The Current - Inside the family feud over control of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Rupert Murdoch’s eldest sons, James and Lachlan, have spent much of their lives in a Succession-style battle to determine who would take over their father’s massive media empire which includes the likes of Fox News, Sky News and the Wall Street Journal. Now James has broken his family's code of silence in a scathing interview with The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, who walks us through the Murdoch’s warring family tree.

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You're sitting in a lawyer's office. Your dad's attorney is asking you questions and they're not friendly. He asks, have you ever done anything successful in your life? And does it strike you that in your account, everything that goes wrong is always somebody else's fault? This sounds like a bad dream, but that actually happened to James Murdoch. His father is media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who you may know as the founder of News Corp, which owns Fox News. The questioning was the culmination of a few decades in the making within the Murdoch family, pitting sibling against sibling in a battle over the empire.

Now, James Murdoch has broken the family's code of silence to tell his side of this story. He spoke to the Atlantic Magazine staff writer, Mackay Coppens. Mackay, good morning. Thanks for having me. There's a ton to get to here, but can we just sort of set the stage with the three main players in the drama, Rupert and then the sons, James and Lachlan.

Walk us through this warring family tree. Yeah, so Rupert has six children now, but originally had four, and his two sons, James and Lachlan, have always been seen as kind of competing with each other to be Rupert's successor. Lachlan is his oldest son. He has always been seen as the more natural successor.

He's more kind of self-consciously emulative of his father. He's charismatic. He loves Australia, which is Rupert's ancestral homeland. James, the younger son, is seen within the family as a bit more of a black sheep or a rebel. When he was younger, he would ask contrarian questions at the dinner table, his politics are a bit more moderate. And throughout his time working for his father, he often clashed with him. He would push initiatives that his father disagreed with. He had a very different vision for how the companies should be

run. But really, James's life and Loughlin's life, to varying degrees, have been defined by this quest for the crown. And a few years ago, Loughlin essentially won. He was named CEO and eventually chairman of both of the two big companies that Rupert runs and owns and James was pushed out of the company. And now, as you mentioned, they're kind of locked in this litigation over who will control the empire once Rupert dies. That came after a period in which James looked like he might be the heir apparent, in spite of the fact that, as you say, he was a black sheep.

He did have sort of contrarian nature. We have a clip here of him talking about his university days at a Goldman Sachs event in 2018. Take a listen to this. Being in the creative industries was always something that was very, very attractive. I switched actually in between from medieval history to puppet animation, which you can

do at Harvard. And then left to start this little hip hop label. A hip hop label from a puppet major. It certainly doesn't feel like a natural degree path for a future CEO, does it? Yeah, that's right. And I think early on, because Lachlan was seen as the one on the successor track, it actually created more space for James to kind of carve out his own identity and explore his own interests.

He spent summers during his teenage years working on archaeological digs in Italy, and he got into the classics and medieval history. He read a lot. He was honestly often almost a little disdainful of his father's work in the media industry. There's a famous moment when he was interning at an Australian newspaper that his dad owned, where he went to a press conference and fell asleep and a picture of him ended up in a rival newspaper. So James was always, yeah, like, you know, he was more able to kind of explore his own interests, but what he told me is that Rupert always wanted

all of his kids to work for him. He saw his empire, even though it's this massive global force in media, entertainment, and politics, as a family business. And eventually Rupert bought that hip hop label, folded it into News Corp and put James as well as Lachlan on these executive tracks inside the company. And James ended up kind of surprising everyone, right? He went to Asia, he clocked some real success in running divisions of the company. How is it that he came to be in the, eventually in the corner office of News Corp's operations

in London? Well, he went to Hong Kong to take over a struggling satellite TV business that the Murdochs owned. It was largely seen as kind of a suicide mission. The place had lost tens of millions of dollars a year. James turned it around. He pivoted the growth strategy to India, which was seen as counterintuitive, but it ended up paying off.

He then got a promotion where he was sent to London to take over Sky, which the Murdochs owned a minority stake in, and was eventually promoted to news international CEO, where he was running the Europe and Asia operations for the Murdoch Empire. And throughout this period, there was kind of this interesting tension, right, where Rupert had built his empire with kind of a pirate ethos, right? He would hire these self-styled gamblers and cowboys. There was a very kind of swashbuckling nature to the operation. According to James, at least, there was not a lot of deference paid internally to lawyers and HR. It was more like, you know, go break things and move

fast and be disruptive. And James understood the value in that approach, but he also felt like the companies were not being professionally run. They were taking huge risks they didn't need to take, and they needed to be modernized. And he always saw himself as this kind of forward-looking, modern executive who wanted to civilize his father's empire. And Rupert, I think, bristled at that. He bristled at what he saw as James's kind of preoccupation with respectability. And their approaches just fundamentally clashed. They had very different ideas of how these companies should be run, what they should look

like in the future. And yet, because James kept clocking these wins, it was hard for Rupert to push him out, especially because Loughlin in 2005 ended up quitting and moving back to Australia and kind of opting out of the successor role. So Rupert sort of only had one viable successor, at least among his sons. And I should note that James told me his sisters were never seen as viable contenders because in his view,

