The secret deal that plunged Rupert Murdoch into a family war

The media mogul’s latest family feud over the future of the business has the makings of a Succession episode – but nobody would believe it

Succession, HBO’s all-conquering drama about a family of billionaires at war with each other, concluded last May. Over four series, the programme chronicled the poisonous squabbling over a media dynasty, as the ageing patriarch Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, decided which of his children would inherit the company. By the final episode, loose ends were tied up, tensions resolved, the future given some kind of shape. Succession’s creator Jesse Armstrong, no doubt for sound legal reasons, has always maintained his fictional family was inspired by several different families, including the Maxwells, the Redstones and the Sulzbergers. But the programme was obviously based on one family above all: the Murdochs. 
Although Succession has ended, the real-life battle for the Murdoch empire rages on: a decades-long tale of power, money, and internecine family rivalry that would make the Ancient Greeks blush. This week it has been revealed that Rupert Murdoch is embroiled in a secret legal battle with three of his children over the future of the business. At 93, it seems the old tycoon has lost none of his appetite for a fight, nor his willingness to line up with one of his children against the others. 
According to a report in The New York Times, which has seen private legal documents, the nonagenarian billionaire is going through the courts to alter a supposedly unalterable trust. In the event of Murdoch’s death this trust, made nearly 25 years ago, gave equal control of his business empire to his four eldest children: Prudence, 65, by his first wife, Patricia Booker, and Elisabeth, 55, Lachlan, 52, and James, 51, by his second wife Anna Torv. 
The trust was part of his divorce from Anna after 31 years, where she agreed to take a lower settlement than the 50 per cent she could well have asked him for. The trust was designed to be a final safeguard on the future of the empire, structured in a way that no subsequent meddling could change it. (The two children Murdoch had with his third wife, Wendi Deng, were later added as financial beneficiaries but without votes.)
Now it seems Murdoch has decided that he wants to change it, specifically to put his eldest son Lachlan in charge. The tycoon reportedly began the process late last year, surprising the other three children. Murdoch’s case is that in order to preserve the commercial success of the businesses, especially Fox News, it is vital to have a boss who is politically aligned with them. That means Lachlan, the most conservative of the four siblings, is the best fit. The implication of Murdoch’s secret coup is that the other children, who are more liberal, could not be trusted to keep Fox News and News Corp going at full throttle. 
“I think this is a mistake by Rupert Murdoch, to seek to change the terms in a way that would obviously potentially endanger the economic interests of the three other siblings,” says Alice Enders, head of research at Enders Analysis, a media research company.
“This document was leaked to The New York Times, obviously. I don’t believe in the succession battle story, that what James wants to do is actually take over Fox and change it to a CNN. But they are quite right to defend their economic interests.”
“This is a very sad day for the Murdochs,” she adds. “Because if this had not happened, they would have remained a united family.“
Still, Murdoch may get his way. The New York Times report states that the Nevada probate commissioner found that Murdoch would be able to edit the trust if he could prove that he was acting in good faith and for the sole benefit of his heirs. The case is expected to come to trial in September. The outcome will be closely watched: the future of a decent-sized chunk of Western media may depend on it. 
The story is the latest chapter in a family saga so gripping that fiction, even as rarefied as HBO’s, can scarcely do it justice. For as long as Rupert Murdoch has had children – Prudence was born in 1958 – there has been speculation over the future of his business. 
Walter Marsh, the author of Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire, says Murdoch’s recent actions are hardly a surprise, given his lifetime of control over his firm. 
“Just after my book came out [in October 2023] Rupert announced he was resigning, which seemed like a strange moment,” Marsh says. “On the one hand, he was handing over the baton to Lachlan, but on the other hand the idea that he after 70 years of being the north star of this company that’s beholden to his whims and his lizard-brain instinct for chasing opportunity and making his calls, that he would fade into the background… it seemed too good to be true. Sure enough, this latest revelation makes it clear he’s still making moves to dictate the direction of the company after retirement, but also beyond the grave.” 
As in Succession, at various stages different children have appeared to be preeminent in their old man’s affections. When the trust was established in the 1990s, relations between the four children seemed harmonious, their politics more closely aligned. All were involved in the businesses in some way. A quarter of a century later, the world – America especially – is a more fractious place politically, and the Murdoch children have variously drifted out of the business and fallen out personally, despite Elisabeth’s attempts to be the “Switzerland” of the family, and stay on good terms with everyone. For a while James looked like a likely heir: in 2003 he was made chief executive of BSkyB. By 2011, he was running News International, the parent company of The Times, but was forced to resign in 2012 over the phone-hacking scandal. 
As Fox News has become a more powerful and polarising force in America, both James and Elisabeth have broken from the party line in public. Elisabeth held a fundraiser for Obama in 2008, while in 2020, when he resigned from the board of News Corp, James criticised the way his father’s media properties had reported on climate change. 
Lachlan, on the other hand, was welcomed back into the fold in 2014, when he became non-executive chairman at 21st Century Fox and News Corp. Since then he has become more and more the heir apparent, culminating in Rupert’s decision last year to hand over sole charge to Lachlan. Reports have suggested that the machinations of the past ten years, and especially Lachlan’s return as the apparent prodigal son, have led to a breakdown in relations between the siblings, especially between Lachlan and James. 
The political waters are just as choppy as the familial ones. Despite Murdoch’s reputation as a kingmaker, he has had an up and down relationship with Donald Trump, particularly after Fox News called the 2020 election for Joe Biden. In the UK, newspapers – including Murdoch’s Times and Sun – no longer have the influence or profitability they once did. Earlier this year, Murdoch’s TalkTV channel, a rival to the insurgent GB News, was taken off the air, although it remains online. 
“This is a fight for hegemony on the right,” says Des Freedman, a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths University. “There’s fierce competition in the UK and US at the moment with quite different electoral fortunes. This is the Murdochs trying to find their place in it. I’m sure Murdoch is trying to shore up his worldview. It’s just unusual that his family happen to be the collateral damage. But it’s a race against time. Murdoch is seeing diminishing returns on a once very grand empire. I think he sees Lachlan as the best way of protecting that reputation against kids who aren’t reliable enough as voices of Rupert’s politics.”
Whoever ends up running the business will end up with an empire smaller than it was at its peak. In 2019, Murdoch completed his sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney for a reported $71bn, a deal which left each of his children with $2bn. 
While the appointment of Lachlan safeguarded the political leanings of the company during Rupert Murdoch’s lifetime, the trust means that Murdoch cannot be sure what will happen after he dies. For Marsh, Murdoch’s control issues might be related to the circumstances around his own father’s death. Keith Murdoch, an Australian media proprietor whose titles were the starting point of Rupert’s vast empire, died of cancer in 1952.
“His father had spent the last few years of his life trying to set up his son to inherit a few newspapers, but he died quite suddenly in this process of trying to reassert control,” he says. “Rupert was thrown into this power struggle where all his father’s former allies and rivals were trying to take back what Rupert saw as his inheritance. That put him on this treadmill with a big chip on his shoulder for 70 years. It makes sense that he wants to set up the family trust in a way that Lachlan isn’t facing the same power struggles. When they established it in the 90s, with the four votes equally between the four older children, who could have predicted that there would be such a spectacular division between the siblings that he would decide to take the steps he is taking?” 
It is not only in his business dealings that Murdoch has maintained an impressive work rate. In California last month he got married for a fifth time, to Elena Zhukova, 67, a retired Russian biologist, and the former mother-in-law of oligarch Roman Abramovich. Reportedly only Lachlan turned up. If you tried to put it in a TV script, nobody would believe it.