[dramatic string music playing]
[man 1] The Murdoch succession battle has been like a soap opera
that's been going on for, honestly, decades.
[reporter 1] Bombshell news that the Murdochs have settled.
[reporter 2] The long-running saga has reached a resolution.
[man 2] It was about more than money. It was about power and Daddy's love.
[reporter 3] Rupert!
[man 2] Rupert got everything he wanted.
[music pauses]
And it ripped his family apart.
-[horns beeping] -[music resumes]
[woman 1] Family dynasties are incredibly hard to maintain.
They tend to follow a traditional pattern,
where you have a founder,
then in the second generation, the real success,
and in the third generation,
things sort of fall apart.
[man 1] These families have an enormous amount of power.
[man 3] All this influence, all this wealth.
[man 2] Flying in private jets
with incredible properties all over the world.
[woman 1] You have the Waltons in the US, who own Walmart.
-Do solemnly… -Swear.
-[man 3] The Bushes. -Please clap.
[man 1] The Fords.
[man 3] But of all these families,
far and away the most influential is the Murdochs.
[enigmatic string music playing]
[man 4] Rupert Murdoch is a one-of-a-kind, brilliant businessperson.
But he's also a villain for a lot of people.
[man 5] Shame on you!
[man 6] Murdoch's a… a proper danger to liberal democracies.
I'm not making any comments.
If liberal democracy is your thing.
[Rupert Murdoch] Our company is a reflection of my thinking,
my character, and my values.
[exhaling deeply]
[woman 2] Like most rich people,
Rupert thinks he's gonna live beyond the grave,
so he feels like he has to have control over his legacy,
or it's the end of the empire.
[Rupert] It's every father's natural desire
to see his children follow him, if they're up to it.
[man 2] For Rupert, there was the family,
and there was the business, and they were never separate.
[man 3] But this is part of the game that Rupert Murdoch has played with his family.
[man 7] Tell us the best thing about your dad.
See…
[man 1] What's at stake here is billions of dollars.
[man 2] And the most influential media property that's ever existed.
So it's like a family squabble…
[scoffs] …like, on steroids
that has a huge effect on our politics and our lives.
[music continues]
[music ends]
[man 1] I hate to do this, but to explain the Murdochs,
you have to understand the television show Succession on HBO.
It's about a dynastic media family strikingly like the Murdochs.
There's a patriarch who's very much modeled on Rupert Murdoch,
and just like the Murdoch kids, there are four children,
each with their own little camp.
And of course, the Murdoch children love the show,
except for James, who claims not to watch it.
Apparently Dad's sick. Uh, what do you mean he's sick?
[Jim] So, in the last season in 2023,
the Rupert character suddenly dies.
Don't go, please. Not now.
[Jim] The family goes into a tailspin.
-They are not ready. -I'm welling up.
[Jim] Succession isn't settled. The stock price is crashing.
My father, Logan Roy, was pronounced dead…
[man 2] No one has any idea what to do.
Who's gonna speak at the funeral?
Who's gonna take over the company? It's a mess.
Elisabeth's representative, Mark Devereux, is watching the show,
and Mark finds himself in a panic.
"Oh my God. That could happen to us. We haven't thought about any of this."
It's good to see you.
[Jonathan] It's important to understand, though Rupert is well into his nineties,
he hates talking about his mortality.
There's this kind of mythology within Rupert Murdoch's companies
that he's never gonna die.
That he's immortal.
There's been no discussion of memorials, of burial.
You… you… you just can't go there with Rupert.
So Mark calls Liz and says, "Oh my God, have you seen this episode?"
And she's already seen it twice. [chuckles softly]
And she also panics.
"You have to do something."
So Mark Devereux starts to write what will become the Succession Memo.
It lays out, "Here are the things you have to start thinking about."
"What is gonna happen when Rupert dies?"
[Jonathan] Who will speak at the funeral? What will happen with the companies?
And this memo is circulated among the children.
And the idea is that they are going to begin this conversation,
if not with their father, then at least on the margins around their father.
[Jim] Liz says, "This has to be sorted out now."
