Rupert Murdoch once suggested that he could live forever. “In the unlikely event that I prove to be mortal…” he began, and the executives around him laughed obligingly. What they didn’t know was that Rupert planned on running his empire from beyond the grave. Thus begins our dive into the real-life world of Rupert Murdoch’s succession.
After five marriages, six children and a lifetime spent building a vast global media business, the 93-year-old tycoon (94 in March 2025) is finally and reluctantly confronting the question of who fills his shoes. The result is a dynasty at war, with billions of dollars at stake and the spoils of power being fought for across three continents.
The Murdoch clan once orbited reverentially around the patriarch. Now it is spinning off in fiery trails of rancour and division. More accustomed to fighting politicians and business rivals, the boss finds himself in a bitter courtroom battle with his own children.
No one seriously expected Rupert to quietly slip away. But neither did they foresee him finding a means to keep a posthumous grip on his business. In early 2024, it came out that he intended to hand over control to his favoured son, 53-year-old Lachlan.
The plan has outraged three of his other children, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence who have joined forces to oppose it. And in a courtroom — situated in America’s ‘divorce capital’ of Reno, Nevada — the Murdochs are now eyeballing each other across the benches.
They arrived in a fleet of black limousines. Rupert stepped out in a dark suit and sneakers, accompanied by his new wife, Russian microbiologist Elana Zhukova, and saying nothing beyond a murmured “no thanks” to a man asking him to autograph a baseball. The old Washoe County Courthouse hadn’t known such excitement since Marilyn Monroe skipped up its steps in her final movie, The Misfits, in 1961. The other Murdochs and their squadron of lawyers came in a convoy that eventually filled most of Sierra Street.
Rupert has hired Los Angeles-based chief counsel, Adam Streisand, a cousin of singer Barbra, who boasts a string of starry clients including Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, and Barry White. Whereas James and his siblings have hired New York’s Gary Bornstein. He is a formidable disputes litigator with a record described in a legal house journal as “simply stellar”.
Denied access to the hearing, and with both sides tight-lipped, the media outside play up the irresistible parallels between the Murdoch fall-out and Succession. The hit HBO drama depicts an ageing mogul whose children are vying with each other to take over. Others saw similarities with Shakespeare’s King Lear, whose attempt to divide his kingdom among his heirs ends in epic tragedy.
“I think what we’re really seeing is the logical outcome of a patriarchal setup where the patriarch has never really understood how to show love,” says journalist David Folkenflik, author of Murdoch’s World. “Instead, he’s written cheques to ease wounded feelings and actively pitted his children against each other in competition for his affection and respect.”
The roots of the current dispute date back to the complex settlement of Rupert’s divorce from his second wife, Anna, in 1999. As part of the deal, an ‘irrevocable’ trust was drawn up. This ensured that control of the family’s businesses would pass equally to the couple’s three children, Lachlan, James and Elisabeth, and Prudence (Rupert’s daughter from his first marriage).
At the time, all was relative harmony between the tycoon and his offspring. Lachlan was living in Sydney, helping to run the family’s Australian interests. James had been dispatched to Hong Kong to build the Asian business. And Elisabeth was in the UK overseeing a newly launched satellite TV operation. Only Prudence — apart from a stint on the company’s London newspapers — chose to stay clear of a role.
“My kids are extremely tight with each other,” Rupert liked to say. “And they’re all brilliant.”
Today Lachlan and 51-year-old James are not on speaking terms. Prudence, 66, is angry not only with her father. Reportedly she is resentful of her three half-siblings who she believes see her as an outsider. She once spoke ruefully of their high-profile, glamorous lives, adding: “And I’m just the short, fat one.” Elisabeth, 56, has forged a successful business career outside the Murdoch realm. She is said to be torn between devotion to her father and disapproval of his behaviour. A friend, quoted in the American magazine Vanity Fair, says: “She’s terrified of Rupert dying mad at her.”
And Rupert, too, is fuming. Like Lear, raging on the blasted heath, he believes that his children owe him everything, but show little gratitude. James, who declined to attend either his father’s lavish 90th birthday party in New York or his fifth wedding in California earlier this year, is a particular object of the tycoon’s ire.
