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In 2005, Lachlan Murdoch walked away from a worldwide media empire that could have been his. Now, after nearly a decade of

exile, power struggles, and near-catastrophic scandals, the firstborn son of Rupert is on the verge of claiming the News Corp. throne.

h a n d s o nAfter nearly nine years of pursuing his own life

in Australia, Lachlan Murdoch—shown here

during News Corp.’s stressful summer of

2011—may finally be ready to take the reins.

Opposite: A protester sets fire to a copy of

the now-defunct News of the World, 2011.

Heire

By michael wolff

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or almost 10 years Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s 42-year-old son, has been the wayfarer child, searching for his place in the world and turning a cold shoulder to his father’s beseeching that he return home.

Father and son, locked in a war of wills and ego and pride, have suffered greatly in the standoff. The son was hurt by his father’s busi-ness slight; the father was deeply pained when his son turned his back on his dynastic place. Of the many, many rifts in the Murdoch family, this has been the epic one: The designated heir, with all the entitle-ment and inevitability surrounding a first son, went stubbornly miss-ing, creating a power vacuum in which much went awry.

But give credit to a father’s persistence. At 83, playing a long game, Rupert Murdoch is close to bringing his son back to where he wants him—no matter that his son’s pride is still wounded and his feelings are tangled.

Dynasties are hard to maintain, but they are not so casually destroyed.The first time I saw father and son together was in 2004, a

year or so before their near-mortal breakup. I had been invited for the first of many interview sessions I would ultimately have with Rupert Murdoch. Lunch was served in his cramped office dining room at News Corporation headquarters in Manhattan. Gary Gins-berg, the mogul’s ever-present PR lieutenant, was there. Murdoch maintained the remote gruffness that would seldom, in the years of our acquaintance, relent.

This grumpy-old-man persona seemed in peculiar contrast to the extraordinarily good-looking doe-eyed young man who silently appeared without introduction behind him, as though awaiting orders or instructions. Curious, I thought: The ever-unfashionable Murdoch has gotten himself, in the fashion of all Hollywood moguls, a gay assistant. But then, in what seemed like a sight gag, the gay assistant began to stroke his boss’s shoulder, an open caress of obvious care and affection.

It could not have been long—though in hindsight it feels like very slow motion—before I understood that this must be Lachlan, the then-32-year-old prince of the realm.

What I was witnessing was the odd and inescapable reality of the Murdoch kingdom, the central fact of life for all of Murdoch’s associates and courtiers. The cold and ruthless man lived in a world of the deepest family emotions and attachments. His meetings were often interrupted by calls to his children, with him soliciting their advice and offering

avowals of love, always as though no one else were in the room. The Mur-dochs were the Murdochs to the exclusion of everyone else. They shared not only billions of dollars, a global power base, and a sense of utmost destiny, but a failure to separate in any modern family way. They lived in a bubble—continents apart but tying up their yachts together at conve-nient moments as often as many other families get together for dinner.

This was the political reality lived by such people as then News Corp. COO Peter Chernin, Fox News head Roger Ailes, and Fox broadcasting chief Chase Carey (now president and COO of 21st Century Fox). These professional managers had been key players in transforming News Corp. from an outsider company into a modern, blue-chip Wall Street darling. And yet here they were, having to be attentive and respectful, even subordinate, to the desires and opinions of Murdoch’s adult but wet-behind-the-ears children. Three of the four kids he had with his first two wives were handed major—and, reason might say, undeserved—roles in the business.

In 2001, Murdoch had brought Lachlan—who had been given wide powers to run the company’s Australian operation after graduating in 1994 from Princeton, where he studied philosophy—back to New York to be his right hand and successor-in-training, effectively super-seding all of the company’s seasoned lieutenants.