"The future of the family depends on it."
[man 3] Since they were kids, the Murdochs had been raised
with this idea that their father built this media empire
in a kind of swashbuckling, risk it all, gonzo manner
that, uh, Rupert is really proud of.
[man 4] This is a theme that runs all through Rupert's career.
It's the outsider, it's the underdog, taking on the elite.
And that was established early on when he first arrived in London in 1969.
[man 5] When Rupert arrived in Britain, no one took him very seriously.
Which is the mistake everyone's made about Murdoch to this point.
[man 6] As a young man in Australia,
he had acquired a number of Australian newspapers
and had just married his second wife, Anna Torv Murdoch.
[reporter 1] Anna was a reporter on one of his Australian newspapers.
She is quite capable of coping with the tricky job
of being wife to an ambitious man.
I think that being the wife of a tycoon must be
awful, really.
Well, first of all, I don't like him being called a tycoon.
And secondly, it is awful sometimes and it is lonely,
and you are cut out of it.
But I don't think I'd change it for anything at all.
I think newspapers are in his blood. He's fascinated by them.
By the presses rolling.
Seeing it on the street.
Watching what other people read.
He catches the tube in the morning, and he doesn't take the papers.
He has read them all here.
And he sits in a little corner
and watches the dolly birds in London with their miniskirts… [chuckles]
…and what they're reading.
He's like a good Australian businessman, who's come here,
"I'm going to show you how to do it."
[camera clicks]
[David] Murdoch decides that the British Establishment
needs to be shaken up and disrupted.
So he buys a fading left-of-center British tabloid
called the News of the World.
[reporter 1] Murdoch took over the News of the World in January.
Since then, its circulation has risen by more than half a million.
[reporter 2] Critics claim it has lowered the standards of Fleet Street.
[reporter 3] The demon king of journalism. Rupert Murdoch.
Rupert in Britain is called "the dirty digger."
The British Establishment sees him
as playing to the basest interests and appetites of the British public.
People said, "He's destroying British newspapers."
But actually he wasn't. He was making them fun,
and people responded to that.
[Rupert] I'm not ashamed of any of my newspapers at all.
And I'm rather sick of snobs who tell us that they're bad papers.
Snobs who, um, only read papers that no one else wants.
[reporter 1] Murdoch's London home is in a fashionable square near Hyde Park.
Anna has settled down somewhat uneasily to English life
with her one-year-old daughter.
Anna provides Rupert with a lovely family.
Elisabeth, named after Rupert's mother, is born first.
Lachlan and James arrive, each in sequence, a couple of years later.
And with Prudence, who is the product of his first marriage in Australia,
the Murdochs become prominent figures.
Prominent enough that they're targeted.
[reporter 1] A recent profile said
that you belong to the brash, masculine Australian tradition.
Is that how you see yourself?
Brash? I don't know. Judge for yourself. Um…
[Paddy] He got a lot of publicity, and he does an interview
which then is seen by two men, the Hosein brothers.
[suspenseful music playing]
It shows Rupert's Rolls-Royce turning up at the offices of the News of the World,
and the Hosein brothers go, "That guy's rich,"
and they come up with a plan to kidnap his wife.
One day, they follow the Rolls-Royce.
[David] But they don't know that the Murdochs have loaned their Rolls-Royce
to the family of one of Murdoch's executives.
And the executive's wife, Muriel McKay, is kidnapped instead.
So the Hosein brothers are in a bind.
They've kidnapped the wrong person. They don't know what to do with her.
[reporter 4] More than 100 policemen will begin an even more intense search
of the farm buildings and surrounding fields.
[David] The brothers were ultimately apprehended by police,
but the body of Muriel McKay was never found.
[Paddy] And for the Murdochs, it was also traumatic
because they knew that the attempt had been on Anna Murdoch's life.
[interviewer 1] You were the intended target.
-Yes. Mm-hm. -[interviewer 1] That must be a nightmare.
It wasn't so bad for us as it was for Alick McKay.
Uh, but certainly one has to think about it.
And it colored my time there in Britain after that happened.