Over the years, James has drifted away from the conservative stronghold of the Murdoch titles. Now he is a fully signed-up member of America’s liberal elite. He and his activist wife Kathryn have donated tens of millions of dollars to environmental and social justice campaigns. They even endorsed Kamala Harris in the November 2024 US presidential election.
The rift came to a head in 2020. This was when James walked out of the business. Thus, making clear his distaste for the stridently right-wing tone of its media outlets, particularly Fox News, the controversial and monstrously profitable American TV network that Rupert built from nothing. He was also scathing about the group’s coverage of Australia’s bushfires in 2020, which he and Kathryn saw as “climate denialism”. But when James quit, he took an estimated $2 billion with him — most of it the proceeds of a sale of Rupert’s Fox movie studios to arch-rival Disney.
Rupert has found it hard to forgive what he sees as his son’s hypocrisy in attacking the family businesses while enriching himself from their success. The two have been estranged ever since. For the birthday party, both Lachlan and Elisabeth presented filmed tributes to their father’s life and career. From James, there was nothing.
Even as his empire grew — along with his wealth, power and global reach — Rupert always insisted that what he ran was a “family business”. He had built it from a small Adelaide newspaper inherited from his father. From their earliest days, his own children were raised for the roles they would one day play. But in recent years, as Rupert aged and the younger Murdochs mature, the tensions within the family have been unmistakable.
By 2019, things had become so strained that Rupert arranged group therapy sessions in London for the children and their spouses. These were followed by a “therapeutic family getaway” at Cavan Station, the Murdoch ranch in NSW. Word afterwards suggested that little had been achieved. And according to one report, the holiday “provided just another forum for power games and manipulation”.
Long-time Murdoch chronicler, Michael Wolff, says Rupert privately believes both James and Lachlan would be “mid-level media executives making $250,000-a-year and grateful for it without their old man”.
Lachlan, married to Australian former model Sarah O’Hare, at least shares his father’s political views and has committed himself completely to the business. Easy going by nature, and more comfortable in his office analysing spreadsheets than rampaging through newsrooms like Rupert, he has, says his biographer Paddy Manning, spent most of his life being underestimated.
“One of the main differences between Lachlan and Rupert,” says Paddy, who fronted a three-part ABC series Making Lachlan Murdoch, “is that Lachlan doesn’t aspire to be the political kingmaker that his father has been throughout his career. Lachlan is much more of a businessman, more focused on the bottom line, and what’s going to maximise the value of the business.”
In the programme, Lachlan’s friend and occasional business rival, James Packer highlights a core difference between Lachlan and his brother. “Lachlan is pretty conservative,” says James. “I think James — and I hope I don’t say the wrong thing here — sometimes is embarrassed by Fox News. I don’t think Lachlan is embarrassed by Fox News; I think Lachlan’s proud of Fox News. That’s probably one of the reasons why Lachlan is where he is, and James isn’t.”
When the two brothers first went to work for their father, it was James who seemed the likeliest successor. Woolf portrays him as having a sharp business mind, albeit combined with “an overweening smugness and a punch-before-getting-punched spirit”. Lachlan was more detached and less interested in the cutthroat global mediasphere. According to a Murdoch insider: “The single reason for Lachlan holding his Fox job seemed to be that his brother actually wanted it more than he did.”
But in 2014, after a lengthy spell away developing his own business interests in Australia, Lachlan returned to the family fold. He brought Sarah and their three children to Los Angeles and spent $150 million — the highest price ever paid for a home in California — on a Beverly Hills mega-mansion with 11 bedrooms and several hectares of gardens. When Rupert — if only nominally — stepped down as head of his two main companies in 2023, Lachlan took over and now appears to be digging in.
But his tenure may be on shaky ground. And furthermore, a key factor in his survival is certain to be the attitude of Elisabeth. Despite having played no frontline role in the family business for over 20 years, she is known to keep a close and critical eye on its activities. In some ways, the London-based TV entrepreneur can claim to be the most successful of the Murdoch children. Elisabeth founded and ran her own powerhouse TV production company – the Shine Group – creating a string of hit shows including Masterchef and the popular crime drama The Bridge.
