The American journalist McKay Coppins this weekend published a rare and wide-ranging interview with James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's second-oldest son, who is often portrayed as a bitter rival to his older brother, Lachlan. Coppins reveals James Murdoch, 52, regarded his father, 93, as a "misogynist" and considered Fox News a "menace" to US democracy.
In one of several anecdotes that could have been taken from the script of the HBO drama Succession, the Atlantic article relates how James faced a barrage of "withering" questions from his father's lawyer, including reference to him and his siblings being "white, privileged, multibillionaire trust-fund babies" - only to realise that Rupert had been silently texting the questions to the lawyer from across the room.
What Coppins did not know when he and James began speaking in early 2024, he writes, was that "the Murdochs were in the midst of a private meltdown" - the nasty court battle over the future of News Corp, kicked off by the somewhat misleadingly titled "Project Family Harmony".
The plan involved Rupert informing James and his sisters, Prudence and Elisabeth, that he was anointing Lachlan as his heir. On Rupert's death, instead of the evenly split family trust previously planned, power would go solely to his older son. But he lost his effort to hand the reins to Lachlan in December last year.
Detailing the many power struggles within the family, Coppins writes that one former News Corp employee claimed Lachlan had referred to the media side of the business as "ShitCo" (a claim a spokesperson for Lachlan denied to Coppins) - a possible echo of RoyCo, the fictional company created by patriarch Logan Roy in Succession, commonly regarded as having been inspired by the Murdochs.
This story is from the February 18, 2025 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the February 18, 2025 edition of The Guardian.
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