[David] It shakes their sense that Britain is a safe place for them to be.
She worries about her own safety, but she really worries about her children.
-[interviewer 1] Was that why you left? -Um, partly.
[tense music playing]
[Paddy] The details are very sketchy, but one night,
Anna Murdoch is driving her own car,
and there was an elderly woman trying to cross the road,
and she hit the woman and killed her.
[tense music continues]
[siren wailing]
No media did publish the details.
I mean, this terrible accident happened 50 years ago,
and we still don't know very much about it.
This is a terrible tragedy, and it shakes Anna to her core.
[Paddy] First, there had been the attempt on her life.
And the accident is the last straw.
Anna Murdoch is desperate to leave England behind her.
[music ends]
[interviewer 1] You went to America with the family?
[Anna] Yes, I took my children to New York.
[Paddy] The Murdochs moved to a fabulous apartment
just across the road from Central Park.
[McKay] It was this penthouse apartment
that had a private elevator,
and a butler named George who catered to every whim.
Anything that they could ever want or need was given to them.
[woman 1] I suppose we lived a very privileged lifestyle
comparative to some of the people that we grew up with,
but we didn't think of ourselves as special at all.
The kids were afforded every luxury imaginable.
They had the best educations. They went to the best schools.
So they were all a part of this ecosystem
of the most wealthy and powerful people in the city.
Tell us about your father a little bit. Tell us the best thing about your dad.
-The best thing? -[man 7] Yes.
Um…
Let's see.
Um…
Well, he always likes to go camping with us.
And we'll go…
Actually, we're going camping after the Olympics for a week.
[man 7] Does he spend a lot of time with you?
Yes.
[McKay] When James and Lachlan were really young,
they were treated almost like twins.
They were only born 15 months apart,
and as little boys, they were almost inseparable.
They liked to play knights together and build forts
and, you know, get into little-boy trouble together.
When they argued, Rupert almost welcomed the competition between his children.
He never stepped in to stop it. He just let them fight.
[interviewer 2] When you were growing up, was there a pecking order in the family?
No, I used to beat them up a lot, but… [chuckles]
Um, but we were always a very, very close family.
[McKay] For the Murdochs,
family life was organized around Rupert's professional world,
where he was king of the castle.
[man 8] From a very early age, seven years old and eight years old,
we began to understand that we were part of the media business.
Liz, James, and I would come for breakfast before we had to get the bus to school,
and all the papers would come out.
And as we read the papers, my dad would be handing out stories to us.
He'd say, "Read that." Or, "That's a shocking headline."
[McKay] All of the kids wanted Rupert's attention,
and there was a finite amount of it to go around,
so invariably, the kids ended up competing for it.
[Elisabeth] We knew that you had to be part of that world in some ways
if you were going to be engaged with him.
[phone ringing]
[McKay] James told me this story about how his dad was always so distracted
and would often not respond to James when he was talking.
James once asked his mom, "Is Daddy going deaf?"
"No, he's just not listening."
[woman 2] Rupert is always moving,
and like a shark, you die if you stop moving.
He asks himself, "What do my competitors know?"
"What do I know that they don't know?"
Three blocks, you make a left. You follow that down and…
[woman 3] What Rupert liked about America was it wasn't old.
It wasn't stuck in the past.
He saw a huge landscape he could paint on.
And that's exciting for an entrepreneur. He could do whatever he wanted.
[man 9] Murdoch bought the New York Post in 1976,
and on the very first day that Rupert took over the paper,
door bursts open at 6:00 a.m. in the morning,
and he just walks in.
There's things he wants changed.
[Jim] What Murdoch wants to do
is to win over the white working class who are reading the Daily News.
He's gonna draw them to the New York Post.
And in 1977, he got his chance.
-[electricity crackles] -[people groaning]
[reporter 5] We bring you the following NBC News Special Report.
Darkness takes the city.
[helicopter whirring]
The New York City area
and its ten million people were blacked out.
And tonight, large parts of the city still are without power.
[siren wailing]
[Dick] There was looting, there was crime,
and people felt that New York was just out of control.
