McKay Coppins
Appearances
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Right. Well, Rupert flew to London amid the controversy. And while James was kind of in damage control mode with his executives, Rupert increasingly started to, you know, freelance, right? He was kind of shuffling around London, answering shouted questions from reporters. You know, he paid a visit to the family of one of the victims who was hacked.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
He gave a not very helpful interview to The Wall Street Journal where he said he was getting annoyed with all the negative coverage. And, you know, a lot of what Rupert seemed to be doing was only exacerbating the issue. As the public outrage intensified, it became clear to Rupert.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
that somebody in the family was going to have to take the fall for this, that the public outrage basically wouldn't be satisfied with just a lower-level executive being fired. It would have to be a Murdoch who was kind of offered up as the sacrificial lamb. And amid all of this, I report that Liz went to her father and basically made the case that it should be James.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
She said, look, James is the executive who is technically over all these papers, even though the hacking had taken place before he got there. He was also planning to eventually move back to New York anyway for what was being presented as a promotion. But she said, maybe we could recast this as kind of a mea culpa. His resignation could be seen as like his taking the blame.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And we can move past this scandal. And there's this remarkable moment where Rupert says, OK, let me think about it. He comes back the next day, tells Liz, I think it's a good idea. We should do it. And then tells Liz, go tell him. And basically has his daughter walk down the hallway and try to fire her brother.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And James does not react well to this, actually tells her, you know, if dad wants to fire me, he can do it himself and throws her out of the office. And their relationship actually did not recover for many years. They barely spoke to each other. They were constantly suspicious of each other, kind of making moves. And I think it's kind of an example of how Rupert's insistence on making
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Making his kids compete for his approval and for position in the family empire really drove a wedge between them.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah, I think it was really disillusioning for him. You know, he had always had different political views than his dad, and he knew that. But what he told me is that he'd always assumed that his dad had political views, that he had a political ideology. Yes, Rupert was kind of this puckish, anti-establishment figure. Yes, his media outlets often kind of delighted in needling the establishment.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
But he believed that beneath all the kind of mischief-making was a set of real beliefs. He thought his dad was a devoted free marketeer, an internationalist who supported American global power. He had heard his dad talk about immigration as a source of industry and ingenuity in America. And in a lot of ways, Rupert's brand of conservatism was miles apart from Trump's.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And yet, as soon as Rupert realized that his audience loved Trump, he pivoted. And immediately, his outlet started to support Trump. The Wall Street Journal even started running editorials defending his policies. The New York Post was running covers celebrating Trump. And it dawned on James that there actually were no ideas at the center of all these media outlets, right?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah. So this was last year James showed up for a deposition. The lawyer sitting across from him was this kind of well-known lawyer in the estate legal world and was kind of firing, you know, pretty aggressive and withering questions at him. What was remarkable about the moment, because that's not totally unusual in a deposition. Sometimes these depositions can be hostile.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
It was really all about accumulating power and profit. And I think for James, who had grown up hearing his dad sermonize about how important it was for the media business to take their role seriously, this was profoundly discouraging and also eye-opening.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah, well, this is the other thing that surprised James during Trump's rise was how quickly Loughlin kind of got on board. He said that he had always thought of Loughlin as sort of affable and dilettante-ish and friendly and not really that interested in politics at all. But James told me that while Trump was running for president in 2016 and when he would do something –
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
James considered outrageous, he would say, you know, bring it up with Lachlan, for example, his proposed Muslim travel ban. And he would expect Lachlan to say, oh, yeah, that's terrible. But instead, he would kind of retreat to this knee jerk anti-Hillary stance. And
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Over time, James started paying more attention to Loughlin and found that his older brother was willing to indulge in pretty reactionary and even, in his words, white nativist ideas. And I should note that a spokesperson for Loughlin pushed back against this characterization, called it false.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
