Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsHe was, after all, the eldest boy.The family drama that inspired HBO’s Succession ended this week with a settlement that ensures Rupert Murdoch’s conservative-media empire will pass to his oldest son, Lachlan. Three of Murdoch’s other children will each reportedly receive $1.1 billion as part of the agreement. The saga’s finale also seems to cement the politics of the news conglomerate.Before the deal, a persistent question dangled over the empire: What might happen to Fox News and the many other right-wing Murdoch properties if Rupert’s more politically moderate children took over?With the keys going to Lachlan, the most conservative of the siblings, that question is answered. New ones follow: What does a post-Rupert News Corp mean for The Wall Street Journal and how the outlet covers President Donald Trump? How might Lachlan differ from his father? And, ultimately, what were the decades of family strife for when it all ended in a buyout anyway?Staff writer McKay Coppins profiled the family’s second son, James, for The Atlantic’s April cover story. McKay joins Radio Atlantic to share insights from his year of reporting on the family and what he thinks now that the real-life Succession has ended.The following is a transcript of the episode:[Music]Mylee Hogan (from 7News Australia): It is Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan pitched against his other three children Prudence, Elisabeth, and James.Carrington Clarke (from Australian Broadcasting Corporation): Rupert Murdoch took three of his children to court to ensure his media empire remains in the hands of eldest son Lachlan and a conservative force.Jim Rutenberg (speaking to 7News Australia): Given the outsize influence that Rupert Murdoch’s empire has and its role in being a sort of clarion of right-wing populism … this is about all of us; this isn’t only one family’s drama.Hanna Rosin: The HBO show Succession ended over two years ago. But the real-world family saga that inspired it continued on. Rupert Murdoch, patriarch and media mogul of all media moguls, has always said that he wanted his conservative empire to stay in the family after he died. As he entered his 90s, the question of which child would lead it became more urgent.But as the HBO show dramatized, succession is no simple thing. The empire is held by a family trust, and Rupert didn’t get to dictate its fate. The siblings fought, battled each other in court; family secrets spilled out in legal documents.Staff writer McKay Coppins wrote The Atlantic’s April cover story about the Murdochs, and he spoke extensively with one brother, James. By that point, the succession battle was between James and his older brother, Lachlan.Lachlan is more conservative, more self-consciously modeling himself on their father. James, meanwhile, is more politically moderate, but he also spent two decades in the family business.Who would take over and steer a news empire that includes Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and a myriad of outlets across the world? Would it remain an important force in the right-wing media ecosystem?This week, we got our answer. The two sides came to a deal, and the chosen heir is Lachlan. The Murdoch news empire remains conservative. James and his two older sisters reportedly get $1.1 billion each—but no stake in the company’s future.So that’s the finale. But the implications go far beyond the Murdochs themselves. McKay Coppins spent a year reporting his story and knows all the twists and turns, and so when the news broke, we were eager to sit down with him. Here’s our conversation.McKay, welcome to the show.McKay Coppins: Thanks for having me on.Rosin: So the moment has arrived. (Laughs.)Coppins: Yes.Rosin: The drama has ended, which has been going on for decades. How do you summarize how it ended?Coppins: In some ways, it’s basically a cementing of the status quo, right? Lachlan—the chosen heir apparent, Rupert’s favorite son, the one he has always wanted to run his empire when he was gone—is now firmly established as the king-in-waiting and will have full control of these companies when Rupert dies, without any threat of a challenge from his siblings.In some ways, I feel like it’s a fascinating moment because this succession drama has really defined the Murdoch empire for decades. It is the single element of these companies that has continued to pop up in coverage, in speculation, in scrutiny—inside the companies and outside. And so I almost wonder if the Murdochs now have to kind of wonder, What are we about now? You know?Rosin: (Laughs.) That’s such a good point. Like, this is their meaning, and now they’ve lost their meaning, so—Coppins: Right, and I’m sure it’s a—look, it’s a sigh of relief for Rupert. He got what he wanted, Lachlan gets what he wanted, and the other three kids walk away each a billion dollars richer. And so, in a way, you could say that this was a development that led to everybody getting what they want, but in reality, it’s kind of the finale of a story that has really, in very serious ways, wrecked this family and, for better or worse, defined this very powerful and influential media empire.