‘White, privileged, trust-fund babies’: James Murdoch breaks family silence

In March last year, James found himself opposite his father in the Manhattan offices of Rupert’s lawyers over the siblings’ legal challenge to “Project Family Harmony”.

Rupert’s lawyers peppered James aggressively during his deposition while Rupert tapped away on his phone. ’Have you ever done anything successful on your own?” he was asked.

James and his sisters were later referred to by the lawyers as “white, privileged, multi-billionaire trust-fund babies.”

But it was another realisation that shocked James about his father’s phone use.

“He was texting the lawyers questions to ask,” James told The Atlantic. “How f—ing twisted is that?”

Not that Rupert’s ability to pit the siblings against each other, or use them to do his dirty work, should have been a surprise.

As the phone-hacking crisis reached its zenith in 2011, it was Elisabeth who suggested to Rupert that maybe James should take the fall for the fiasco. There were suggestions rivalry may have been a motivating factor.

Lachlan had quit News Corp in 2005 and returned to Australia. James had established himself as the heir apparent to Rupert – to the point that even his father had apparently grown jealous.

“Go tell him,” was Rupert’s reply.

Elisabeth delivered the news to James, who subsequently resigned, triggering years of silence and bitter recriminations.

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Elisabeth confirmed the decision to sacrifice her relationship with her brother to win over their father: “It’s one of the greatest regrets of my life,” she told The Atlantic.

But above them all was the one person who Rupert really wanted running the business: Lachlan.

The heir, moulded in Rupert’s conservative ideology, was more likely to continue running the empire in Rupert’s swashbuckling manner and was never going to lose to a younger brother who believed in good corporate governance.

As The Atlantic reports, Murdoch’s style is to hire aggressive executives and let them run wild. As Kathryn put it: “He was pitting them against each other, but there was always going to be one winner.”

But the end of his relationship with the family business came with the rise of Trump, and Fox’s pivot from treating the presidential candidate as a joke to fawning coverage to keep its commercially lucrative audience.

According to James, one of Rupert’s lawyers suggested that Fox’s success came from pandering to its viewers at the expense of basic journalistic standards.

The lawyer even pointed out that the viewers lost when Fox News made the early call that Joe Biden had won Arizona in 2020, were won back through its election-denial coverage.

“I underestimated the ability of a profit motive to make people do terrible things – to make companies do terrible things,” James said.

While it was James who exited Fox after the $US71 billion sale of its movie studio assets to Disney in 2019, he says it was Lachlan who was most threatened by the sale which would leave him in charge of “ShitCo” – the current collection of news and book publishing businesses owned by News Corp and Fox.

James says Lachlan lost his temper over the proposed sale and warned his father “you will not have a son” if the deal goes through. “And you will not have a brother,” he told James.

Lachlan disputed this, and other accounts in the Atlantic story.

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