moving with Kathryn to Hong Kong a few years later.” Five years after that he went to Sky. “I feel like every few years I set out on something new, and it’s not this drama that other people try to make about it,” he said. “But I don’t know anything about the show.”

After so much time in the executive suite, Murdoch seems genuinely excited to be in a smaller shop. He said that last year, just for the hell of it, he thought of becoming an architect, going back to school.

“The outside world,” he continued, “it looks at you and says: ‘Well, these are the runners and riders. This person is up and down and this is success and this is failure.’ I think that that has to come much more from yourself. I’m incredibly grateful to be able to be just a totally free agent.”

When he looks back at the searing hacking scandal, to that painful moment sitting in front of a parliamentary committee in London with his father, who called it “the most humble day of my life”, how does he feel? Was James angry to be left holding the bag for the hacking, which was the ultimate end of the tabloid culture his father created?

“Going through something so intense like that, you definitely learn a lot of different lessons,” he said, adding, “It was very much about some stuff that had gone on at the newspapers before I was there, by the way.”

I wondered what he made of Fox News and Trump playing down the coronavirus, even after the president was hospitalised.

“Look, you do worry about it and I think that we’re in the middle of a public health crisis,” Murdoch said. “Climate is also a public health crisis.” He continued: “Whatever political spin on that, if it gets in the way of delivering crucial public health information, I think is pretty bad.”

He added that Trump’s likening Covid-19 to the flu had been “his message from day one”, and was “craziness”. He thinks that “companies have a responsibility to their customers and their communities” and “that responsibility shouldn’t be compromised by political point scoring, that’s for sure.”

Did he catch that bananas moment on Fox News after the president’s loony Evita balcony star turn, when Sean Hannity compared DJT to FDR?

Murdoch, who doesn’t usually watch Fox News, said he didn’t see that show and didn’t like to criticise specific Fox News personalities, but added dryly, “I think comparing that kind of personal behaviour to FDR, it’s a little much, you know?”

I noted that his father had a very dim view of Trump – in 2015, he tweeted, “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” – before the pragmatic Rupert came around to the president.

“I’m just concerned that the leadership that we have, to me, just seems characterised by callousness and a level of cruelty that I think is really dangerous and then it infects the population,” he said, referring to the Trump administration. “It’s not a coincidence that the number of hate crimes in this country are rising over the last three years for the first time in a long time.”

With Trump and Fox News, who is the dog and who is the tail?

“It looks to me, anyway, like it’s going to be a hard thing to understand because it probably goes back and forth,” he said. “I don’t think you’re going to get one pristine, consistent analysis of that phenomenon.”

I asked if he was friends with Ivanka and Jared Kushner. Ivanka was at one point a trustee for the fortune of the two daughters of Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng.

“She and Jared are both close with Wendi,” he said, adding: “I don’t know them well. I wasn’t in New York, you have to remember. I came back from abroad after over 10 years and I didn’t know a lot of things. I missed the whole “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”, the whole origin story of that.”

( The Times Magazine report included the detail that James and Lachlan tried to dissuade Pops, as they call him, from marrying Deng; James was worried, based on information he had received from senior foreign officials, that she was a Chinese asset; she has denied that.)

Murdoch’s friends describe him as “happy as a clam”, “giddy” and far more relaxed now that he has shaken off the King Lear machinations he has dealt with his whole life, as his father pitted the siblings against each other for the golden crown.

Murdoch’s friend Matthew Vaughn, an English producer and writer who did both Kingsman movies, believes that James will now start his own empire.

“James’s next chapter is going to be a damn good one, and it will surprise so many people,” Vaughn said. “He’ll be released from the blessing and the curse of the name Murdoch.”

I asked Murdoch if he would create his own Game of Thrones and bring in his own children – a daughter and two sons – to help run it.

I feel like tattoos should never have stories attached to them. You always regret it

“There’s no empire,” he replied, laughing a bit ruefully. “There’s no future dynasty.”