But I think it's safe to say that the Trump era was one of several wedges at this time that was driven between James and Loughlin as they tried to run the family media empire together.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah, James, at that point, had stepped down as CEO of Fox but was still on the News Corp board. And, you know, he had always been taught not to answer questions like that. And generally, he didn't answer those questions.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Even when he disagreed with his dad or disagreed with the way that the media outlets were being run, he would kind of keep it to himself or express his disagreements privately, try to push back internally. In 2020, he decided that he was just going to throw caution to the wind and answer a reporter's question.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And he released a statement with his wife through a spokesman saying that their views on climate are well established. Their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well known. They're particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia, given obvious evidence to the contrary.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And let me tell you, it did not go over well on the News Corp board. This was seen as a profound act of disloyalty on James Murdoch's part. And he was basically told that he either needed to resign from the board or he would be forced off. And so later that year, he resigned.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
officially resigned and released a statement saying that he had disagreements with some of the company's strategic decisions and the editorial output of the news outlets. And that was that.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
What was remarkable is that Rupert was sitting next to the lawyer throughout the entire deposition. He was actually staring kind of inscrutably at his youngest son while the lawyer asked him questions like, have you ever done anything successful on your own? Does it strike you that everything that goes wrong is always somebody else's fault in your account?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Right. In 2023, Rupert begins working secretly with his son Lachlan and a consortium of executives and lawyers to rewrite the family trust in such a way that will concentrate complete control of the family business with Lachlan and essentially cut out his other three children from having a voice in the business. they codename this initiative Project Family Harmony.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And they spend several months drawing up detailed legal memos and decks and quietly recruiting new trustees to join the board. And at the end of 2023, they... They basically spring it on James and his sisters that Rupert is planning to rewrite the trust and that Lachlan will be fully in charge once he's gone. James and his sisters experience this as a profound betrayal.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
This arrangement had been made at the insistence of their mother, Anna, when she was divorcing Rupert, actually. And the idea had been that she saw the way her soon-to-be ex-husband played their kids off each other, how he played favorites, how he pitted them against each other. And she worried that their lives would become consumed with kind of a never-ending quest for the crown.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And she wanted the family trust... to basically establish that all four of those kids would have an equal say in the business when he was gone. And she thought that this would actually incentivize them all to get along and to work together. In fact, she gave up quite a lot of money in the divorce in exchange for this agreement.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Part of what made James and his sister so upset about this is that it wasn't just their father kind of betraying them. He was going back on a promise he had made to their mother a long time ago.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Right. And it was kind of this bizarre thing because, to put it another way, Rupert had to establish that disenfranchising three of his kids was actually in their best interest, right? That eliminating their voting power was good for them. Right. James and his sisters immediately sued to block this amendment.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And what followed was almost a year of pretty intense, pretty nasty litigation that led up to a high drama but private trial of sorts in Reno, Nevada probate court.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Why were you too busy to say happy birthday to your father when he turned 90? Throughout this, James tried to focus on the questions that the lawyer was asking, but he kept looking over at his dad, who was silent but kept picking up his phone. And finally, it dawned on James that Rupert was actually texting questions to his lawyer to ask him. And James reflected on this for months afterward.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah. Well, they were informed on a Zoom call and – James, looking back on this whole situation, would kind of marvel at the fact that at no point amid all the kind of scheming that was being done in Project Family Harmony did it occur to either Rupert or Lachlan that maybe they should just pick up the phone and try to talk to James and talk to his sisters, you know, like a normal family might.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
You know, yes, James was fairly estranged at this point from his father, but Liz wasn't and Prue wasn't. And James is adamant even today that if Rupert had just said, hey, let's all talk about this once. I have some concerns about what's going to happen to these companies when I'm gone.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Can we try to figure out a solution that will be to everybody's benefit, whether that's a buyout or some amendment to the trust that's not quite as dramatic? James would have played ball. He would have been willing to talk it out. Instead, Rupert kind of went immediately into litigation. There were a couple odd moments of outreach throughout the litigation process. One of them
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
