What happens when you preemptively try to stop a coup, only to discover that you’ve incited one?
That is the very real scenario that Rupert Murdoch finds himself in, after a Nevada court ruled that he couldn’t change the family trust and give control to his son Lachlan.
In trying to solidify his eldest son’s position as head of his powerful media empire to preserve Fox News’ right-wing slant, the 93-year-old Rupert seems to have drawn his other three eldest children – James, Elisabeth and Prudence – closer together.
While the bizarro-world scenario of art imitating life imitating art that we’re witnessing with the Succession-fueled drama engulfing the Murdoch family is genuinely fascinating, we may now be entering uncharted waters after Rupert’s power-consolidation scheme backfired.
It’s long been said that if you come at the king, you best not miss. Well, what happens if you are the king – and you miss?
In a blistering 96-page ruling denying the bid to amend the family trust, Nevada probate commissioner Edmund J. Gorman Jr. said that Rupert and Lachlan had acted in “bad faith” with their “carefully crafted charade” to “permanently cement Lachlan Murdoch’s executive roles” within the Murdoch media companies.
“The effort was an attempt to stack the deck in Lachlan Murdoch’s favor after Rupert Murdoch’s passing so that his succession would be immutable,” Gorman concluded. “The play might have worked; but an evidentiary hearing, like a showdown in a game of poker, is where gamesmanship collides with the facts and at its conclusion, all the bluffs are called and the cards lie face up.”
He added: “The court, after considering the facts of this case in the light of the law, sees the cards for what they are and concludes this raw deal will not, over the signature of this probate commissioner, prevail.”
But how exactly did we get here?
Simple. Brotherly rivalry. Much as his fictional counterpart Logan Roy did throughout the acclaimed HBO series that was unsubtly based on his media empire, Rupert has spent years pitting his oldest children against each other as he searched for the heir apparent to the family business.
And just like the Roys of Succession, the Murdoch kids have taken turns being ostracized by their father or seated beside him at his throne, ready to take over when the day comes.
Currently it’s Lachlan’s time to be the favored son while James is out of the fold.
After decades of building a multinational media behemoth that included newspapers, movie and TV studios, and book publishers, Rupert decided to launch a right-leaning version of CNN in 1996. He hired Roger Ailes to run Fox News, which soon became the top-rated cable news channel in the United States.
By the mid-2000s, both James and Lachlan had taken on important roles within the family empire. James was sent to the UK to manage News Corporation’s ever-growing digital investments, while Lachlan stayed in New York alongside his dad, tasked with running Fox Television stations and publishing the New York Post.
Lachlan butted heads with Ailes and eventually gave his dad an ultimatum in 2005: the Fox News chief or his eldest son. Rupert chose the man who had made his cable network into a conservative news powerhouse, prompting his son to resign angrily and pack his family up for Australia.
He would not return to the family business for nearly a decade, instead trying to build his own media fiefdom, which included buying Nova Radio, a series of FM radio stations.
With Lachlan suddenly gone, James found himself being groomed for glory.
When his father achieved his lifelong dream of buying the Wall Street Journal in 2007, James was promoted to running Murdoch’s television and news operations in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Scandal, however, ground James’ upward trajectory to a halt.
Reporters at the News of the World and the Sun—two British tabloids owned by Murdoch—had been hacking the phones of celebrities and royals for years and James found himself squarely in the middle of the controversy. Alongside his father, James was dragged before the British Parliament and forced to testify about his knowledge of the hacking scandal.
With lawsuits growing and the possibility of prosecution hanging over James’ head, Rupert shuttered News of the World in 2011. James would eventually resign as the executive chairman of News Corp’s British newspaper division. He was also forced to step down as chairman of BSkyB, prompting the Murdochs to abandon their takeover of the British telecom giant.
James would slink back to North America after his inept handling of the fallout leaving him publicly diminished and embarrassed. And the hits kept coming.
Because of the illegal phone taps, shareholders wanted the Mudochs to completely separate the tainted newspaper brand from the rest of Fox’s properties. This resulted in Rupert being forced to split News Corp from his Fox entertainment brand while buying back a large portion of stock.