[Music]Coppins: The thing that most surprises me is that they were able to come to the table at all at this point, because when I left off, right after I stopped reporting in February of this year, the two sides were really far apart. And the legal battle over the family trust had been incredibly personally bitter and angry and painful, and it had surfaced years of kind of family secrets and scheming and manipulation. And James, at least, the youngest son, did not seem eager to settle anything—and for what it’s worth, neither, really, did Rupert or Lachlan. And so I am, I guess, a little surprised that they were able to work something out. But I’m not really surprised that it ended up in Lachlan’s hands, because as far as Rupert [was concerned], this was always how the story was going to end.Rosin: Can you lay out the battle lines for us? Because I think, I mean, you’ve obviously followed it closer than most of us, and the rest of us probably have it confused with HBO’s Succession in our heads. And you can understand why that happens: The similarities are uncanny.Kendall Roy (from the show Succession): Oh, hey, Dad, I like those stories you planted about me. That was … (Makes the “okay” hand gesture.)Logan Roy: Yes. You forced my hand.Shiv Roy: There it is.Logan Roy: What you kids do not understand, it’s all part of the game.Rosin: Anyway, lay out the battle lines in the real-life Murdoch drama: Who wanted what, and what had developed over the past many years?Coppins: Right, so the players here are Rupert, of course: the man who built the empire, the either visionary or supervillain, depending on your politics and what you think of (Laughs.) the Murdoch media assets. And he had always built this empire with the idea that he would pass it on to his children.And at various points, he had favored different kids to take over when he was gone, but really, it was always supposed to be Lachlan. Lachlan is his oldest son, the one who kind of most self-consciously emulates his father, also the one who appears to share his father’s conservative politics. In fact, according to my reporting, Lachlan is actually more right-wing than Rupert and more aligned with kind of the Trump-era populist conservatism than Rupert ever was.Then there was James, the younger son, who at some points was kind of the backup—the spare, to use some royal terminology. He’s the one that I spent a lot of time profiling for The Atlantic. And he was more moderate in his politics, a little more liberal, also more contrarian, and he spent 20 years working in the family business as an executive but would often criticize the way it was managed internally. And then once he left his executive perch, increasingly, he spoke out publicly and then, in my interviews with him, was very, very public about his complaints and criticisms of the family empire. And sort of aligned with him were his two oldest sisters, Prudence and Liz.And so, in this latest episode of the succession battle (Laughs.), the latest episode of Succession, you had James and his sisters on one side, Rupert and Lachlan on the other. And what Rupert was trying to do was, essentially, to rewrite the family trust in such a way that would make it so that rather than dividing control of the empire equally between these four children, it would secure control completely with Lachlan and cut out the other three.And so that was what the—over the last year or more, there’s been this very pitched legal battle taking place in a Reno, Nevada, probate court over whether Rupert could do this. This was supposed to be an irrevocable trust; he wasn’t supposed to be able to change it. Rupert and Lachlan developed this whole secret plan that they called “Project Family Harmony,” where they were trying to, basically, assert their will without cooperation from the other three.And they failed in court initially, but a judge had to sign off on the final decision by the probate commissioner. And in the interim, a lot of things happened, including the publication of our cover story, that seemed to introduce a degree of uncertainty in the kind of legal machinations here. And it seems like, eventually, that’s what led everybody to come back to the table and see if they could make a deal without the courts, and they did.Rosin: And when you say that’s what led them to ultimately come to the table. What’s the “that”? The exposure of all the secrets, the bruising from the litigation—what is it that finally pushed them to end the drama?Coppins: Well, I think from James and his sisters’ perspective, they thought that they had won, and they had, by all accounts. The probate commissioner had ruled very decisively in their favor, and as far as they were concerned, it was over. A few things happened, though, after that commissioner’s decision was released.A judge had to sign off on it, and the judge was supposed to just kind of rubber-stamp whatever the probate commissioner decided. Rupert and Lachlan and their lawyers tried to argue that the decision was “clearly erroneous,” that the judge should reconsider it. And during this period, in February of earlier this year, The Atlantic published the profile of James that I had been working on for the past year, which appeared to give both the probate commissioner and the judge reason to believe that James had violated a court order to not talk publicly about certain court proceedings. So all of a sudden, there was this kind of