Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins describes the rivalry among the children of 93 year-old media titan Rupert Murdoch over who will control his business empire when he dies. It's a real life Succession drama. Also, we'll talk with Harvard Professor Elizabeth Linos about the extraordinary measures Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken to drastically shrink the size of the federal government, and the ripple effect.Also, John Powers reviews the Oscar-nominated animated film Flow.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who are the key players in the Murdoch family succession drama?
Murdoch's effort to ensure his elder son Lachlan inherits the throne led to a no-holds-barred legal brawl that unearthed painful family stories of manipulation and betrayal.
Also, we'll talk with Harvard professor Elizabeth Linos about the extraordinary measures Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has taken to shrink the size of the federal government and what that means for federal workers and the rest of us who depend on government services. And John Powers reviews the animated film Flow, which he says is wonderful.
Chapter 2: What measures has Elon Musk's DOGE taken to reduce the federal workforce?
That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
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This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Dave Davies. If you enjoyed the HBO series Succession about the children of an aging media mogul competing to inherit his business empire, you'll want to read the new article in The Atlantic by my guest McKay Coppins.
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Chapter 3: What are the dynamics between Rupert Murdoch's sons Lachlan and James?
It's about the real-life drama involving the children of 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch and their battle over who will someday lead his business properties, most prominently Fox News. And even if you didn't see Succession, the story is still fascinating, both because of the intense family dynamics and the stakes in this conflict.
The outcome could mean big changes for Fox News, which Coppins describes as the most powerful conservative media force in the world. Late last year, the parties in this family dispute squared off in an epic court battle over the succession plan for the Murdoch empire.
Rupert Murdoch wanted to amend the family trust to ensure his eldest son Lachlan would take the helm, shutting out his younger son James, who was troubled by Fox News' hard right bent.
Coppins writes that the trial testimony and depositions and discovery in the case were often intensely personal, bringing up years of painful secrets, scheming and manipulation, lies, media leaks, and devious betrayals. For his story, Coppins had extensive interviews with James Murdoch and his wife Catherine. Their side prevailed in the trial verdict, which is under appeal.
McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of two books, The Wilderness, about the battle over the future of the Republican Party, and Romney, A Reckoning, a biography of Mitt Romney. The online version of his new article is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire.
It's on The Atlantic's website, and it's also the magazine's April issue cover story. Well, McKay Coppins, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. All right. Well, let's talk about this story, the Murdoch story. I mean, Rupert Murdoch actually inherited a newspaper from his dad who had an interesting background in journalism.
And then he went off on this swashbuckling campaign to acquire one paper and then use the leverage on that to get another and another. And at the time, he was 40. He was the most powerful media owner in Australia. He moves to the United Kingdom and
buys tabloids and eventually a broadsheet there, eventually ends up in the States where he gets the Wall Street Journal and starts Fox News, which was a big success. I wouldn't normally assume that someone who owns media businesses would necessarily want his kids to get involved in the family business. They have resources. They could get educations, do whatever they want.
Did Rupert Murdoch consciously try to bring his children, get them interested in the media?
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Chapter 4: How did the rise of Donald Trump influence the Murdoch family dynamics?
And what he said was that his animating motivation in all of this was to give something of value, leave something meaningful. 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.
Now, he had two sons, Lachlan and James, born 15 months apart. Lachlan was a little older. James was a little younger. And the other major character in this is their sister, Liz. Those three were the children of Murdoch's second wife, Anna. There was a fourth, Prudence, known as Prue, and she was the daughter of his previous marriage.
But those three, James, Lachlan, and Liz, were the main characters for most of this drama. James and Lachlan would both eventually play prominent roles in the businesses and would be rivals for succession over the years at various times. But James didn't start out that way, did he? I mean he went a whole different direction out of college and thereafter.
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...
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 think that he ever would have a chance to run the companies.
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. 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. 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.
So I want to move us into the Trump era here. Lachlan Murdoch, the elder son, had left the company. He had been in Australia for many years. And then in 2015, he moves back, gets an office in Los Angeles. He's with the company. James, the younger brother, has an office in New York, putting them in kind of an awkward position, both being prominent executives in the company.
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Chapter 5: What was the outcome of the Murdoch family court battle over the trust?
There was a plan in place for many, many years, a trust, which said that when Rupert Murdoch passed away, that the voting rights in the company would be split among four siblings, Lachlan and James, the two boys, Liz, their sister, and then Prue, who was their sister from a previous marriage.
And to a lot of observers, that meant that it might be James who had the upper hand over Lachlan because it was assumed that the two sisters might work with him in terms of the future direction of the company. This was problematic for Rupert Murdoch, right? So he hatches a plan. What does he do?
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.
