In 2015, the older son agreed to return from Australia as his father’s heir. But James’s liberal politics and desire to make News Corp respected in elite circles rankled Murdoch, who continued to woo Lachlan with Ahab-like determination. For the next decade, James climbed the ranks, vowing to make the Murdoch empire carbon-neutral and investing in prestige media brands like Hulu and the National Geographic Channel. In 2005, Lachlan, then News Corp’s deputy chief operating officer, quit and moved back to Sydney after clashing with Fox News chief Roger Ailes and chief operating officer Peter Chernin. But Murdoch worried that his easygoing son, who seemed happiest rock climbing, did not want the top job badly enough. “Lachlan was the golden child,” the person close to the family said. Lachlan shared Murdoch’s right-wing politics and atavistic love for newsprint and their homeland, Australia. She quit the family business in 2000 and launched her own phenomenally successful television production company. Elisabeth was by many accounts the sharpest, but she is a woman, and Murdoch subscribed to old-fashioned primogeniture. It’s sad,” a person close to the family said. “He pitted his kids against each other their entire lives. Murdoch believed a Darwinian struggle would produce the most capable heir. He long wanted one of his three children from his second wife, Anna-Elisabeth, 54, Lachlan, 51, and James, 50-to take over the company one day. Illustration by Risko.Īlthough he is a nonagenarian intent on living forever, Murdoch has been consumed with the question of his succession. Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, surrounded by (clockwise from top left) his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, ex-fiancée Ann Lesley Smith, and sons James and Lachlan Murdoch. “There’s been a joke in the family for a long time that 40 may be the new 30, but 80 is 80,” a source close to Murdoch said. But unlike the politicians Murdoch has bullied into submission with his tabloids, human biology is immovable. He reminds people that his mother, Dame Elisabeth, lived until 103 (“I’m sure he’ll never retire,” she told me when I interviewed her in 2010, a day after her 101st birthday). “I’m now convinced of my own immortality,” he famously declared after beating prostate cancer in 1999 at the age of 69. Murdoch assiduously avoids any discussion of a future in which he isn’t in command of his media empire. Many of these episodes went unreported in the press, which was just how Murdoch liked it. In recent years, Murdoch has suffered a broken back, seizures, two bouts of pneumonia, atrial fibrillation, and a torn Achilles tendon, a source close to the mogul told me. COVID was only the most recent medical emergency that sent Murdoch to the hospital.
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