As I mentioned, I don't think you could even call this outreach, but was that deposition that I described at the beginning where Rupert sat across a table while he texted questions to his lawyer to ask to James. There's another moment where James's lawyer requested a packet of documents from Rupert, and it came with a handwritten note that said, Dear James, still time to talk? Love, Dad. P.S.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Love to see my grandchildren one day. And to James, this was just extremely disingenuous. He said he couldn't remember the last time Rupert had taken an interest in his grandchildren and he didn't bother to reply.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
But it kind of underscored the weird dynamics in all of this where there were kind of, you know, interpersonal issues and family issues interwoven with this very high stakes legal drama that would determine the fate of one of the most powerful media empires in the world.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah, I found this really remarkable. And it's kind of tangential to the main story, but I think there's a way to understand it as actually central to the Murdoch story. So at one point, the lawyer asked James, isn't it true that Fox is the top cable news outlet because it respects its audience and gives them what they want?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And James kind of took issue with this idea and said, well, I don't know that respecting your audience and giving them exactly what they want are the same thing. The lawyer pushed forward and said, well, you know, Fox News lost a significant part of its audience when it called Arizona for Biden in 2020.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And then said, and do you know that Fox won back most of that audience through its election denial coverage? Essentially, this lawyer was arguing that Fox had covered – false claims about the rigged 2020 election in the way that they did purely for ratings and to win back their audience.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And that actually James, by opposing that coverage and insisting that the cable network should take a more responsible approach, was undercutting the value of the network. And I think that this both highlights the real difficulty gap in how he and his father see the future of these companies.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Like James just finds that idea repugnant and believes that any news operation, no matter what its kind of ideological slant, should have to adhere to basic journalistic standards. That is not what Rupert's lawyer, at least in this deposition, was arguing.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
We spoke about it quite a bit. And he just couldn't quite make sense of how his relationship with his father had gotten to this point. He called it, well, it's an expletive that we can't use, but he called it twisted behavior. And I think that it really kind of captures just how far the family has fallen in terms of their estrangement and the dysfunction that now defines the family's dynamics.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
He told me that he had gone into the trial resolving to kind of approach it in a spirit of like corporate combat, right? And he told me, I'm good at that. You stiffen your spine. You harden your tummy. And then he walked into the courtroom each day. And he would look across the courtroom and see his father and his brother on the other side.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
These men whom he had loved, who he had believed had loved him, with whom he'd shared holidays and family memories and now was no longer speaking to. And he said the question that just kept coming to him was, how did we let it come to this? On the third day of the trial, when he testified, he said that
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
He recounted a dinner at which Lachlan effectively ended their relationship over a proposed sale of the film and TV studio to Disney. And James surprised himself by beginning to cry. And he didn't think that he would get that emotional. You know, he had really prepared for it.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
But there was something just so fundamentally sad about what had happened to his family that kind of caught up with him at that moment.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah, he ruled that Rupert could not amend the trust in the way that he wanted to, that he had not established that he was acting in good faith or in the best interest of the beneficiaries, and that essentially the status quo would remain. The trust would stay as it was, and when Rupert died, control of the business would be split four ways among his four oldest children.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah, it's a good question. James and his sisters feel good about where they are. They think it's unlikely that given how sweeping and definitive the ruling was by the probate commissioner that it will be overturned. But that doesn't mean it's the end of the story. I think everyone expects that if this particular initiative doesn't work –
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Rupert will look for other ways to sideline James in particular, whether that means a buyout, whether that means an attempt to sever James's sub-trust from the rest of the trust. There were a lot of possibilities discussed by the Project Family Harmony team in 2023, and James suspects that there will be other efforts. But, you know, Time is ticking here, right? Rupert is 93 years old.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
There's no telling how much time he has left. And so if he's going to continue to make these moves, he's going to have to figure out pretty quickly what to do if he wants to get James out of the picture.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
You know, this was one question that I asked repeatedly to James and Catherine, and I think understandably they were a little bit cagey because this exact question has been central to the litigation with Rupert.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Rupert is basically arguing that if James is allowed to have his say, Fox News will be defanged, it will become liberal, it will lose all its audience, and the profit center of the Murdoch empire will be destroyed. What James says is that he's not necessarily interested in turning Fox News into MSNBC, right? He's not trying to fundamentally change the political slant of the network.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