And they spend several months drawing up detailed legal memos. And at the end of 2023, 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... experienced this as a profound betrayal.
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 and 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.
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.
And I think that 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.
This trial began in September 2024 in this county courthouse. James took the stand. What did he say the experience was like for him emotionally?
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.
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Chapter 6: How might the Murdoch empire change with James Murdoch's influence?
On the third day of the trial, when he testified, he said that he recounted a dinner at which Loughlin 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.
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.
After all this testimony, it didn't go particularly well for Rupert. It went much better for James and his siblings' side of it. And this all came down to a single man, Edmund Gorman, who's the Washoe County Probate Commissioner. This multibillion-dollar company and all this comes down to one man, one county official, and he issues a clear ruling, right?
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.
Rupert and Lachlan have appealed. Is it likely to stand do you think? What's the course from here?
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, 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. 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.
You know, you note that James and his wife, Catherine, have spent millions on political contributions, mostly to Democrats, I think, and to pro-democracy causes and other philanthropic work, particularly climate change. Is it fair to assume that if this verdict holds that when Rupert Murdoch dies, Fox News is not going to be the same product?
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Chapter 7: How does the HBO series 'Succession' relate to the Murdoch family?
Flow is an animated movie from Latvia that follows an unlikely collection of animals who are brought together by a massive flood that overwhelms the countryside. The film, which is now streaming on Max, already won animation prizes from the Golden Globes, the New York Film Critics, and the Los Angeles Film Critics, among others.
And it's received Oscar nominations for both Best Animated Feature and Best International Film. Our critic-at-large John Powers says it is quite simply wonderful.
Perhaps the most famous line in ancient Greek thought comes from the philosopher Heraclitus, who said, You cannot step into the same river twice. That's because reality is not a static thing, but an ever-changing flux. The fluidity of life runs through flow, a marvelous animated movie from Latvia, which has already been showered with acclaim.
Directed by Gintz Zalbalotis, it takes a simple premise, a sundry crew of animals get caught in a flood, and without a single word being uttered, transports us into a radiant fantasy. At once fun and affecting, Flo made me think of everything from Spirited Away and The Incredible Journey to the story of Noah and the recent floods in North Carolina.
Flo centers on a slate-gray cat whose home is a big house in the forest surrounded by larger-than-life feline sculptures. It sleeps upstairs in a double bed whose emptiness offers our first inkling that there are no people about. And indeed, no humans will appear in the film.
Instead, we follow this watchful, eloquent-eyed loner as it prowls around and gets chased by a pack of dogs, a pursuit interrupted by a deluge that comes whooshing towards them. the water keeps rising higher and higher. And just as the cat is about to be washed away, it's able to jump on a sailboat occupied by, of all things, a capybara.
Soon they're joined by a scene-stealing lemur, who has scavenged various human knickknacks, like the mirror it keeps looking at itself in. It's like the opening of a joke. A cat, a capybara, and a lemur walk into a bar.
As the three float together on their small ark, they're joined by a golden retriever and a predatory secretary bird, which boasts a crazy beautiful headdress of feathers and a body like an eagle's glued onto a heron's legs.
This odd band of survivors seeks to ride out the flood, a dangerous enterprise that forces them to work together and leads them to rescue others in distress, even if they don't always want to. So Belotus pays these animals the respect of observing them closely.
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Chapter 8: What is the animated film 'Flow' about and why is it acclaimed?
A group of creatures overcome their differences and learn to help one another. It's solidarity, not selfishness, that will save them.
John Powers reviewed the animated film Flow, which is up for two Oscars. Coming up, Harvard professor of public policy Elizabeth Linos talks about the extraordinary measures Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has taken to shrink the size of the federal government. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
If he wanted to, could Elon Musk establish a new bathroom breaks policy for more than 2 million federal employees? Well, he hasn't. But since the Trump administration took office and gave Musk's Department of Government Efficiency a mandate to shrink the government, Musk has wielded an astonishing level of authority over the federal workforce.
After gaining access to the Treasury Department's massive payment system, Musk and his team have dismissed thousands of employees, terminated countless contracts, and targeted two government agencies created by Congress for elimination. Last weekend, federal workers received an email instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they'd accomplished the previous week.
Musk added in a social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. That got pushback from several Trump-appointed agency leaders who told their employees not to respond. Much of what Musk has done is under court challenge, but President Trump has said he'd like to see him become even more aggressive.
To help us understand these efforts to drastically reshape the American government, we've invited Elizabeth Linus to join us.
She's the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and director of the People Lab, which does research on how to recruit, retrain, and support the government workforce and integrate evidence-based policymaking into government.
Earlier in her career, she was a policy advisor to Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece, pursuing government reform at a time of financial crisis. Well, Elizabeth Linos, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me.
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