Confirm or deny

Dowd: Judge Jeanine Pirro is really fun at the company Christmas party.

Murdoch: I have no knowledge of that.

Dowd: When you were 18, you had a summer job as a production assistant on Rising Sun and you held a giant duct of personal air-conditioning on Sean Connery wherever he was on the set.

Murdoch: Yes, I held the air-conditioning behind Sean Connery. The most interesting thing was, if he wanted the tube moved to a different spot he wouldn’t tell me. He would tell the director, who would tell the first assistant director, who would tell the second assistant director, who would tell me. It was a very hierarchical management of the air-conditioning tube.

Dowd: You’ve never filled out a job application.

Murdoch: No, not true. When I went to Sky, for example, it was pretty controversial. It had to be voted on by all the shareholders. It was like months of job application in full public glare with psychological tests. Psychometric testing.

Dowd: You know how much a gallon of milk costs.

Murdoch: Confirm. I just bought one the other day. It depends on where you get it, I guess. It’s like $4.

Dowd: You’re tatted up.

Murdoch: I have a few. I drew them myself. One of them is a weird shape I drew when I was a kid. The other is actually a lightbulb. I feel like tattoos should never have stories attached to them. You always regret it.

Dowd: After you quit the board, you considered bleaching your hair again just for the hell of it.

Murdoch: Deny.

Dowd: Your father made you and your siblings watch Gallipoli on every family vacation.

Murdoch : No. Great movie, though.

Dowd: When you had a hip-hop record company after college, you slept with a gun under your bed.

Murdoch: It’s an urban myth.

Dowd: You were childhood friends with Ghislaine Maxwell.

Murdoch: Nope. Absolutely not.

Dowd: You bought a 445-acre “end of times” house in a remote part of Canada with its own water and solar energy supply.

Murdoch: Oh, it’s just a fishing cabin. But the borders got shut so I haven’t been. I don’t know why we didn’t think that through.

Dowd: You wrote a column in The Harvard Lampoon titled “Albrecht the Atypical Hun.”

Murdoch: Yes. It was a cartoon that I wrote with a friend. I am not great at it, but I can draw.

Dowd: Lachlan is not very good at rock climbing.

Murdoch: I have no knowledge of that. I think he’s probably pretty good.

Dowd: President Trump has handled the TikTok situation perfectly.

Murdoch: It doesn’t look very handled right now.

Dowd: You do your best thinking about climate change on your father’s yacht.

Murdoch: (Laughs.)

Dowd: You were the driving force behind Fox’s Myspace acquisition in 2005.

Murdoch: No, I wasn’t there at the time.

Dowd: Prince Harry reached out to you about how he should deal with Prince William.

Murdoch: No. No.

Dowd: You have a black belt in karate.

Murdoch: Yeah.

Dowd: You are extremely fastidious.

Murdoch: I have a bad habit of straightening other people’s pictures on their walls, yes. I’m just trying to be helpful.

Dowd: Most of your success has come from hard work, not luck.

Murdoch: Isn’t that what they say – the harder you work, the luckier you get?

Dowd: You make your children call you “Dottore”.

• Murdoch empire a ‘cancer on democracy’, former Australian PM says
• The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty is enthralling
• Murdoch son ‘frustrated’ by Fox and News Corp coverage of wildfires

Murdoch: I got an honorary doctorate from the American University of Rome, and I continue to insist that I’m called “Dottore”, but it’s not working.

Dowd: You don’t watch Fox News.

Murdoch: Sometimes I watch, if there’s an important thing, like an important interview or something like that, sometimes.

Dowd: Wendi Deng dated Vladimir Putin.

Murdoch: You can’t ask me those questions.

© The New York Times

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Holiday like a media mogul on Rupert Murdoch's superyacht

It boasts five spacious suites, several luxurious salons, a gym and the king size bed in which Rupert Murdoch enjoys his holiday lie-ins. And now, from just €210,000 (£181,000) a week, you too can holiday like a media mogul, accompanied by nine lucky guests, and attended to day and night by the same number of exceptionally solicitous staff.