He just wants it to be more responsible. And he said, you know, Fox News could still report from a conservative perspective without, for example, platforming quack doctors who rail against vaccines or, you know, That basically, with the correct editorial guardrails, with the right professionals running the network, Fox News could be a responsible contributor to the national political discourse.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
I think there is a genuine and fair question to be raised about how much that would hurt the value of Fox News, though. You know, how many viewers would they lose to right wing competitors if they lost, you know, kind of their hard edged pro Trump reporting, for example? I don't know.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
But James just believes that if his family is going to continue to operate these media outlets, they should at least make an effort to ensure that they are responsible members of the media landscape.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah, well, it was one of the weird things about doing these interviews is I found myself repeatedly thinking, I swear this sounds familiar. And James would say, no, I've never told anyone this before. And it would occur to me that I had seen it on this HBO show or a fictionalized version of it.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Throughout my reporting, it was one of the stranger phenomena was just how much the Murdoch family was obsessed with this show. James told me he watched the first episode and couldn't watch beyond it because it was too painful. And I can see that. Imagine if a TV show was made about your own life and family. It might be hard to watch.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
But other members of his family were obsessed with it and specifically obsessed with trying to figure out – There were just so many scenes and moments in the show that felt so uncannily familiar and true to life that everybody was convinced that somebody was kind of sharing family secrets with the writers. Oh, heavens.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
James believed his sister was his sister swore she wasn't but believed her ex-husband had I actually finally just went to Jesse Armstrong who created the show and asked him point blank you know who in the family were you talking to and he was adamant that not no one. You know, he didn't have a mole on the inside.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
He kind of laughed at what he called the psychodrama around this thing in the family. But he said, you know, the truth is they've all leaked so many stories against each other over the years that we had plenty of press reports we could draw on for our own stories.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah, I think it's one of the reasons he decided to talk to me. You know, James, like all the Murdochs, had been instilled with this kind of almost code of omerta idea that you don't talk about what happens inside the family outside the family, right? From a very early age, he was told you never talk to reporters. You never air the family's dirty laundry.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
If we have disagreements, we have them inside and we don't leak them. We don't talk about them. And I could sense James throughout my interviews with him last year sometimes bumping up against that reflexive protectiveness of his family. At the same time, as you mentioned –
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
This process of discovery meant in both the legal sense and the broader sense, I think, really did cause him to think about things differently. He was kind of almost processing in real time throughout our interviews what he had seen behind the scenes of the family business that he worked in for 20 years. he had seen inside his family for his entire life.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And it made for a really compelling series of interviews and a really compelling subject because for really the first time, he was sharing his entire side of the story in a way that he had never dared to do before.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah. By all accounts, he was quite aggressive about it, in fact. He insisted on treating News Corp, even as it expanded and became a publicly traded company, like a family business, almost like, you know, kids living above the shop, right? He was... always looking for opportunities to draw his kids into his professional world.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
At breakfast, the legend goes he would spread the day's newspapers across the table and go through the various headlines with his kids and explain the editorial decisions that were made and the biases at work and kind of critique the framing of the stories. He would take his kids on tours of the printing press. He would bring politicians and dignitaries to dinner.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And what he said was that his animating motivation in all of this was to give something of value, leave something meaningful behind. An inheritance to his children, the way that his father had for him. A quote that I found that he once gave was that he said, I don't know any son of any prominent media family who hasn't wanted to follow in the footsteps of his forebears. It's just too great a life.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think that there was an assumption early on that Lachlan as the eldest son was the natural successor. And as they kind of grew up and acquired their own personalities, it was clear that Lachlan was more similar to Rupert. He was charismatic. He was, you know, kind of self-consciously emulative of his dad. James was a little bit more of a rebel. He...