But a quiet and methodical management rebellion slowly gained traction. Murdoch’s topmost executives, openly ridiculing Lachlan’s inexperience and questioning his competence—and launching a whisper-ing campaign about his partying lifestyle—triangulated Lachlan out of decision-making powers. In 2005 they starkly ignored Lachlan’s wishes regarding a set of key decisions involving the company’s television net-works. In essence, they were daring Murdoch to overrule them. Murdoch,

fwho would tell me later that this was one of his “worst decisions,” felt he had no alternative but to side with his executive team and trim Lachlan’s powers.

Furious and feeling betrayed, Lachlan quit his job as deputy COO of News Corp. on July 29, 2005, and, with his pregnant wife Sarah and infant son in tow, decamped for Australia.

It is not an easy business—or family—to leave. Not only was Lachlan’s entire financial future locked into the company he was turning his back on, but, as a board member, a role he was strategically not relinquishing, he continued to have large responsibilities in it. Even in his new exile, his father spoke to him almost every day, engaging him in the daily Murdoch tangle of family and business issues.

From the beginning Rupert waged a campaign to bring Lachlan back into the company. The father held a particular trump card: None of the Murdoch offspring really had any money to speak of. They may have been the children of a billionaire, but they were among the world’s

most cash-poor children of a billionaire. Nearly every penny they had was tied up in company shares controlled by the Murdoch Family Trust, which left them with no authority to sell. The Murdoch children were hopelessly dependent on their father—just the way he liked it.

But fate—and family—intervened. Lachlan was not Rupert’s only personal crisis. In 1999 he had divorced his wife of 32 years, Anna Murdoch, and married Wendi Deng, 38 years his junior, engendering the lasting resentment of his children. But as part of the divorce settlement, a canny Anna had agreed to $100 million—not, as California property law entitled her to, half of Murdoch’s then-

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c h i l d r e n o f e m p i r eAbove: The Murdochs in 1973—Lachlan, Rupert, Elisabeth, Anna, and James. Right: Rupert with third wife Wendi Deng and their two daughters, in 2005. Opposite: Lachlan in the New York Post newsroom in 2002, three years before he resigned from the family company.

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$8 billion fortune. This on-the-cheap divorce was in exchange for Murdoch’s agreement to make the terms of the Murdoch Family Trust unbreakable. Her three children and Murdoch’s oldest daugh-ter, by his first wife, would remain his only heirs.

Then Murdoch had two more children with Deng, who began her own campaign to secure a place for her officially disenfranchised off-spring. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Murdoch negotiated.

He needed the agreement of a majority of his four adult children to change the terms of the trust. More than a year of bargaining, and some cold cash, got him part of what he wanted.

While his two children with Deng would never become voting participants in the trust, his four older children agreed to share with their new siblings an equal, one-sixth economic interest in it. In return, each of the four was given an immediate $150 million in cash and in company shares that they could sell—enough to buy quite a bit of independence.

This was, for Murdoch, a painful outcome. Not just because he had to sell company shares, which always hurt (they were the basis, after all, of his control of the company), but because Lachlan grabbed his new independence and launched out on his own with a personal invest-ment fund. The child raised in Manhattan was now styling himself as the wealthy Australian he might have been had his father never set out from his Melbourne home to conquer the world 50 years earlier. Lach-lan and his wife Sarah, a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model and Australian television host, became arguably the most famous couple in Oz, living in Sydney’s Bronte Beach—rich, glamorous, and Murdoch, the biggest name in Australia.

the soft life according to a new study, male minks raised in cushy “enriched environments”—which in this experiment meant luxurious cages tricked out with pools, swings, and various toys—

are twice as successful with lady minks as their less fortunate peers. those with real estate in the hamptons fared best of all.

It is surely easy to understand the attraction of living in Australia and being a Murdoch with all the entitlement and powers and none of the drawbacks—that is, the omnipresence and meddling of the father. On the other hand, there was for Lachlan, ostensibly happy to be free of family intrigues, the increasing tension and nettlesomeness of his younger brother James’s ascension to the throne that had once belonged to him.