The Australian tycoon may head a $33bn (£20bn) global newspaper and television empire, but even billionaires can do with a little extra pocket money now and then. It has emerged that the News Corporation chairman has made his yacht, Rosehearty, a 183ft (56-metre) "aluminium masterpiece", available for holiday rents – although of course only those with quite a few million of their own need apply.

The charter company CharterWorld.com is listing the three-year-old yacht for hire in the Mediterranean or Caribbean, boasting "magnificent" performance and "a stunning interior by famous French designer Christian Liaigre" that includes "full beam owner's suite with king bed and sitting area". The yacht's two tenders, reportedly named Grace and Chloe after Murdoch's young twin daughters, are included, along with two dinghies complete with instructor, six sets of dive gear, and nine plasma TVs.

Photographs on the company's site of the interior reveal the 78-year-old to have a minimalist taste in interior design that one might suggest (though not in any outlet owned by NewsCorp) borders on the bland. The spacious main salon features a large sofa in beige, the same colour as featured in the internal reception rooms, and, for the sake of consistency, the bedrooms. A similar approach to colour characterises its exterior – hull and masts are a brilliant, uninterrupted white.

Hugo Andreae, editor-in-chief of the magazine Superyacht World, said at 56 metres the Rosehearty was certainly "up there" in terms of luxury and scale, but was by no means among the flashiest of vessels favoured by the super-rich. "A few years ago that would have been a pretty sizeable yacht, but these days you regularly build up to 100 metres."

With even Murdoch's relative tiddler costing an estimated €30m, however, Andreae said it was not unusual for the super-wealthy to offer their yachts for charter "to offset the enormous costs. There are certainly bigger and more luxurious boats available." He added that those hiring a boat would not be made aware of its owner's identity. "It's a very discreet world, for obvious reasons."

According to enthusiasts who have posted sightings on the web, the Rosehearty has recently sailed around Alaska, where Murdoch has reportedly been holidaying with the actor Mel Gibson, according to Gawker.com . One spotter on the site yachts.monacoeye.com reported that she arrived two days ago in British Columbia, Canada, commenting: "What a beauty!"

Others who have first-hand experience of the Rosehearty are the Conservative leader, David Cameron, who in October took a private jet to the Greek island of Santorini where the yacht was moored in order have drinks on board with the NewsCorp chairman. Singer Billy Joel, a sailing enthusiast, has also reportedly spent time on board with Murdoch and his wife, Wendi Deng.

The billionaire has been a yachting fan for some time, marrying Deng on board the Morning Glory in New York harbour in 1999. At 48 metres, however, that boat was evidently not large enough for his growing second family; happily, Murdoch found another media tycoon on whom to offload it – the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

Other top lets

Richard Branson's private island, Necker, is available for private hire for $51,000 (£30,000) a night, with a minimum stay of five nights. The 74-acre island, part of the British Virgin Islands, can accommodate up to 28 people.

The £80m Maltese Falcon yacht of Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley billionaire, can be hired for £300,000 a week, and comes with four dinghies, two windsurfers and a jet ski. It can accommodate 16 guests, with 18 crew.

Musha Cay, a group of 11 islands in the Bahamas owned by David Copper–field can be rented from $37,500 for 12 people to $46,500 for 24 people. The islands have five guest houses, 40 beaches, a gym, and other facilities.

Mick Jagger lets out his oceanfront villa, Stargroves, in Mustique. The six-bedroom Japanese-style villa comes with a large koi pond, a freshwater swimming pool and croquet court. There is also a cook, butler and gardener. It is available for £6,500 a week between May and December.

Goldeneye, an 18-acre estate in Jamaica, was originally owned by Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and is where he wrote 17 of his novels. It is now owned by Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records. The estate and its three villas can be rented, with the main villa costing from $2,500 a night.

Lauren Goodchild

• Rupert Murdoch
• News Corporation
• Sailing holidays
• Luxury travel

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