A portrait of Lachlan: The victor in Rupert Murdoch’s real-life ‘Succession’ will continue his conservative revolution

Last Monday, on his 54th birthday, Lachlan Murdoch received a gift he had been waiting decades for: official confirmation of his victory over his siblings — especially James — in the fight to determine who will succeed their father, Rupert Murdoch, perhaps the most powerful man in the media world and one of the most influential figures in U.S. politics.

At stake was the helm of a conglomerate that sets the global direction of conservatism and includes Fox News, as well as newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and The Times of London, along with audiovisual platforms, newspapers, and media chains in Australia and the U.K.

The family owns more than 40% of the two pillars of the empire: Fox Corporation, the U.S. television business, and News Corp, which encompasses everything from a pay channel in Australia to publishers like HarperCollins. In exchange for full control and the assurance that his siblings will be removed from his sight in those businesses, 54-year-old Lachlan, who already took over from his father as head of the company after Rupert’s (semi)retirement in 2023, will pay $1.1 billion to three of them: Prudence, 67; Elisabeth, 57; and James, 52.

In practice, little to nothing will change in the day-to-day management, which Lachlan has overseen for the past two years, with a strong focus on digital media and the booming podcast market on the right. The most significant aspect of the deal is that it ensures the continuation, through the same channels, of the Australian magnate’s conservative revolution — his life’s great work, a mix of ideology and business acumen in areas often neglected by the left. This will be made possible by the creation of a new 25-year trust, from which the other two younger daughters of the 94-year-old Rupert Murdoch — who has been married five times — will benefit.

“This consolidates and extends the right-wing influence of the Murdoch media sphere,” writes Margaret Sullivan, former public editor of The New York Times and communications editor at The Washington Post, in an email.

“[Lachlan’s] victory condemns the United States and the English-speaking world to another generation of fascist propaganda amid a successful campaign to destroy democratic institutions,” adds media analyst Jeff Jarvis.

Father and son had tried in 2024 to ensure that nothing would change with Rupert’s passing by altering the legal structure of the trust, which they wanted to name — not without irony — the Family Harmony Project. The move aimed to transfer control of the empire to Lachlan while securing the editorial line of the media outlets that form part of a massive multinational, which began modestly 71 years ago with The News, a small newspaper in Adelaide that Rupert Murdoch inherited from the grandfather. A Nevada probate commissioner rejected the attempt, describing it in a legal document as a “carefully crafted charade.”

Against the backdrop of this ideological struggle — James and Elisabeth are more politically moderate, while Prudence has always preferred to stay on the sidelines — the news that everything is now settled in the Murdoch empire has far-reaching consequences in the United States, beyond simply the economic.

The influence of the Murdoch media empire is stronger than ever in Trump’s America, as was demonstrated again last week. While The Wall Street Journal dominated the news cycle with the publication of the scandalous illustration accompanying Trump’s alleged birthday message to millionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — a scoop that has sparked a defamation lawsuit by the U.S. president against his friend Rupert — the murder of far-right activist Charlie Kirk caused Fox’s viewership to spike dramatically. Trump chose the network on Friday to announce live on air the capture of the prime suspect.

Beyond the immediate news, perhaps no media outlet wields more influence over U.S. public discourse and the erosion of its democracy than Fox News. It is the undisputed leading cable television network, having long established itself as the voice of Middle America by channeling and amplifying the anti-elitist anger of a large segment of the population.

That influence was carefully crafted and gradually built by the network itself, founded in the 1990s by the controversial Roger Ailes. Today, Fox faces a myriad of rival media outlets and podcasts on the fringes, many of which owe their origins to the network. Lachlan Murdoch also faces a new and corrosive competitor in conservative television: Larry Ellison, another Trump ally. The Oracle magnate, who on Thursday overtook Elon Musk as the world’s richest man, already controls CBS alongside his son David, and last week reports surfaced about his interest in acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, the owner of CNN.

In Lachlan’s case, it is curious that the man who has inherited the “golden key” of the right, tasked with restoring America’s greatness (Make America Great Again), prefers to live far away in Australia, where he spends most of his time with his wife, former model Sarah Murdoch, and their three children. It is as if an arsonist could stoke the fires he started every day (through Fox News) without ever feeling the heat of the flames.

The family moved to Sydney during the pandemic and they’re still there five years later, which has significant implications for the personal life of someone who must work with a 14-hour time difference from New York — or 17 hours from Los Angeles. In the latter city, the couple lived since the mid-2010s and maintain a pied-à-terre there, though the term may be inadequate given that it is an 18-bedroom, 24-bath mansion on four hectares in Bel-Air, purchased for $150 million in 2019.