Rupert is a misogynist. Right. And he comes back to that a couple of times. It's just like he didn't take his sisters seriously at all. But so James is on top of the world. He's had major success in Asia. He's now taken over in London. He's sort of there with a bunch of MBA types that are on this path to civilizing the empire, as you say, when he crashes up on the rocks of a major scandal. It was a while ago now. So just can you remind everybody what the News of the World phone hacking scandal, what happened there? Yeah.

So basically, in 2011, The Guardian published this kind of explosive story revealing that journalists at the Murdoch-owned News of the World tabloid had used a private investigator to hack into the voicemail of a missing British teenager named Millie Dowler and published the contents of some of the victims' messages. Millie Dowler was eventually found dead. After that story was published, a bunch more allegations came out that journalists at Murdoch-owned papers had worked with private investigators to hack families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, victims of the 2005 London bombing. And this was a major, major scandal in Europe and especially in Britain.

As the allegations piled up, James kind of realized that he was becoming the face of this scandal because even though most of the, I think all of the hacking or at least most of it had taken place before he ever got to that job where he was over these newspapers. He had signed off on a settlement with a soccer executive named Gordon Taylor who had alleged phone hacking. At the time, James told me he was told that this was a one-off incident, a reporter had gone rogue and we just need to settle this and he didn't really think much of it. As it turned out, it was one of many, many examples of this practice taking place. And James kind of ended up taking the fall for all of this.

And he became the face of it certainly through, there's this huge inquiry in Britain where James and his father sat and testified, which led to this just remarkable moment. Comments, Mr. Chairman, of my statement, which I believe was around the closure of the News of the World newspaper. Before you get to that, I would just like to say one sentence. This is the most humble day of my life. So that was James in the midst of his testimony getting cut off by his father. What was that? What do you think happened there? Well, it's kind of emblematic of how this whole scandal was handled, or in James's view, severely mishandled, right? So, as the kind of firestorm of controversy was swirling

around the Murdoch outlets, James's approach was to hunker down with his executives and lawyers and come up with a damage control strategy, right? And that included a public apology PR campaign and firings and new compliance reforms put in place to make sure this never happened again. Meanwhile, Rupert kind of arrived in London and just started freelancing. You know, he was like shuffling around, answering shouted requests from reporters and ultimately decided at the urging of his daughter, Liz, that somebody in the family was going to have to be

the scapegoat for this controversy, to satisfy the public outrage. And they decided in the family that it should be James. James was not really kind of brought into that conversation, at least until the decision had already been made. And I think that that moment could be seen as one of several moments where Rupert is kind of using his son as a shield, presenting himself as a, as you know, this kind of sympathetic, figure, as older man, whereas his son, the younger executive,

was gonna be the one who had to take the brunt of the blame for what happened. And they framed his departure as a promotion, that he was gonna come back to the United States and run sort of a bigger part of the company. He comes back to the States. It's right around the time that Donald Trump is making his first bid for the White House. Fox News becomes one of Donald Trump's favorite outlets.

How did James sort of feel about the state of the media empire as all that was unfolding? Yeah. Well, once he became, he got back to the States, he was working in New York, he started paying closer attention to the American outlets because remember, for most of his time as an executive in the company, he had been overseas, both in Asia than in Europe.

And he knew about the controversy around Fox News, but he had never really, he didn't really watch it. They didn't have it in a lot of the places where he worked. And, and he kind of felt like, oh, this is like a, you know, political fight in the US. Once he started watching Fox News and ostensibly running it, or at least running the parent company, he started to have real qualms about it, especially during the Trump era, right? And what was really eye opening to him that he told me was that he had always believed his dad was at his heart somebody who had these kind of firm principles or ideological views. And they weren't always perfectly aligned with James's views, but he believed that