[Jim] The big columnists at all the papers were out in the streets,
and many reporters were liberal in their views about these things.
[people clamoring]
And they are writing about
how the blackout has brought inequality in the city to the surface.
So Rupert brings in his favorite correspondent, Steve Dunleavy,
and Dunleavy knows the story that Rupert wants.
He sees it through the eyes of the cops.
"I'll go to the poor neighborhood, write about the breakdown in law and order."
[tense music playing]
Playing to the white-flight crowd.
[music ends]
And it works. It sells papers.
So Rupert says, "That's what my newspaper's gonna be."
[seller 1] Get your Post here. New York Post here. Only a quarter.
[Jim] He's building a new constituency. White, working-class readers.
But with a populist, right-leaning slant.
[woman 4] Pre-Murdoch, the Post was a blue-collar but educated readership.
I don't know what comes after blue collar,
but whatever the color of the collar is, that's… [laughs]
…that's where Rupert Murdoch took it.
If you don't do what I want, then
it's gonna be your fault, not my fault, if it doesn't work.
Rupert was making the New York Post like his British tabloids
with lots of sex, lots of crime, sensationalist headlines.
[Dick] "Headless body in topless bar."
That's still legendary.
[man 10] He is doing a very good job, a superb job,
and, uh, all his publications are more interesting than they have been.
[Dick] The Post went from 400,000 circulation to a million.
And we went from being this quiet little paper
to being this paper that became controversial.
[seller 2] Read all about it. Get your Post.
And everybody either loved us or hated us.
You run a sleazy newspaper.
Not true.
[Paddy] Rupert became a villain for a lot of people.
-[man 11] Rupert Murdoch. -[woman 5] Controversial publisher.
[man 12] The tabloids have given Murdoch his reputation.
[man 13] …sensational newspapers in the world.
But that disdain that sort of polite society had for Rupert Murdoch
actually helped bring the kids together and bring the family together.
This is my son James.
[man 7] Are you in the newspaper business too?
-I wanna be. -[man 7] Do you?
-Yeah. -Tell us about your dad.
We know him through the papers. How would you describe your dad?
Um…
Well, different from what the newspapers say and the TV shows.
Well, I think the, um, the papers and the shows about him and stuff
make him look a little, like, too mean and dark and sinister.
And really, he's a really nice person. A fun person.
-Sometimes, eh? -Yeah.
When you behave.
[quirky music playing]
[Lachlan] I remember one cover of Time magazine,
uh, that had my father as King Kong on top of the World Trade Center
with, you know, little biplanes trying to shoot him down.
And that was the first memory that I have
that, well, you know, the other dads at school,
uh, weren't on the cover of Time magazine, portrayed as this monster.
[Sarah] All these kids were very aware
of the disapproval that many New Yorkers had for their father.
And so it was something that forged their identity.
I mean, Liz told me that if you see people constantly attacking your father,
you wanna band together.
And that's what they did.
At least for a while.
It's always been the kids' destiny. They're going to run the company.
They're told that from a very early age.
"One day, one of you will be running the Murdoch empire."
They don't know who. They know they're gonna have to compete.
[dynamic music playing]
[David] This is part of the game that Rupert Murdoch has played with his family.
[Paul] It's gonna be a long battle. They're gonna have to prove themselves.
[Paddy] And so, as competitors for Rupert's affections,
and ultimately for the succession…
[music intensifies, ends]
…all the kids have played a different game.
[camera clicks]
[David] First and foremost, we have Prudence.
[McKay] Prue was from a previous marriage, had a different mother.
So that made her feel like a little more of an outsider.
[David] Prudence, relatively early on,
decides she doesn't wanna be a major player in this.
[woman 6] You know, it's a big buzz being around Dad.
You know, it's very exciting what he does.
And I'm sure, if I'd been around him longer,
I may well have wanted to do that.
But I always wanted to be independent.
[David] Next up is Elisabeth.
[interviewer 2] He has said that, of his children,
you're the one who's most like him.
[Elisabeth chuckles softly]
Really? Um…
Possibly.