Rupert Murdoch needs a successor. But in some sense this is, as all his children are aware, just a place-filler job. The father might be particularly sentimental about his firstborn son, but in the end it doesn’t matter who the heir is, just as long as the person is named Murdoch.

Before Lachlan became the official successor in 2002, Rupert openly discussed the possibility that his daughter Elisabeth— then in her twenties and assuming greater and greater responsibilities at BSkyB, the Murdoch satellite television company in the U.K.—might one day take over. Indeed, Rupert had prevented her from going to Stanford Business School, saying he could teach his oldest child by his second wife more. But father and daughter eventually fell out—she was angry about his marriage to Deng; he was angry about the breakup of her first marriage—and she too would try to go her own way, ultimately building one of the largest independent television production companies in the U.K. (which, to no one’s surprise, News Corp., shrugging off charges of the most obvious nepotism, bought in 2011).

After Lachlan bowed out of the running in 2005, James came next.

The brothers, two years apart, have vastly different tem-peraments. In the family view, Lachlan is a Labrador to James’s Doberman: one comfortable, the other attacking.

Sibling rivalry manifested

itself at News Corp. board meetings, where both brothers held seats. Their face-offs raised the testosterone level of every gath-ering—even beyond the usual levels of Rupert Murdoch’s ever-onward quest for world dominance. The brothers openly squabbled and struggled to have the last word, to the general embarrassment of other board members.

For Rupert, his sons, each of them his confidant and adviser, served different purposes. Lachlan tended to reassure his father, provide sup-port, offer good counsel, and follow his father’s lead. In 1991, when News Corp. teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, it was Lachlan, still a teenager, who often accompanied his father around the world in his efforts to rescue the company. Lachlan recalled, in an interview with me, putting his father to bed on the night they signed one particular life-or-death deal. “I mean, I was only—what, 16 or 15 or something—but I remember really being worried about him.”

James, meanwhile, tended to challenge his father, often publicly disagreeing with him, which, in un-Godfather-like fashion, seemed to fill Rupert with pride: such a feisty son. James was always urg-ing Rupert to be even more Rupert, more decisive and ruthless. And Rupert seemed proud of him for being willing to double down on the Murdoch toughness.

James also understood something that his brother hadn’t. The closer you come to News Corp. headquarters the more perilous it is for you if your name is Murdoch. James insisted that his career, and his route up the News Corp. ladder, happen as far as possible from headquarters in New York. For a time he was in Asia. Then he moved to BSkyB in London.

Gradually, his success as CEO of BSkyB made him look more and more like “the one.” This view was encouraged by senior executives at News Corp., who had developed an any-Murdoch-but-Lachlan point of view. And it was gradually accepted by Murdoch himself. Lachlan had become entrenched in Australia and ever more resistant to his father’s efforts to find a way for him to come back into the company. “A stub-born bastard,” Rupert said to me about his firstborn son.

“I told my dad I was happy doing what I was doing. Period. End of story,” an impatient Lachlan told me when I interviewed him in Syd-ney in 2008.

t e a m o f r i v a l sClockwise from left: Lachlan and Sarah Murdoch with daughter Aerin in St. Bart’s, 2011; Rupert flanked by Elisabeth and James, 2010; father and firstborn son at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, 2012.

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p o w e r c o u p l eRight: Rupert with Roger Ailes (left), president of Fox News Channel and chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group, at the 2007 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Below: News Corp. headquarters, in New York City.

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A l l A l o n G , RU p e R T wA s keeping close tabs on Lachlan, del-egating his other children to report back the details of his business life. Quite predictably, Rupert was usu-

ally distressed by what he found out.First there was Lachlan’s friendship with

Jamie Packer, the son of Kerry Packer, the other Australian media mogul, for whom Rupert had great and historic scorn. The mogul-billionaire sons had bonded. Back in the 1990s, Jamie had led Lachlan into OneTel (with each son getting his father to invest), an ambitious effort to cre-ate an Australian mobile telecommunications giant, which, in short order and with maximum publicity and embarrassment, collapsed into bankruptcy.