A private man

Lachlan, a fiercely private man who avoids interviews — paradoxically, given that he employs more journalists than anyone else in the world — likes to live well. He surrounds himself with Porsches and superyachts, of which he has owned several. On one of these floating palaces, named Sarissa, a scene worthy of Succession — the series that elevated the Murdoch family’s internal disputes to the heights of popular culture, premiering six months later — unfolded in January 2018.

It was nighttime, and Lachlan and his father were sailing in the Caribbean when Rupert suffered a fall while heading to the bathroom. He had to be evacuated to Los Angeles with an epidural hematoma, and his wife at the time, Jerry Hall, called the other two children involved in the inheritance dispute so they could say goodbye. They arrived ready to fight for the reins of the empire, but the patriarch survived and was soon working from his hospital bed.

Paddy Manning, author of The Successor (2022), the first biography dedicated exclusively to Lachlan, recalled in a phone interview from Sydney on Friday that last week’s agreement effectively means Lachlan has bought out his siblings “in the same way that Rupert did with his in the 1990s.”

Manning titled his book The Successor as a nod to the series, but also because “it had long been clear that he was the chosen one.” How long? According to the biographer, since the 2019 sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney for $71.3 billion — a move designed to concentrate even more on news and sports, which turned out to be a financial masterstroke.

The move cemented Lachlan’s role at the head of the new Fox Corporation. That operation, according to Matt Gertz of the progressive U.S. media watchdog Media Matters, marked the beginning of “the definitive transformation of Fox News into an unrestrained pro-Trump propaganda outlet that promotes white nationalism.”

By then, it had long been clear who Rupert’s favorite was, though the father-son relationship has not been without its bumps. In 2005, Lachlan stormed out of News Corp when Rupert sided with Ailes in a dispute between them. After a decade focused on his businesses in Australia — which was also James’s best chance to succeed their father — he returned to the company in 2014. Ailes died in 2017, nearly a year after leaving the network following sexual abuse allegations from several employees. Since then, Rupert and Lachlan have been inseparable.

Lachlan Murdoch was born in London but grew up in New York, where he attended some of the best schools. He graduated from Princeton with a degree in Philosophy, writing a thesis on morality and freedom in Kant’s work. Soon after, he joined the family business and steadily worked his way to the top. By the age of 30, he had become deputy chief operating officer of News Corp.

If James ever had a chance, he lost it with the scandal over illegal phone hacking at one of Murdoch’s British tabloids, the now-defunct News of the World, which between 2000 and 2006 tapped the phones of 600 celebrities, politicians, and members of the Royal Family, bribing police officers to obtain information.

It was a severe blow for James Murdoch, who had always lived under the pressure of an unbridgeable ideological gap with his father and the desire to keep the family business free of schemes that threatened democracy, as James acknowledged in a profile published by The Atlantic in April, in the midst of his battle with his brother and father. In July 2020, he resigned from News Corp’s board.

Lachlan also had his own News of the World moment. That came with the Fox News settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. The network paid $787.5 million to the company to resolve a defamation lawsuit. The case was brought over false claims made by Fox hosts, who alleged that Dominion had played a role in stealing the 2020 election from Trump.

That case also led to the departure of the network’s biggest star and most extreme anchor, Tucker Carlson. But it did not harm Lachlan, because the network not only survived the scandal; it continued to grow in viewers and influence. A lawsuit from Smartmatic, another election technology company seeking $2.7 billion in damages from Fox, is still pending.

From the Dominion legal documents, there emerges a picture of Lachlan willing to unscrupulously use the network to serve up lies to flatter Trump. Apparently he later tried to distance himself from Trump after the Republican failure in the 2022 midterms, when Trump seemed destined for the dustbin of history and supporting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis seemed like a better idea.

Fox News and the Post had no choice but to align with Trump again during his second administration. Trump’s Cabinet is populated with faces familiar to the network’s viewers, starting with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Its hosts and commentators enthusiastically celebrate the administration’s achievements (just as, Manning notes, they had aggressively questioned Joe Biden’s abilities to be president— “and they were right about that,” adds the biographer). The fact that the Journal has positioned itself — at least in its news pages, if not its editorials — as a reliable counterweight to Trump seems to validate the saying about not putting all one’s eggs in the same basket.

For Jeff Jarvis, the recently signed family agreement disproves the notion that “Rupert cares more about money than politics.” “Father and son have shown they would rather pay $3.3 billion to their relatives than moderate their political extremism and disinformation. Lachlan — who, by all indications, is even more conservative than his father — intends to make Fox an even more odious source of news,” the journalist argues.

The big question now is whether Lachlan, who lacks his father’s charisma, will also inherit his passion and talent for influencing U.S. politics. And whether he can do so from the distance of living in Australia, where he sent all company executives in 2024 to participate in budget meetings.

What seems clear is that there will never be another U.S. president as obsessed as Trump with what airs on Fox News, the crown jewel of the empire that Lachlan finally received as a birthday gift.

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