According to friends, she reveres her father, while being willing to call out what she sees as his errors. Their relationship went through a difficult time during Elisabeth’s marriage to a high-powered London PR man, Matthew Freud. Matthew once said he was “ashamed and sickened” by Fox News. Things improved following her divorce from Matthew and later remarriage to British artist, Keith Tyson. Unfortunately, they have been on a downward slide again.
Elisabeth’s relations with James haven’t always been amicable either. During the 2011 phone hacking scandal at Rupert’s London newspapers, Elisabeth called for her brother — then in charge of the UK operations — to be fired.
For all her spirited independence, Elisabeth struggles to escape the shadow of the Murdoch ‘brand’. One of Rupert’s own newspapers, The Wall Street Journal, reported how she was confronted at a private dinner party by actor, Robert de Niro. Robert demanded to know why she hadn’t spoken out against what he saw as Fox News’ malign influence.
“You can still love your father, but you can tell him he is wrong for what he is doing to this country,” Robert said. Elisabeth was reportedly visibly upset by the encounter, and the actor later apologised.
When asked, in calmer circumstances, how she views her father’s role in world affairs, she answered: “I just see my dad”.
Actor Brian Cox, who plays the patriarch Logan Roy in Succession, recounts sitting in a London cafe and being approached by a man who said he and his wife were big fans of the show, “even if she finds it hard to watch.” The man turned out to be Keith Tyson.
“I said, ‘Yeah, sorry,’” recalls Brian. “And he said: ‘No, it’s fine, just go easier on her in the next series.’”
To seasoned Murdoch watchers, one of the more surprising aspects of the current imbroglio is the sight of Prudence lining up with her half-siblings against her father. She is the daughter of Rupert’s first marriage to Patricia Booker. Prudence divides her time between London and her homes in Australia, does extensive charity work, and has generally stayed above any corporate dramas playing out among the rest of the brood.
For all the apparent complexity of his empire — and, for that matter, his personal life — Rupert believes in keeping things simple. The credo broadly runs: if something’s working, keep doing it. If it isn’t working, divorce her.
His fourth wife, Jerry Hall, who nursed him through the pandemic and a life-threatening accident aboard the Murdoch yacht, checked her emails one morning in 2021 and saw: “Jerry, sadly I’ve decided to call an end to our marriage. We’ve certainly had some good times, but I have much to do. My New York lawyer will be contacting yours immediately.”
Jerry has told friends she had no idea anything was wrong. Rupert’s latest wife must have nerves of steel.
“The expression that most sums up Rupert’s attitude to life is ‘Lower the lifeboat, I’m in,” says Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of the Murdoch-owned London Sun. “He would chuck anybody out — his kids, his wives, his executives.”
Keeping things simple also appears to be the reasoning behind the anointment of Lachlan. While the court hearings have been conducted in secret, it is clear Rupert now believes that giving an equal say to all four siblings would be a recipe for chaos. He fears that James, potentially supported by Elisabeth, would seek to “detoxify” Fox News. Thereby muzzling its notoriously raucous editorial voice, sparking an exodus of its star presenters and risking a collapse of its revenues.
The ‘irrevocable trust’ contains a narrow provision allowing changes to be made if they benefit all parties. Rupert’s lawyers are understood to be arguing that, if the network’s business model is destroyed by infighting, all beneficiaries will suffer.
The word from Reno is that the wranglings are likely to continue for some time. Whoever loses is almost certain to appeal. Furthermore, murmurs from within Murdochdom suggest a possible final settlement may be a form of buy-out, whereby James, Elisabeth and Prudence effectively sell their stakes in the trust. The cost of such a deal would be enormous and likely leave the business unrecognisably shrunken.
For Rupert, it wasn’t meant to end this way. And for his would-be heirs, the echoes of Shakespeare are too loud to be ignored: “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”
This article originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Pick up the latest copy from your local newsagents or subscribe so you never miss an issue.