Lachlan, for his part, tried hard to keep his father in the dark. Once, after I had interviewed Lachlan in Sydney, I returned to New York and mentioned several things that Lachlan was doing, which, for a moment, Rupert pretended he knew about. When it became obvious that he wasn’t in the loop, his face crumpled.

Lachlan understood the key fact about his father: No matter his love, his desire to be sup-portive, he couldn’t not get involved. He couldn’t help but to try to have it his way.

One afternoon I found Rupert steaming about a set of new investments that Lachlan had made—and that Rupert had to read about secondhand. Again it was a Jamie Packer deal, in which Lachlan was positioned as a minority investor in a portfolio of companies, thereby having little control, rather than, as Murdoch couldn’t helping pointing out, taking a control-ling stake in one company that he might effec-tively run.

It was during this time, as James began to look more and more inevitable—and Rupert continued to feel more and more guilty about Lachlan’s lost place in the company—that Rupert started to foresee a solution: Lachlan should not only come back to run News Corp.’s Australian operation—something Lachlan had continually refused to do—but Lachlan should look toward buying out News Ltd., the Austra-lian division of News Corp., hence giving him his own empire.

After the successful 2007 battle to buy the Wall Street Journal, in which James acted as his father’s key adviser, Murdoch promoted James to the official number three position in the com-pany, behind COO Peter Chernin, with respon-sibility for all of the company’s international

operations. Except Australia. Australia remained in some org-chart limbo,

waiting for Lachlan—more exasperated than ever by his father’s maneuverings and quite com-fortable in his role as the Murdoch without port-folio. He was hardly without a future. Not only was he a celebrity in Australia—“the king of Sydney,” as his sister Prudence, from Murdoch’s first marriage, described him to me—and heir to one-sixth of a $13 billion fortune (at current mar-ket prices), but his voice and concerns about the future of the company could not be ignored.

There are four votes on the Murdoch Family Trust, which will have voting control over all Murdoch family assets post–Rupert Murdoch. There is no tie-breaking mechanism. So, in a way, heir to the throne is an illusory position—or at least a fragile one. Whoever becomes the CEO can rule only with the agreement of two of his or her siblings.

For several years the family dynamic seemed quite clear. Lachlan, with his public lifestyle in Sydney (where he outbid Russell Crowe on a $20.5 million mansion in 2009), was naturally allied with his sister Elisabeth in London, who, with her husband Matthew Freud, a well-known PR agent and great-grandson of Sig-mund, cut a figure in London society. Prudence, who lived quietly with her husband and children in Sydney and had no ambitions in the company, was the official family peacemaker. James was the sore thumb, or, as Prudence half-affection-ately described the robotic James, “the cyborg.”

This was the situation going into the sum-mer of 2011, when the hacking scandal broke wide open with the disclosure that News of the World, one of Murdoch’s British tabloids, had gotten into the voicemail of not just politicians, celebrities, and royals—bad enough—but also of Milly Dowler, a murdered 13-year-old. With that revelation, the company’s long and seem-ingly successful efforts to stonewall the scandal came undone.

It was the summer horribilis of the Murdoch family. There was fear within the family that not only might their reputations be ruined but their fortune lost—and that people named Murdoch could even go to jail. The outsiders, Lachlan and Elisabeth, and to a lesser extent Prudence, blamed the insiders, believing that their father had put too much faith in James and that James, running the business in Britain, had wholly lost control of events.

A family that, even in its most rancorous moments, saw itself as exclusive and insular was now coming apart. Lachlan and Elisabeth were hardly speaking to their father and were com-pletely severed from James.

Indeed, it was the intervention of Lachlan

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and Elisabeth that, according to many in Mur-doch’s executive circle, was the final and neces-sary straw in getting their father to understand that James would have to lose his place, not only in London but also as heir apparent.