And James was damaged goods.
Enter Lachlan. After returning from Australia in 2014 after his self-imposed exile, Lachlan formed an uneasy alliance with James when they were both given co-CEO roles. However, the brothers didn’t see each other regularly, as Lachlan was headquartered in Los Angeles and James was ensconced in New York.
The two brothers’ politics also began to diverge, especially as Donald Trump ascended to the top of the Republican Party. At the same time, they were able to agree on one thing in 2016 – Ailes had to go.
After helping rid Fox News of its longtime chief following accusations of sexual misconduct and harassment, which Ailes denied although they led to high-priced lawsuits, the two brothers rarely saw eye-to-eye on anything else. Lachlan became more drawn to the nationalistic conservatism peddled by Tucker Carlson, who he helped elevate to become Fox News’s biggest star and ratings draw.
Meanwhile, James’ more liberal leanings – especially when it came to climate change – made him increasingly uncomfortable with Fox News’ programming and the right-wing tabloid nature of the other Murdoch news properties.
The 2019 sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney, which split off most of the family’s entertainment properties, presented James with an opportunity to jump ship, especially since each of the Murdoch kids received $2 billion from the deal. James left the company months later, leaving Lachlan and Rupert to run it alone.
Untethered to the media empire his father had built since the 1950s, James soon began making it publicly clear that he disagreed with the editorial positions Fox and the newspapers were taking, further creating a rift with his brother, who was now running both Fox Corp and News Corp alongside his father.
“The connective tissue of our society is being manipulated to make us fight with each other, making us the worst versions of ourselves,” James told the New Yorker in 2019, adding: “There are views I really disagree with on Fox.”
It wasn’t just the public condemnations that irked Lachlan and Rupert, though.
The Murdochs control roughly 40 percent of the shares in News Corp and Fox Corp via the family trust, so they’ve generally voted against all business decisions. That changed two years ago.
Nearly a decade after the hacking scandal caused them to separate print properties from television, Rupert and Lachlan concocted a scheme to merge Fox Corp and News Corp once again. While Rupert was already dealing with angry shareholders who opposed the deal, a united family front would likely allow it to go through.
James, though, decided to vote against the merger. It was soon abandoned.
The deal, if it went through, would have gone far in cementing Lachlan’s position as top dog after Rupert’s death. James’ objection, and any further dissension from the other Murdoch trustees, could spell trouble for Rupert’s plans to make Lachlan the steward of the kingdom.
He was determined not to let that happen again.
The Murdoch family trust, as it currently stands, came about because of a divorce.
When Rupert split up with his second wife, Anna Torv, in 1999, he seemingly got off relatively scot-free. Rather than seek half of his fortune, as was her right under California law, she agreed to $200 million. In return, she asked that control of the media empire be split between their three children — James, Lachlan, and Elisabeth — and his daughter Prudence from his first wife.
Like her two brothers, Elisabeth was once seen as a possible successor to the throne upon her father’s death and occasionally clashed with James and Lachlan early on. She now runs the successful movie studio Sister and, in recent years, has tried to be a neutral party in the family’s squabbles. Prudence, meanwhile, has largely stayed out of the public eye and is the least involved in the family business.
The trust was fully established in 2006 after Rupert had married his third wife Wendi Deng, and they had two more children, Grace and Chloe. Under the terms of the agreement, Rupert’s two youngest children do not hold any voting shares, though they retain an equal financial stake. Rupert maintains control of the business until he dies, whereas the voting shares will be distributed equally between the four oldest kids.
According to Michael Wolff’s book on the Murdochs, Rupert had to pay the oldest children $150 million each to agree to add Grace and Chloe and give them equitable shares. But when it came to voting rights, Anna Torv wouldn’t budge, apparently incensing Deng.
The trust was irrevocable after the amendments in 2006 and meant to be binding. It did include language, however, that would allow Rupert to make “changes to it as long as he was acting in the best interests of his beneficiaries,” according to The New York Times.
