Extract from ABC News
It was the middle of the night in 2018 when Rupert Murdoch fell over and triggered a succession drama.
The 86-year-old media mogul was spending a blissful few days with his wife, supermodel Jerry Hall, cruising the Caribbean on board a yacht borrowed from his son Lachlan.
The 42-metre carbon globetrotter Sarissa was light and sleek enough to compete in regattas, but it also resembled a floating resort with a kiddie pool and rock climbing wall on board.
While it would later be described to his senior management team as a "sailing accident", in reality Murdoch had tripped on his way to the bathroom.
The ageing billionaire was airlifted to a Los Angeles hospital for emergency surgery on a broken vertebra in his back.
His wife Jerry called his four adult children with a plea: They must come to their father's bedside and say their final goodbyes.
Prudence, Lachlan, James and Elisabeth rushed to LA. But this was no ordinary farewell to a beloved patriarch.
The boss of the multi-billion dollar media empire, sprawling several continents, had never chosen an heir.
For their entire lives, the possibility of ascending the throne upon their father's death had been dangled before each of them.
And now they faced the very real possibility, foreshadowed by their father a decade before, that they would have to battle among themselves for the crown.
The 'forgotten daughter'
At the age of 26, rising newspaper baron Rupert Murdoch became a father for the first time.
Baby Prudence ensured the Murdoch dynasty lived on.
But Rupert Murdoch's first-born child has never been considered a viable successor.
"Murdoch, at this point, still [didn't] see girls as having much of anything to do with what he does," biographer Michael Wolff told Vanity Fair in 2008.
"She is the only one of his children not directly competing for his business affections."
Her parents divorced when she was nine, and Prudence went to London to live with her father and his new wife Anna.
Her half-siblings Elisabeth, Lachlan and James soon joined the blended family.
But according to Michael Wolff, Prudence spent many years feeling "like the stepsister and outsider child—without a place in her father's empire".
In 1997, after her father casually mentioned in a press conference that he had "three children", Prudence went straight to his media rival Fairfax.
"I rang up. I screamed at him. I hung up. He was very upset," she said in a Sydney Morning Herald story that ran under the headline "Forgotten Daughter".
"He then sent me the biggest bunch of flowers — it was bigger than a sofa — and two clementine trees."
While Prudence grew up among her half-siblings, some media experts say her father engaged her in a competition she had no hope of winning.
As the children ate their breakfast, Rupert Murdoch would drill them on the layout choices of the morning newspapers, seeming to prepare them for their futures as media moguls.
But as the young Murdochs grew up and took on high-profile roles in the family business, Prudence hovered in the background.
With her trademark frankness, Prudence told Michael Wolff in 2008 that she has always felt inferior to her siblings.
"They have massive boats, all of them," she said.
"I never feel sophisticated enough to be on this big boat.
"They are all taller than me, that's the worst thing, so they all look chic-er wherever they are, but especially on a boat, where everyone is in shorts or a swimsuit and I'm the short, fat one."
While Prudence — along with everyone else — assumed Rupert Murdoch's successor would be Lachlan, James or Elisabeth, there were shock divorces, rivalries and scandals to come.
Wendi Deng joins the family
By the late 1990s, Elisabeth was a top executive at BSkyB, Lachlan was running the Australian wing of the empire, and James was running Mushroom Records.
The prevailing wisdom was that Lachlan, the golden boy, would eventually be named heir.
"Currently it is the consensus that Lachlan will take over," Rupert Murdoch told the Guardian in 1999.
"He will be the first among equals, but they will all have to prove themselves first."
Elisabeth, a TV producer behind MasterChef, held a vaunted position of being, as Michael Wolff called her, "Rupert Murdoch's most successful child".
And James was described by the New York Times' Maureen Dowd as "the more strategic one, the more interesting one, the harder-working one, the more enlightened one".
The competition for success and their father's approval was intense, but also familiar.
Then Rupert Murdoch detonated a bomb.
He left their mother Anna after 32 years of marriage, proposed to a young employee called Wendi Deng, and brought two new baby girls into the clan.
"Everyone was hurt," Prudence said of her half-siblings as they grappled with their father's betrayal.
"It was interesting because I was just sitting there thinking, 'Well, hello, I've done this.'"
It's believed that while Anna could have pursued her estranged husband for half his fortune, she settled for far less.
But she had one demand: When Rupert Murdoch died, only Anna's three children — and Prudence — would assume control over the family trust that owned 30 per cent of News Corp.
According to the agreement, Rupert retained four of the trust's eight votes, while Prudence, Lachlan, Elisabeth and James received one each.
