Lachlan Murdoch and the Cold Calculations of Estrangement: Fox Before Family
Author Gabriel Sherman on dynasty schism, the ‘California Post’ and why ‘you’d have to be a psychopath not to feel sadness’
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Few have traversed the right-wing media landscape as loudly and successfully as Gabriel Sherman — from his Roger Ailes biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room (adapted into a Showtime series), to his screenplay for the Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice (which earned Oscar nominations for its stars, Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, and drew ire from Trump, who called Sherman a “hack”).
So it’s no surprise that his compact but riveting new biography on Rupert Murdoch, for which Sherman interviewed more than 150 people, contains several jaw-dropping anecdotes — including that Murdoch’s third wife, Wendi Deng, found out her daughters with Murdoch wouldn’t be included as full voting members in the family’s trust by watching her husband on TV being interviewed by Charlie Rose.
And yet, “Wendi’s still very close to Rupert,” Sherman tells me. “That’s one of the interesting things about this extended family: Even the ex-wives aren’t totally out of the picture. They speak frequently. And she still has his ear on some things, for sure.”
Despite the snub of his younger daughters, Murdoch, 94, always imagined that having his children inherit the family business would secure his legacy. He focused most of his attention on his three middle children — Elisabeth, now 57, Lachlan, 54, and James, 53 — with his second wife, Anna Torv. (Murdoch has one older daughter, Prudence, with first wife, Patricia Booker, and the two younger daughters, Chloe and Grace, with third wife, Deng.) But Murdoch proved to be a mercurial father and boss, and those ambitions blew up in a fractious 2024 court battle that ended with Lachlan becoming the heir apparent by buying out James, Elisabeth and Prudence for $3.3 billion ($1.1 billion each).
With Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family—and the World out today, I spoke to Sherman about how the real-life Murdoch family is even stranger than Succession’s fictional Roy family (which was inspired by them), whether Rupert regrets selling the 21st Century Fox movie studio to Disney, how he differs from media moguls like Jeff Bezos and David Ellison, his relationship with Trump today, the thinking behind the California Post, and what Sherman predicts Lachlan will do with News Corp. once Rupert is gone.
Sherman’s reporting reveals a family where estrangement wasn’t collateral damage, but strategy — a price Rupert Murdoch was willing to pay to secure control, ideology and succession.
“Rupert’s dream was to build a family business,” says Sherman, “but he instead built a business that destroyed his family.”
Do they have regrets? Oh, they have a few. Read on…
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