This provision was what Lachlan and Rupert decided to exploit in the middle of 2023.
The Succession episode in which Logan Roy died, sparking chaos among the fictional Roy heirs over who would actually succeed him after years of backstabbing and machinations, prompted the oldest Murdoch children to start discussing a public relations strategy for Rupert’s eventual passing.
The trust representative for Elisabeth, in fact, wrote a “Succession memo” to address how they could avoid the fate of the Roys on the show.
Unbeknownst to the other three children, Lachlan was hatching a plan to cement his status as ruler of the media empire. He wanted to keep the business’ crown jewel Fox News as a highly profitable right-wing machine, and disenfranchise the rest of his siblings so they couldn’t subvert his power going forward.
The scheme, hilariously named “Project Family Harmony,” was meant to preemptively stop James from challenging Lachlan’s leadership or attempting to moderate the conservative slant of Fox News and the other Murdoch news properties, which Rupert argued would damage them financially. (Perhaps to hammer home that point, Fox Corp is looking to acquire right-wing podcast companies, notably the Daily Wire.)
Bringing on former Trump attorney general Bill Barr as their new representative of the trust, they described James as the “troublesome beneficiary” and sought ways to limit his power. Concerned that he was plotting with Prudence and Elisabeth to take over Fox and make it more liberal, they eventually settled on expanding Lachlan’s voting power while offering voting shares to Grace and Chloe, thus watering down the other three’s shares.
When the secret plan was finally unveiled at a trust meeting late last year, both Elisabeth and Prudence were furious. Meanwhile, Lachlan sent Elisabeth the following text message that morning: “Today is about Dad’s wishes and confirming all of our support for him and for his wishes. It shouldn’t be difficult or controversial. Love you, Lachlan.”
Around the same time, Rupert also symbolically stepped down as head of Fox, naming Lachlan as his successor and the new chief of both Fox Corp and News Corp.
Throughout the court proceedings this past fall, the probate commissioner found that Rupert and Lachlan “demonstrated a dishonesty of purpose and motive” with their “bad faith” effort to change the trust.
Gorman also found that Rupert’s paranoia that James was plotting a coup with his sisters to depose Lachlan and remake Fox News lacked evidence. The siblings insisted that they “disavowed any plan to oust their brother,” with the commissioner saying he “did not find “that they shared any singleness of purpose in changing the management of Fox News” after Rupert’s death.
Meanwhile, even before this week’s decision came down, the open war over the trust had caused perhaps irreconcilable differences within the family, and not just between James and Lachlan.
When Rupert married for the fifth time this past June, none of the three attended.
As for James, he is now taking the approach that his objection to Lachlan’s leadership of the companies is not so much about their ideologies as it is about the preventable losses that the businesses have incurred under Lachlan’s watch. Specifically, the jaw-dropping $787.5 million settlement paid out to Dominion Voting Systems last year over baseless election fraud conspiracies peddled on Fox News’ airwaves.
“The line of attack that James is taking against his brother is said not to be based simply on the role of Fox News in amplifying a flood of Trump falsehoods, but pitched at the loftier level of corporate governance and Lachlan’s record of oversight of the network, which incurred major litigation costs over election falsehoods under his watch,” Murdoch expert Clive Irving and reported for Vanity Fair this week.
At the same time, while James is suggesting all along that he’s had much loftier ambitions when it comes to challenging Lachlan’s anointed status as heir apparent, Rupert’s preemptive kill shot against his kids may end up creating the scenario he hoped to avoid all along.
As the court hearings and Gorman’s decision made clear, there was never any hard evidence that James was formulating a scheme with his sisters to fire Lachlan and create a kinder, gentler Fox News.
Sure, James’ criticism of Fox News and its editorial direction is baked in the cake now. Still, it appears he’s been cautious when it comes to voicing any intention of actually moderating the network’s stance, knowing he’d have to get both sisters on board to take any action.
Yet, here’s the rub. Their father preemptively trying to disenfranchise all of them in a coup-killing attack is the very thing that could make the three siblings band together and do the very thing Lachlan and Rupert dread.