Upon Rupert Murdoch's eventual death, it was agreed that his votes will die with him.
His two new daughters, Chloe and Grace, will be looked after financially, but they will never have a voice — and, crucially, their mother can not speak for them — on the fate of the empire.
Wendi Deng Murdoch found all of this out when she tuned into her husband's television interview with Charlie Rose in 2006.
"If I go under a bus tomorrow, it will be the four of them [that] will have to decide which of the ones should lead them," Mr Murdoch confirmed live on air.
"The four kids have to decide who will be the heir apparent?" Charlie Rose asked.
Mr Murdoch responded: "In terms of power, yes. In terms of leadership, they'll all get treated equally financially."
A scandal rips the family apart
At various points, Rupert Murdoch's children have walked away from him, vowing to make their own way in life.
"It's like The Godfather," a film executive close to the family told the Hollywood Reporter.
"They all come together for events and play the role, but in terms of real emotion, it's awkward ... it's a business, and it's a family."
Elisabeth — always considered the rebel of the family — scandalised her father by leaving her husband for the great-grandson of famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
She refused to break off the relationship, and instead had a baby with him.
"What on earth is this baby going to be like with the blood of Rupert Murdoch and Sigmund Freud running around in its veins?" his ex-wife Anna Murdoch said of her new grandchild.
And in 2005, heir apparent Lachlan Murdoch stunned everybody by suddenly walking away.
What seemed like a small disagreement over a TV series pitched by Fox News chief Roger Ailes had escalated into a dispute that saw Lachlan resign over an emotional lunch with his father.
"I have to do my own thing," Lachlan reportedly said.
"I have to be my own man."
With Lachlan on his own course, the path suddenly looked clear for James.
By 2011, the baby brother was the newly minted chief operating officer of News Corp and the head of its international operations.
"His father is wowed by the boy's pure aggression, by his fight, by his fearsomeness," Michael Wolff wrote in his book The Man Who Owns the News.
But once again, a bomb was detonated in the family — and this time it threatened to obliterate the family's empire.
Over the course of a few days in England's summer of 2011, it emerged that reporters at the Murdoch-owned tabloid News of the World had been illegally hacking into people's phones.
Royalty, celebrities, the victims of terrorist attacks, the families of dead soldiers all had their privacy violated.
Even the voicemail of a missing little girl was breached and cleared, giving her family false hope that she was still alive and deleting messages.
"This is the most humble day of my life," Rupert Murdoch said when he and James were hauled before a UK parliamentary committee to explain themselves.
Amid reports that key News Corp officials including James could face criminal charges, the recriminations within the family came fast.
"Elisabeth blamed her brother for allowing the phone-hacking crisis to spiral out of control," Vanity Fair reporter Sarah Ellison wrote in 2011.
One unnamed News Corp official asked of James: "Are you stupid or guilty?"
For the first time in a long time, the question of succession had never been less certain.
With his children at war and the future of the empire in doubt, Rupert Murdoch even brought in a family therapist to counsel them.
"I think there's going to be a lot of heartbreak and hardship with this," Anna Murdoch said of the looming succession battle that would pit her children against each other.
"There's been such a lot of pressure that they needn't have had."
The prodigal son returns to rule
In the years after the phone-hacking scandal nearly demolished his empire, Rupert Murdoch built himself a new life.
He broke up with Wendi Murdoch, and found love with Jerry Hall.
The hopeless romantic married for the fourth time.
And he did the one thing he vowed never to do: He sold a huge part of his sprawling business.
While he kept a few papers and Fox News for himself, almost all of the rest of his legacy went to Disney for $92 billion.
His six children received $2 billion each.
But while they were equal in reaping the family spoils, the issue of succession still loomed.
For a while, it appeared that James might emerge from the ashes of the phone-hacking scandal and continue being groomed as heir apparent.
But after the Disney deal went through, he abruptly quit.
"My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company's news outlets and certain other strategic decisions," he said, in reference to Fox News.
But after decades in Australia, the prodigal son returned.
Lachlan became CEO of Fox and co-chairman of News Corp, with many media analysts presuming he was right back where he started: Next in line.
And with Thursday's announcement, that prediction was confirmed.
With Rupert stepping down from his roles as Chair of Fox Corporation and News Corp, Lachlan was crowned.
But the four Murdoch children still have a chessboard of options before them.
Their votes in the family trust are equal. The siblings will have to form alliances if they disagree over the future of the family business.
Whether the empire can survive without its emperor remains to be seen.
As Lachlan admitted in 2005: "There'll never be another Rupert Murdoch."
No comments:
Post a Comment