The Murdoch Succession

On 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. 

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, surrounded by (clockwise from top left) his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, ex-fiancée Ann Lesley Smith, and sons James and Lachlan Murdoch. Illustration by Risko.

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. 

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/Tlj2s3I