I don't quite know what that means, to be most like my old man.
[Sarah] Elisabeth is the oldest child in his marriage to Anna Murdoch.
She is shrewd and ambitious in her own way.
[McKay] She has her dad's creative streak in a way that her brothers don't.
[Paul] So she's sent to be a researcher
on a pretty crappy little current affairs program in Sydney,
which is kind of the lowest of the low in that position.
She serves a couple of years doing that.
Then she persuades Rupert to lend her some money to buy a couple of TV stations.
[interviewer 3] Who are you most like of your mother and father?
Who am I… Oh boy. I don't know.
Um, I think, hopefully, I'm a mixture of both.
Um…
Hopefully, I've got my mother's looks.
[chuckles]
Lachlan has always been the dutiful son.
[camera clicks]
[McKay] He's kind of the mini Rupert.
Self-consciously emulative of his dad.
[Paddy] Lachlan did an apprenticeship at The Times and The Sun in London.
[Lachlan] I was cleaning out inkwells.
But, having said that, I understand the basics of printing
a lot better than a lot of executives around the place.
And then I went to university.
[Sarah] Lachlan went to Princeton and was pretty low key.
[Paddy] His main passion was actually not academic at all.
It was rock climbing.
He was climbing eight hours a day, and he was good at it.
[Lachlan] I studied philosophy and, specifically, sort of ethics.
But I wasn't a great student. I tended to leave everything to the last minute.
[interviewer 3] The journalist in you, perhaps.
Absolutely. That's right. Pushing deadlines whenever I can. [laughs]
[McKay] James is more of an introvert.
He's very bright, very articulate,
but he was always seen as kind of the problem son.
[David] He had famously done an internship at an Australian newspaper
and been photographed asleep on a couch,
as though he was bored with the news meeting he was sitting in on.
As it turned out, he had been up all night on an assignment and was exhausted.
[McKay] He just had this rebellious streak
that was always manifesting in different ways.
For example, he somewhat infamously dropped out of school for a while
to follow the Grateful Dead on tour.
That was something that was used to sort of mock and ridicule him.
And Lachlan was dutifully kind of taking the measure
of his younger brother's missteps.
[intriguing music playing]
[reporter 6] If there's any such thing as the New York Establishment, here it is.
From the wonderful worlds of politics, commerce, labor, and industry.
Their guest on this occasion, Rupert Murdoch.
[Rupert] Ladies and gentlemen,
I appreciate your invitation to appear before such a distinguished group.
[Sarah] By the 1980s,
Rupert's pretty triumphant.
He's got this wonderfully influential right-wing tabloid
at a time when the city is ripe for it.
[Rupert] The role of a newspaper should be to provoke debate.
No apologies for anything.
[Paddy] The Murdoch empire is sprawling,
with assets in the US, UK, and Australia.
Here it is, folks. Post here.
[Sarah] Rupert wants to have real power,
and he recognizes that that kind of power comes not just through news
but through shaping politics.
[Jim] He's got a giant goal in mind.
And he can only get it with the help of powerful politicians.
[Sarah] So he starts making friends with the biggest names in New York society.
[Claire] Rupert and Donald Trump are in the same ecosystem.
[crowd chattering]
[crowd cheering, whistling]
[Claire] And Roy Cohn is there.
Roy Cohn is the famous advisor of Donald Trump,
who gives him the playbook of how the media works
and how to be the person he is today.
[Roy] I would do anything that is legally permissible
to get my client to win.
[Claire] Cohn tells Rupert about backroom deals
and who's in power and who's not.
[Jim] Cohn gets him in touch with Roger Stone.
They're the New York Republicans behind Reagan.
We will make America great again.
-[crowd cheering] -Thank you very much.
[cheering and whistling]
[Paddy] Rupert is keen to turn the political influence that he has
as a media proprietor into commercial advantage.
[Jim] So he gets behind a politician
in a way that the New York Post hadn't ever really done.
[man 14] Are you prepared to take the constitutional oath?
I am.
[man 14] Place your left hand on the Bible, and raise your right hand…
[Jim] There's a lot Rupert needs,
and he can only get it from a friendly presidential administration.
