How Rupert Murdoch built an empire and broke his family
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This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. In 2023, Rupert Murdoch officially named his most conservative child Lachlan as the successor to the Murdoch media empire. It includes Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and more. The lawsuit to amend the Murdoch Family Trust and
ended last year, the other three oldest Murdoch children received $1.1 billion each in a buyout. It's a Shakespearean drama that journalist Gabriel Sherman details in his new book, Bonfire of the Murdochs. He spoke with guest interviewer Sam Fragoso. Here's Sam. Rupert Murdoch was just twenty one years old, a student at Oxford, when he inherited his first newspaper.
It was in nineteen fifty two, after the death of his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, and the paper was the News of Adelaide, published out of southern Australia, with a circulation of about seventy five thousand. Rupert was undaunted, though, and used the modest publication as a springboard to build a vast conservative media empire that currently includes Fox News, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal. But despite the size and scope of his continued efforts, Murdoch has long seen Newscorp as a family business, one to be left behind to his children, as his father did for him. In recent years, however, there's been a riff over how the family sees the future of the company, resulting in a legal dispute that pitted the eldest four siblings, Loughlin, James, Elizabeth, and Prudence, against each other. The argument, spearheaded by Rupert and his most politically like minded child, Laughlin, went something like this if James, Liz, and Prudence succeeded in turning Fox News liberal, they would destroy the right wing business model and tank the family fortune.
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