The plotting, of course, then began anew. In one version, reported to me by friends of Elisa-beth’s, she would, on her father’s death, become the CEO of the company with the support of Lachlan, who would become chairman, with peacemaker Prudence in tow, thereby shutting James out.

But News Corp. executives were plotting too. They now took advantage of Rupert’s rela-tive weakness to press an issue that had arisen many times before but that Rupert had always dismissed: getting rid of the newspapers. This business might be near to Murdoch’s heart, but it had no place, his executives began to seri-ously argue after the July 2011 closing of News of the World, in a modern entertainment com-pany. The newspapers had to go.

By all reports Murdoch resisted this assault like a wounded animal—until, in Murdoch fashion, he began to see it not as a challenge to his ultimate dynastic ambitions but as a boost. News Corp., cut off from the Fox entertainment assets, would become exactly the independent company that Murdoch had long dreamed Lachlan would run.

And, indeed, Lachlan for a time considered taking the job. The only problem for him was that his father would be running it too. Rupert would, technically, remain the operating CEO of the much larger entertainment company, 21st Century Fox, with its television, cable, and movie assets, and a more distant chairman of News Corp., the newspaper-focused company. But his family members and closest executives understood that the opposite would be the case: Rupert would be hands-off at Fox and keep his hands on his beloved newspapers.

Once again Lachlan said no.Once again Rupert persisted, shaping reality

to suit his long-term plan. On December 3, 2012, he named Robert

Thomson, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, his CEO—a non-businessman in the top business position. In effect he was holding the job for himself, and for Lachlan. Then, in the division of assets with Fox, Rupert was careful to create a company dominated by properties in Australia. While it would own the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the British papers, it would live or die on its Australian holdings. Along with more than 100 papers in Australia, he added to the mix Foxtel, Australia’s cash-rich leading pay-TV network. If his son wouldn’t come to him, he

Heir Force One

would bring the company to his son.In a sense it was the ultimate solution to

Rupert Murdoch’s dynastic dreams: just have more empires to hand out. Elisabeth and James, who was slowly being rehabilitated, could duke it out for Fox. Indeed, there is enough of Fox to be divided up yet again. And now, for Lachlan, Rupert would create an empire that is so custom-fit, that so surrounds him, and that is so potentially helpless without him that it would become, within the family, an inside joke. Lachlan would have to leave Australia to escape the future his father made for him. He is so triangulated!

In a secret recording made during a meeting at the Sun last year, Rupert revealed that Lachlan was now the heir apparent. Among the Mur-dochs, Lachlan’s return is regarded as a virtual done deal, and News Corp. is spoken of as Lach-lan’s company.

T H e R e i s A n o T H e R C o DA . Murdoch had long struggled to reconcile his children with his wife Wendi. But it never happened. His efforts to navigate the business

and emotional shoals of his relationships with his older children were always hampered by this outsider he had brought into their midst. Like-wise, his marriage was ever compromised by his wife’s resentment of his children’s inability to accept her (and to give her children a proper place in the family and business).

While surely there were many other issues in this marriage, there was an aspect of Mur-doch’s Choice: his wife or his dynasty.

In that summer of 2011, with Hackinggate in full fury—the summer when Deng dived between Rupert and a pie thrower as he testified before Parliament—Rupert confided to Lachlan that his marriage to Deng had been a terrible mistake. In June 2013 he was telling intimates that Deng did not deserve to be his widow, and, pressured by his children, he brought it to an end. If the father is overinvolved in the lives of his children, they are overinvolved in his.

There is a certain sort of tragic comedy in being a Murdoch. The price of a fabulous inheri-tance and the abiding attentions of a father who believes his children possess inevitable greatness, even magical qualities, is that each is pretty much stuck with the others, and with an immu-table destiny. The Murdochs—the first son back in the anointed position and each of their yachts moored side by side at some beautiful destina-tion—are together again, helplessly. •

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Heir Force One