[tense music playing]
What Rupert wants to do is unheard of. At the time, a brazen idea.
He wants to start a fourth television network.
This was a time when you can't imagine it
because today, there's so much media everywhere,
but at that time, there was only the three networks.
[NBC chimes playing]
[announcer 1] This is CBS.
[announcer 2] This is ABC.
History and logic say a fourth broadcast network is a long shot.
But Rupert Murdoch doesn't always play the percentages.
If we pull it off, it'll be a real feather in our cap.
[Jim] Regulations made it hard for someone like Rupert Murdoch
to waltz in and say, "I'm gonna start a network."
For instance, you couldn't have
a television station and a newspaper in the same city.
You couldn't have more than X number of stations in the whole country.
So who's gonna help Rupert pull this thing off?
[camera clicks]
[David] The Reagan administration essentially gave Rupert Murdoch,
let's call it an easement.
[Sarah] He's able to get a waiver
so that he can own both a paper and a television station in the same market.
And then he had to become an American citizen to own a broadcast network.
Media magnate Rupert Murdoch today renounced his Australian citizenship
to become an American.
[David] He goes in a back door in a New York City federal courthouse
and emerges the same day with his citizenship in hand.
That's what happens when you help Ronald Reagan get elected.
[reporter 7] Would you stop and maybe give us three or four questions?
I've got nothing to hide at all.
[Jim] You'll see this time and time again in his career.
It's always about picking the right politician
to get the regulation out of his way for the next conquest.
[Paddy] Rupert is learning how to use power.
And, boom, the Fox network was born.
[Fox network fanfare playing]
-[whooshing] -♪ This is the year, the year for… ♪
[all] Fox.
-♪ Make no mistake about it ♪ -Fox!
[announcer 3] Fox wants to become an alternative
for viewers bored with standard network fare.
The three networks did the same thing. They offered the same hot dog.
Isn't he cute? I call him Scottie.
And these guys were like, "Time for hamburgers."
[groans weakly]
[Matthew] Rupert hit it out of the park with Fox network.
[both] Welcome to Men on Films.
Oh, there was nothing like it.
-Ow! -Ha ha!
[Kara] The comedy shows had the snarkiness and attitude.
Why don't you take a picture of me so you can remember me when I was beautiful?
What, are you gonna get worse?
Shows played to the interests that might appeal to a tabloid newspaper viewer.
Shut up and take the picture.
-[camera clicks] -[cheering]
[Kara] He took from the New York Post this populist tendency
and put it on steroids.
Eat my shorts, lame-os.
[Matthew] Fox, under Rupert Murdoch,
created a market for television that did not exist.
[Rupert] Seems to have made us popular with the viewers
and very unpopular with our competitors.
Uh, and that's a pretty good place to be.
-[Jim] Rupert shook things up. -[Paddy] He put the whole empire at risk.
[David] And the public rewarded him for it.
[McKay] With his success in film and TV,
Rupert and Anna moved to Los Angeles to run these companies.
Meanwhile, James was enrolled in an elite prep school in Manhattan,
and so he stayed behind for basically all of his teenage years,
living alone in this penthouse with butler George…
[quirky music playing]
…just kind of doing whatever he wanted.
And he and his best friend were allowed to run wild in this penthouse.
They would have people over and got into a lot of trouble.
But I think, even then,
James knew that he would be forced to work for the family business one day.
[music ends]
I guess you all know that the newspaper business can be
a funny business.
To my next guest, it happens to be a family business.
She's the wife of probably the richest and most controversial,
also maybe the most influential, media mogul in the world.
Please welcome Anna Murdoch.
-[lively music playing] -[applause]
[music ends]
-Nice to see you again. -It's nice to be with you.
Now, listen, the book is Family Business.
Why would Anna Murdoch write a book about an international media mogul?
[Anna laughs]
That's a not very obvious question.
[soft piano music playing]
[Kara] Anna famously wrote a novel called Family Business
that sort of closely mirrored some of the facts of the Murdoch family.