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
was interested in countercultural things and music and art. He got piercings and tattoos. At the dinner table, he would kind of needle his dad with contrarian questions. And as they got older, James developed more moderate to liberal politics, whereas Lachlan kind of followed in lockstep with his dad. But James really didn't didn't think that he ever would have a chance to run the companies.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And I think because of that, it almost created more space for him to explore his own interests. He dropped out of Harvard to start an independent hip hop label with his friends. And they went and kind of scoured Brooklyn for emerging rap talent. As a teenager, he spent his summers in Italy working on archaeological digs.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And he almost kind of pushed back against early efforts to pull him into the media world. There's a great story about when he was interning at one of his father's newspapers in Australia, he actually fell asleep at a press conference. And somebody took a picture of him and it ended up in a rival newspaper.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
So, you know, he was, I think, very early on sort of staking out a position as somebody who's not going to follow in his father's footsteps. He'll leave that to his brother. But that didn't last long.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah, you know, James, I think, by all accounts, and I interviewed a lot of people who worked with him over the years, people who had worked inside the companies. And by all accounts, he actually did have a talent for business leadership, for corporate leadership.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
In Asia, for example, he was sent to take over this struggling satellite TV company, immediately sensed that they should pivot the growth strategy away from Hong Kong and which is where Rupert had positioned it, and toward India, where he thought there was more opportunity. It ended up working.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
He developed a series of splashy Hindi-language dramas, overhauled the company in a bunch of ways, and within two years, the company turned a profit. And I think that James would say, in particular, that he thrived when he wasn't working kind of under the claustrophobic supervision of his father. Right. In this case, he was living in Hong Kong, working in India.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
His dad was thousands of miles away and frankly, not all that interested in the Asian satellite business. A lot of people actually thought that he sent James there because it was a relatively low stakes part of the company and Rupert didn't really expect him to turn it around. And his success kind of came as a surprise back in News Corp headquarters.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
That's right. He basically took himself out of the running. to take over for Rupert in terms of people inside the family. I should mention that Liz ended up having quite a successful career herself and continues to in film and TV development. But according to James, Rupert never really saw her as a viable contender because she was a daughter. And in James's words, Rupert is a misogynist.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And so James was really it in terms of successors. And that changed the dynamic between him and his father pretty quickly.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah, I mean, I think that after a successful run in Asia and then also running Sky in London, he was promoted to chief executive of News International, which is basically the family's Europe and Asia operations. And in that role, he really started to come into his own and he clearly felt like he was on a hot streak, right? He... Yeah.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
There are some who knew him at that time who told me that he looked a little bit like a boy trying on his father's sport coat. You know, trying to act like his dad but not quite pulling it off. But it was around this time that he really started to establish some independence from Rupert. He – based in London –
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
He started to surround himself with his own kind of loyal deputies who were young men made in his image, you know, dark suits, open collars, similarly fluent in MBA jargon, and began overhauling the Europe and Asia parts of the company in ways that his father did not entirely appreciate.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Yeah, and this was kind of the central tension between him and his father throughout James' time at these companies. James kind of had immersed himself in a more modern approach to management theory, which was that a company's success is defined by its internal culture. And you need to have a positive, innovative, constructive culture.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
There need to be proper editorial guardrails at the media outlets. There needs to be attention paid to corporate governance. And we need to listen to the lawyers. We need to listen to HR. We need to have a set of values that define our modern workplace. And this just runs totally counter to the way that Rupert built his empire.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Rupert had always prided himself on being scrappy and aggressive and irreverent. And, you know, he surrounded himself with really aggressive executives who acted kind of like pirates and gamblers. And the way Rupert seems to have interpreted James's approach is as a preoccupation with respectability. And Rupert never craved respectability.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
He wanted power and success and almost delighted in his own villainous reputation. And I think that the way that James was going about running these companies in Europe really gave him pause about whether his youngest son was the best person to take over for him when he was gone.