Inside the epic battle among Rupert Murdoch’s children for the future of his empire

Lachlan (left) and James Murdoch are on opposite sides of a succession battle in a Nevada court over the future of their father Rupert Murdoch’s empire. 

The biggest story in media right now has nothing to do with sexting. Instead, it’s about the future of Rupert Murodoch’s media empire. And who is going to control it — and Fox News in particular — when the 93-year-old billionaire dies.

Murdoch and his family are currently fighting with each other about the future, but they are doing it behind closed doors in a Reno, Nevada courtroom, which is why you haven’t heard much about it since hearings started last week.

The fight in a nutshell: Rupert Murdoch’s wealth is tied up in controlling stakes of his two companies — News Corp, which owns properties like the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, and Fox Corp., which owns Fox News and the Fox broadcasting network. Control of those stakes was supposed to be split between four of his children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence — when he died. But recently, Rupert Murdoch has been trying to change those plans, and pass along full control to Lachlan Murdoch, who now has the CEO title at both News Corp and Fox.

And yes, this sounds a lot like “Succession,” with good reason: The HBO show was based in part on the lives of the Murdoch clan.

There’s a lot going on here, and it can also be hard to understand. So I talked to David Folkenflik, NPR’s media correspondent and Murdoch family expert, to explain how we got here, what’s happening now — and what might happen next. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

From an outsider’s perspective, it seems like handing over a media empire that one guy ran to four of his children when he dies is a recipe for disaster. Or, at a minimum, a very good HBO show. Was this always going to end up in some kind of sort of knife fight?

Looking back on it, this is the logical outcome of a patriarchal setup, a family setup where the patriarch has never really understood how to show love, has often cut checks to ease wounded feelings, and actively pitted his children against each other in competition for his affection and respect through essentially corporate warfare.

To be clear, is this about how to divide up a fortune worth $6 billion? Or is it about power and control?

I think there’s both at stake. I think there’s the question of who’s controlling this thing, which has been drummed into them — the only thing worth doing is running a powerful company, just like Dad.

I also think that James, in particular, seemingly joined to some degree by his two elder sisters, has a substantive critique of the way in which the company has been run.

Particularly Fox News, which has propelled so much of their fortunes but has gotten increasingly more right-wing and more unhinged in the age of Trump. Fox News embraced things [it] knew not to be true about groundless claims of fraud in the 2020 race. Emails and the texts at the time show that Fox executives and the Murdochs themselves knew not to be true and knew not to be the right thing.

James is saying this has been corrosive to American society and is a short-term financial play in pursuit of an intense but aging audience that will not serve Fox well in an age of cord-cutting and streaming. It’s not a plan for the future. That’s his argument.

Elisabeth Murdoch and her father, Rupert Murdoch, pictured in 2010. Elisabeth is involved in the Nevada court proceedings along with her other siblings. 

He made these arguments after he’d left the company, and also after he basically lost the most recent round of knife fights inside the company, and had been frozen out and didn’t get a job at Disney like he thought he might have after Fox sold most of its assets to Disney. Is that timing coincidental?

And, as people I’ve talked to who have ties to Rupert and Lachlan would point out, after James and all of Murdoch’s other five children had gotten essentially a $2 billion payout as their share of the sale to Disney.

So James’s wealth had become vastly expanded as a result of that transaction, which he had favored and Lachlan had opposed.

But James had been making this argument [about the direction of Murdoch’s properties] somewhat from the inside as well. And so you can say it’s opportunism, but you can also say that the events that played out kept intensifying, right?

He’s talked about his dismay at the coverage of wildfires and climate change issues in Rupert’s native Australia in the Murdoch papers there and in Sky News there. But I think that the election fraud claims and January 6th — there was a steady drumbeat on Fox in the lead-up to January 6th, and then, subsequently, it attempted to essentially exonerate and, in some ways, honor the folks who laid siege to the US Capitol to try to, stop the certification of Biden’s win. That was a real moment.