In this novel, the Rupert Murdoch character is actually a woman
who, like Rupert…
is incredibly passionate about newspapers and knows every detail of the process.
And she has three kids that have all got claims to the business.
And it shows how the succession could end in tears.
[Anna] I wanted to show the breakup within the family,
that I think power and money can actually affect sibling relationships.
You have all these little fiefdoms and people arguing among themselves.
[Jim] I think Anna was almost a Cassandra figure in all of this.
[Sarah] She was very prescient in knowing
that this kind of inheritance was gonna become a problem.
[Paddy] And I think she was kind of advising Rupert in this novel
that no good would come of it.
[interviewer 2] How important is it for News Corporation to stay in,
uh, in family hands?
To whom?
"How important to whom?" is the question.
[McKay] The thing about men like Rupert
is that they say that they're doing everything for their family
and they're building this family empire,
but at the end of the day, the empire always takes precedent over the family.
[tense music playing]
[Sarah] He says, "I want one of my children to succeed me."
But he doesn't say how they should succeed him,
what exactly they need to do in order to get that brass ring.
And it sets up exactly the dynamic that Anna didn't want.
This sort of rivalry among the kids.
It's like Hunger Games, Murdoch style.
[music crescendos, ends]
[Elisabeth] From the time that we were very small,
this is one of the other lessons Dad taught me,
it has been very clear that you have to control your own destiny.
[intriguing music playing]
[Paul] Elisabeth is running her own TV stations in America.
She makes some decisions people don't like.
[Sarah] Elisabeth takes a page out of her father's playbook.
[Paul] She sacks people that have been around a long time.
She pisses quite a few people off,
but she makes a success of those TV stations
and sells them at a great profit.
Rupert respects that and really sees her as a capable executive.
[McKay] She's maybe even a worthy protégée.
[Paul] She says she's gonna do an MBA.
Rupert says, "What do you mean, do an MBA? Come and work for me."
"You'll learn much more."
She goes and works with her father in Britain.
[Lachlan] My father's remarkable, what he's achieved.
And I'll work as hard as I can to do as much as I can,
and, uh, I'll take one challenge at a time.
[Paddy] Lachlan moves to Brisbane
and becomes junior manager at Rupert's paper The Courier Mail.
Lachlan is elevated incredibly quickly to positions of power.
He's running the Queensland newspapers at the age of 22 years old.
[Paddy] He's young. He's good looking. He's fabulously rich.
Arguably, he's the most eligible bachelor in the country.
[reporter 8] With him, his heir apparent, son Lachlan.
Lachlan Murdoch has made a faster rise to the top than Tiger Woods.
Has your dad had this conversation with you? "You'll run this company."
No, no. He, uh… My father's focused on, you know, the day to day.
[Paul] By the mid '90s,
he has essentially been handed the whole of the Australian empire.
[Sarah] And though Rupert officially says that any of the kids could succeed him,
it seems like Lachlan is his favorite.
[interviewer 4] Is there an acceptance that your older brother, Lachlan,
will take over eventually?
Um, I don't think that's really…
That's not an issue that I concern myself with.
-Other people concern themselves with it. -That's their business.
[steady drumbeat playing]
[Paul] James decides that he doesn't want to be part of the company,
that he wants to make his own way.
[David] James drops out of Harvard,
and he goes out and he founds Rawkus Records,
seeking to show that he has a sensibility for a new generation.
[Jim] James is trying desperately to prove himself as an outsider.
His father probably didn't even know what hip-hop was.
[Kara] You know, he was like the hip Murdoch.
[camera clicks]
He wore an earring so we knew he was cool.
[wistful music playing]
-[reporter shouts] -[camera clicks]
All these kids know they have to shine and impress their father.
[McKay] But it's clear that he's not just going to give up this empire.
[David] There was more to do. Another chapter to write.
[Rupert] I wanna stay what I'm doing as long as I'm physically fit.
I don't think my children are ready yet.
They may not agree with that,
but I'm certainly planning to make them wait several more years.
[wistful music continues]
[woman 7] Good morning, everyone. I'm Allison Costarene.