Rupert's, you know, politics came honestly and that the mission of his outlets reflected what Rupert believed. What James came to believe during the Trump era was that those principles, those ideological views were a lot more flexible than he'd been led to believe. In fact, Rupert was primarily interested in profit and power and in needling the liberal establishment any way he wanted. And although early on in Donald Trump's campaign, Rupert privately would kind of grouse to James about how terrible Trump was and how it would be the end of the Republican Party if Trump

won. As soon as Rupert realized that his audience loved Trump, he pivoted, right? And Fox News became this kind of, especially in its prime time lineup, this four hour infomercial for Trump. The Wall Street Journal, which Rupert owned, started running editorials defending Trump and his policy proposals. And he watched in kind of dismay as the Murdoch media outlets in America churned into gear to support Donald Trump, even though he knew that Rupert didn't think very much of him. And it kind of was a clarifying

experience for him. I mean, it's such a remarkable thing to say that Rupert didn't think much of him. This is his father, not just his boss. And at this point, his eyes are wide open. He had seen what happened in the UK. He's watching what's happening with Fox and the pivot away from ideology to profits, whatever it might be. Why then do you think he stayed in spite of all of that?

He had a moment where he thought seriously about quitting. And this was actually after his older brother, L Loughlin was brought back into the company. Now remember James had spent would spend ultimately 20 years working for News International, News Corp and Fox and believing that he was the heir apparent right once Loughlin had left in 2005 he was being told you're gonna be CEO one day, you're going to take over for me. That's what Rupert told him, right? Then Rupert brought his older brother back kind of out of nowhere, blindsided James and said, you're actually going to run the companies together.

And James thought about leaving. But what he told me was, and this is where kind of one of the quirks of James Murdoch comes into play here, he's a real classicist. He spends a lot of time reading literature and especially the classics, Shakespeare, Dante, etc. And he said that there's this passage in Dante's Inferno that he thinks of a lot, which is just to quickly summarize Dante encounters at the gates of hell, this character who's meant to resemble Pope Celestine.

And he had kind of in life had advocated the papacy to live as this kind of humble hermit. And it was seen as this holy pure act. But Dante deems him guilty of cowardice and says that he is, for leaving his post, guilty of allowing evil to come into the church. And James acknowledged to me that this is kind of grandiose to compare himself to this pope, but what he said is that he believed that if he left, he would be guilty of what happened next to these companies. And so he ended up spending several years during that first Trump presidency trying

to push back against what he saw as the problems and excesses at Fox News and elsewhere. He tried to set it on a better path. But again and again, he was kind of thwarted by his father and brother. So step one of that sort of coming apart was his decision, Rupert's decision to renege on the deal to have James run the company. Step two, he goes further and tries to undo his kind of legal will and trust to have the empire run by all four siblings, four of his children equally. That of course leads to that court case where we heard James questioned by a lawyer earlier,

that deposition we talked about at the beginning. Why do you think Rupert Murdoch tried to change the family trust so that Loughlin would have sort of independent and total control over the companies? Well after James left the company, stepped down as CEO in 2019, he became increasingly estranged from his father. He wasn't really talking to Rupert. He wasn't talking very much to his brother either. He said this was not a deliberate decision on his part, but he just found that without work kind of bringing them together, there wasn't much for them to talk about. What happened though is that Rupert, in this kind of absence of communication, came to believe, possibly because Loughlin

was kind of feeding him these stories, that James was plotting with his sisters to essentially stage a coup once Rupert died. That he and his sisters, who it's believed have more liberal politics, would team up against Loughlin, boot him from the corner office, install an executive more in their mold, and kind of defang the Murdoch media outlets, right? Moderate their politics, make them less, you know, more respectable. And in Rupert's view, this would be an absolute destruction of his legacy and life's work. He really only trusts, of all of his children, he only trusts Loughlin to stay the course,

run these companies the way that he would continue to run them if he were still alive. And that is why he is trying at the eleventh hour before he dies to rewrite his trust to make sure that Loughlin is the only one who has control of these companies. I'm Dena Temple-Rustin, the host of the Click Here podcast from Record of Future News. Twice a week, we tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. And these days, our digital world is being overrun by hackers. I was just targeted by a nation state.

And they range from reflective. It's a crime, bro. And I live with that every day. To ruthless. Do you feel guilty about it? No, not really. Click here from Recorded Future News. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts.

There was so much nastiness that came out through that court case, but in the end, James and his sisters won. They retained this idea that the company, the empire, would be run by the four siblings equally when eventually Rupert does die. Why do you think, as all of that was happening, that James wanted to tell his side of the story publicly and run against the family history of never speaking to the press. Yeah, I think he a couple things, right? So James has been very tight lipped throughout his life. He obviously disagreed with a lot of what his father did. He disagreed with how these companies were run, but he also felt this this family loyalty and he didn't

want to speak out against his dad. I think that the move that Rupert and Lachlan made in 2023 to try to rewrite this trust and all the nasty litigation that followed everything that came out in discovery was sort of liberating for James in a way. I think that he experienced that as a profound betrayal by his father and brother. And I think it caused him to feel like, well, if they're gonna do this to me, I guess I can just be honest about everything that I've seen. I don't need to keep the family secrets anymore. And so we ended up spending, you know, a year talking.