This hearing will wrap up sometime this week. Will we know what happens after that? Will there be some sort of public explanation of what’s going on?

To be determined? The probate official in this case has denied the efforts of NPR and a group of other major news outlets to open up this case. It has shown great deference to the parties in this case to say that these proceedings should be private. Though most court proceedings, civil and criminal, are supposed to be public, it has not even identified the litigants involved. It is my belief that through corporate filings, through reporting, and possibly through announcements this will become public. But the probate official has not yet indicated precisely how he’ll handle that.

Do we expect whatever ruling that does come out to be the final word? Can this be appealed?

There is a stretch of time, I believe a couple of weeks, in which either party or presumably both if it’s a mixed decision, can appeal elements or the entirety of the decision. And those decisions can go up to a probate judge and I think they can then go up to the Nevada Supreme Court. That could be a matter of weeks or months or potentially longer. It shouldn’t take that long, but it could take quite a while.

Prudence Murdoch, also known as Prudence MacLeod, as seen in 2006. She has been seen entering the Second Judicial District Court in Reno earlier this month.

If Rupert and Lachlan win, what becomes of Fox and News Corp after Rupert dies?

There’s long been speculation that once Rupert dies, the possessions are in doubt. I think Lachlan would hope to figure out ways to keep on keeping on. Maybe making some strategic sales to help them generate more cash.

It would be a less full-fledged empire. It would not be what his father amassed over the decades.

News Corp has actually performed well in the years since the split of the companies and the renaming of the companies after the Disney deal. Fox Corp. itself has had a bumpy ride. It’s been up and down. It should be the more valuable asset because Fox News is at the core of it.

But we live in a cord-cutting age, and we live in an age of aging audiences, and it’s unclear if more of the same is going to work.

Throughout his career, Rupert Murdoch was always willing to sell assets he’d spent time and money acquiring. It seems that the thing he fundamentally valued the most, even if it wasn’t the most valuable thing in his portfolio, was news and news operations and the proximity to power they gave him. Do you think Lachlan shares that same affection for the news parts of News Corp and Fox?

I don’t think Lachlan is as much of a newshound as his father. He’s an amiable presence, but I don’t think he’s a natural political player, nor is he as intense of one. I think he consults with major political figures, in sort of an echo of his father, but it’s not his father. He looks a lot like him now — like his father did decades ago — but he is not his father. It is hard to see him playing the same forceful role within the political sphere that his father did.

And if James and his sisters win, what do you imagine happens to the empire?

If they prevail and the trust holds, they now have a chairman and executive chairman of the two corporations who just went to the court to, in their mind, screw them out of what was rightly theirs.

NPR’s David Folkenflik, left, is an expert on the Murdoch family. He wrote the book “Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires.” He’s seen on “Meet the Press” with Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair. 

So you’re sketching out a scenario where you’ve got three kids lined up against one. So they wrest control from him and then do what with the properties — keep running them? Sell?

Presumably, they dispose of a bunch of them. My guess is, why would you hold on to newspapers that aren’t profitable?

They could even question whether this would be the moment to sell The Wall Street Journal. It is performing wonderfully financially right now, which is not true of a lot of papers. So you can imagine them selling at a peak — much like the Disney sale, where they sold assets just before streaming undercut the value of a lot of these traditional entertainment properties.

You can also imagine them saying, is there somebody who would take Fox off our hands? Or can we put it in the hands of professionals who have independent standing in a way that people like Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, who’ve come up through this system, may not?

So there’s a scenario where they keep Fox News, but dial it back away from the right and toward the center?

Make it conservative and not unhinged.

Murdochland tends to be a gossipy place. This is a closed-door hearing, but it seems like nothing has leaked out from the courtroom. Am I missing something?

If you had routine leaks on a daily basis right now, I think somebody would stand a pretty good chance of pissing off the probate official who decided to keep things behind closed doors at a time when billions of dollars are at stake. I think that’s a pretty good incentive not to troll the other side publicly.