[man 15] And I'm Louis Aguirre. Topping our news this morning…
[news continues on TV]
That's great. Congratulations. When do you think they'll get back to you?
[Sarah] By the late '90s,
Rupert Murdoch has enjoyed an enormous amount of success in the US.
He has 20th Century Fox. Movie studios, television.
He is a legitimate mogul, and he has the ear of politicians.
-[woman 8] Hello, Mr. Murdoch. -Hello again. How are you?
He is at the top of his game.
[Jim] Rupert is in his late sixties,
and Anna has been waiting for years now for Rupert to retire,
to start their own life together.
Anna had been suggesting that Murdoch step back from the company
and prepare one of their children to succeed him.
He didn't wanna do that at all. He was just getting started.
[horn blares]
He's getting a little antsy and decides to check out his Asia operations.
[Sarah] While he is traveling on a tour through China,
Rupert meets a young woman named Wendi Deng.
[intriguing music playing]
She had a junior role at his company.
[David] Suddenly, Rupert is unavailable.
You know, he says that he was scouting properties or traveling.
Eventually, people on his staff
start noticing that he's showing up with Wendi Deng here and there.
It's clear pretty quickly that a friendship is blooming.
Anna will say outright later that it was an affair.
Rupert will deny it's an affair.
[David] He came back from Asia and set up a board meeting
where he rather abruptly announced
that he was going to divorce his second wife, Anna Torv Murdoch,
and that she was gonna be relinquishing her spot on the company board.
Not long afterwards, he was telling his children he'd met a nice Chinese lady.
[Prudence] He rang me and said, "Oh, by the way, I've met this lady."
I couldn't believe it, actually. I just thought, "You dirty old man."
[Sarah] Both Lachlan and James tried to convince Rupert not to be with Wendi.
They are just aghast that Rupert would betray their mother in this way.
This is a great shock to the rest of the family,
and this was deeply humiliating for Anna.
The wife of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch filed for divorce in California today.
The divorce papers show that Mrs. Anna Murdoch
doesn't know how much her husband's business interests are worth.
But she means to find out.
[reporter 9] Their divorce exposes the assets
of one of the world's richest men.
[reporter 10] News Corporation's share price dropped 27 cents.
Of concern, the impact the separation could have
on the future ownership of the company.
[reporter 11] The stage may be set for the biggest divorce settlement ever.
-[reporters clamoring] -[cameras clicking]
[Jim] Because the divorce is filed in California,
Anna will be entitled
to half of all the wealth Murdoch built
over the course of their 30 years together.
[intriguing music continues]
But throughout the whole building of the empire
and the raising of the kids,
she has been focused on one thing far more than money.
And that's how this succession battle is gonna play out between the children.
[McKay] She saw the way that Rupert pitted them against each other,
and she didn't want that to become the defining aspect of their lives.
[Sarah] So she decides to use her power
to secure her children's control over the company going forward.
And that's when she negotiates to set up the Murdoch Family Trust.
[David] Instead of going for half of his assets,
which she might have been entitled to,
she took only, I'll use that in quotes,
only $110 million
and created a trust
where all of the children will, in tandem together,
decide the fate of the family business.
[Sarah] The trust gives Rupert four votes,
and his children, Elisabeth, James, Lachlan, and Prudence,
one vote each until Rupert dies,
and then the four of them
will have equal control over the company in the future.
Having equal control among four siblings is not a great idea.
They could deadlock,
and that could make it impossible for the company to make decisions.
But I think he just trusts that it's fine,
"I'll deal with it later. I'll kick this can down the road."
[Jim] Until that moment, Rupert Murdoch has full control of his destiny.
He controls the companies. He will choose his successor.
But Rupert is eager, perhaps overeager, to move on with the next chapter.
And in pursuit of a second life and much younger wife,
he gives up control of his empire.
It's a fateful decision that will change the entire dynamic in the Murdoch family.
[Paddy] This is the moment.
[Jim] The beginning of a battle that would define the family for decades.
-[horn blares] -[music ends]
[intriguing instrumental music playing] ld define the family for decades.