We had over a dozen interviews and he was pretty candid with me. What were those meetings like? They were pretty surreal. and he was pretty candid with me. What were those meetings like? They were pretty surreal. I mean, I'll tell you, when I first approached him early last year, I didn't know about any of this litigation. The trial was under seal.

All of this stuff was secret. So it was almost on a lark that I approached him. I just thought he obviously had a great story to tell if he was ready to tell it. It was strange because there were times when we would meet where he was very eager to talk and to kind of dish, right? And he was clearly angry at his father. He also had, you know, he has this very strong memory and he can recall details of meetings and negotiations from a decade earlier, there were other times where he still had that reflexive protectiveness of the family. And I think those two things were kind of pulling at

him in opposite directions sometimes. And my job as the reporter was to sort of steer him toward candor as much as possible in those meetings. And you could sense a kind of nervous energy and like almost like a beneath the surface anxiety. Even though he's a very bright guy, he's very polished, you could feel that that anxiety churning in him. And this is where his wife, Catherine, was kind of helpful to me because she would she would often be in these meetings.

And when he would start to ramble or drift from the point or filibuster, she would often be in these meetings and when he would start to ramble or drift from the point or filibuster, she would often steer him back to like, no, no, no, answer the question. And that was very nice for me as the journalist. It's nice to have somebody to keep things on the rails. It's interesting though, because you've got like Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, they've refused to speak to you, a spokesperson, objected to what he called a quote, a litany of falsehoods, unquote. And I can kind of feel you struggling with parts of this through the piece, but why or how do you come to trust James and his versions of events

as you're learning it, hearing it, and then telling it in the piece? Yeah, I had to do an enormous amount of reporting beyond just talking to him and Catherine, right? You know, I don't go into all the details in the piece, but I talk to do an enormous amount of reporting beyond just talking to him and Catherine, right? I don't go into all the details in the piece, but I talked to a lot of people who have worked at these companies, who have known James and Catherine and Lachlan and Rupert throughout their lives. I spoke to his sister, Liz, of course. She's quoted in the piece as well.

But you do your best basically to check his narrative against the public document, the public record, and what other people are telling me. And you know, there are things that he told me that I wasn't sure about and they didn't end up in the piece, right? I came to believe over the course of the year that I was spending with him that he was making a good faith effort to tell me the truth. I think that he was genuinely candid. I think he obviously had his own biases and brought his own baggage to the experience

of these interviews, but I think he was genuinely trying to reckon with everything that he had seen behind the scenes in this family business. And you just, at the end of the day, you have to kind of decide who you trust in all of this. But there was a lot of other reporting that went into the piece to confirm his story. For sure. And that's very evident as you read it. I just want to make that clear. There's a refrain you hear throughout this piece where you ask, James asks, different people sort of come to this question about how did we let it come to this. As I finished it, I couldn't help but wonder, was there any other way that this story was

going to end other than this sort of angry, bitter breakup? Maybe not. You know, one of the things that I found really compelling about James from the very beginning is that he considers himself sort of a student of dynastic dysfunction, you know? He spends a lot of- Yeah, King Lear and- Yeah, he quotes King Lear, he's studied the Roman emperors and, you know, and we talked at one point about that famous Tolstoy quote, you know, all happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. And you know, we talked about that and he said, I'm not sure I agree with that because

when I look at all these families that have been wrecked by dynastic dysfunction and power and greed, it's the same things happening over and over again. It's the same patterns and endless repetition. And when you have a figure like Rupert Murdoch, who, you know, whatever you think of him, clearly a brilliant visionary guy in a lot of ways, right? Maybe you think he's an evil genius, maybe not. But he built this empire, but he's obsessed with in some ways like immortality. You know, he wants this empire to live on through his kids. And when your

kids become kind of nodes of immortality rather than people, it's maybe inevitable that you will end up in this kind of poisonous, tragic unraveling that the family is seeing now. But I do think that in some ways, this is a profoundly sad and personal story in addition to a political story and a business story. Well, it's been a fascinating saga and just an amazing piece to read. So thank you for writing it

and thanks for coming on the show today. Thank you. McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic. He was in Washington. His amazing piece is called Growing Up Murdoch, and you can read it at theatlantic.com. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.