James Murdoch spills the beans on family feud in explosive interview

The legal battle to keep Lachlan Murdoch from taking control of the $US42 billion ($66 billion) media empire built by his father has led James Murdoch to break a cardinal rule that had governed his life: do not speak on the record about the family.

James revealed his anguish over family betrayals and dysfunction, allegedly driven by father Rupert Murdoch, who pitted the siblings against each other, in a report published by US magazine The Atlantic at the weekend.

Rupert Murdoch and his four eldest children (from left), Lachlan, Elisabeth, Prudence and James.Credit:

In a rare interview, the younger Murdoch brother offered his version of the story, triggered by last year’s legal battle with Rupert and Lachlan, who both dispute James’ account of events.

James and his elder sisters, Elisabeth and Prudence, were left reeling in November 2023 after learning their father’s plans to tear up the supposedly inviolable family trust and ram home changes that would ensure Lachlan alone would control Fox and News Corp.

Lachlan and Rupert lost the legal battle in December last year but have appealed the decision. Documents uncovered during the legal discovery process revealed how callously and calculatedly Rupert had referred to James in emails to other family members, as reported by The New York Times last week.

The process also revealed, according to James, just how many of the stories targeting and denigrating him and his wife, Kathryn, had been sourced from Rupert’s trusted lieutenants.

The media mogul with then-wife Anna Murdoch (right) and their children (from left) Lachlan, James and Elisabeth circa 1983.Credit: Getty Images

And then there were emails such as one from Rupert to Lachlan in 2020 referring to plans to buy the “troublesome” James out of the family trust: “Benefit of getting him out probably outweighs other considerations.”

In another email, Rupert asked his eldest daughter, Prudence, to help with the plan: “Why don’t you suggest that he calls me on my birthday, and then I can widen the conversation?”

Relations between father and son had never been smooth, as a well-known family anecdote from James’ childhood shows. “Is Daddy going deaf?” a young James asked his mother, Anna. “No, he’s just not listening,” she replied.

In March last year, James was peppered aggressively by Rupert’s lawyers over the siblings’ legal challenge to “Project Family Harmony”. During his deposition, Rupert tapped away on his phone.

Rupert Murdoch with his wife, Elena Zhukova, at the NFL Super Bowl game in New Orleans on February 9. Credit: AP

“Have you ever done anything successful on your own?” James was asked.

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

But another realisation 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 posed to Rupert that James could 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 Rupert’s heir apparent – 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 resigned, triggering years of silence and bitter recriminations.

Elisabeth told The Atlantic sacrificing her relationship with her brother to win over their father was “one of the greatest regrets of my life”.

But above them all was the one person Rupert really wanted to run 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, Rupert Murdoch’s style was 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.”

The end of James’ relationship with the family business came with the rise of Donald Trump, and Fox’s shift 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 had even pointed out that the viewers lost when Fox News made the early call that Joe Biden had won Arizona in the 2020 election 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 went through. “And you will not have a brother,” he told James.

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

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.