element of uncertainty about whether the decision would actually become final.It’s a little strange for me to talk about this because it’s this meta level of the story where our reporting seems to have had some influence on things. That’s what The New York Times reported this week, and I’ve subsequently confirmed it: that our story did seem to influence the parties’ willingness to reconsider.The family, both parties, were faced with a choice: They could face the prospect of many more months or even years of litigation, or they could see if they could come back to the table and just come to an agreement that would satisfy everyone. And it seems that the agreement was a dollar figure.Rosin: Okay, wow. I have two things. One is, as you’re talking and you get kind of into the legal weeds and the small maneuvering, I’m literally parsing each of the things you say into an episode.Coppins: (Laughs.)Rosin: (Laughs.) I’m like, Okay, well, that episode would look like this, and here’s where they would film it and in which house. Every move is an episode.Second, McKay, wow. I had no idea how much your Atlantic story ended up being a part of the story. Was it something in the content of what you wrote? I recall that James called his father a “misogynist,” and that got a lot of attention. Was it the fact that they accused James of violating confidentiality and therefore that could open up more years of legal maneuverings that everyone was just too exhausted to deal with? What was the influence?Coppins: It was kind of both. Well, part of it was that he was extremely critical of his father, his brother, and the way they were running these companies. Again, I don’t know exactly what the legal ramifications would’ve been there, but it did raise the question of whether he had the company’s best interests at heart. James, of course, I should say, would argue that his criticism was coming from a place of wanting to turn around, salvage, reform these companies.But then the other part of it was that he, basically, was being accused of sharing information with a journalist, me, that was supposed to be under seal in this private court case. And I do want to just say one thing about this.I think that, since The New York Times story broke, there’s been some speculation in the world of Murdoch watchers that James started talking to me in an effort to mount this attack on his family, and I just think maybe a little context would be helpful here because the reality is, I approached him in January of last year totally on a lark. I had no idea any of this was happening. The legal battle was not public yet, and I just thought he might be an interesting profile. And it wasn’t until I started talking to him that I found out about this. And even then, he was pretty careful about what he was willing to say at first. And I think that some people have the impression that James was secretly colluding with this journalist to go after his family as part of the legal battle. And in reality, it was sort of serendipitous timing for me and unfortunate timing for him that I happened to approach him right as this kind of climactic moment in the Murdoch succession battle was taking place.Rosin: McKay, you mention that Lachlan—who, I should say, declined to be interviewed for your story, along with Rupert—might be more aligned with Trump politics than his father, or at least as conservative. And Rupert himself once said that his companies acted as, quote, “protector of the conservative voice in the English-speaking world.” So what does the choice of Lachlan mean for how the media empire’s positioned politically? Does nothing change?Coppins: Yeah, I mean, there had always been this hope among sort of liberals and centrists and, frankly, even some people inside these companies that, when Rupert finally stepped back or died, that James and his sisters would come in, kind of link arms—because they all have more liberal politics—oust their more right-wing brother, and then defang Fox News and reform the Murdoch press, right? That they would make these outlets more responsible, slightly more moderate in their politics. And I talked to James about this, and he was always a little wary of getting into too much detail, but he did say that he considered Fox News a blight on his family name, a threat to democracy. He said that their model is essentially lying to their viewers.So he was very clear-eyed about what he thinks the problems are at Fox News, in particular, and some of the other Murdoch media assets as well. And I think that if things had gone a different way, we might have seen a real effort by James and his sisters to do this. But with this resolution, what it essentially means is that James and his sisters have nothing to do anymore with these businesses. And with control of these companies firmly in Lachlan’s hands, I think we can expect, at the very least, for them to continue on the political path they’ve been on and, if anything, to maybe even become more aligned with sort of this new populist right-wing movement that has taken over conservative politics, at least in the English-speaking world.[Music]Rosin: After the break: how the Murdoch media empire tore apart the Murdoch family.[Break]Rosin: From the beginning, Rupert Murdoch insisted on running his media empire like a family business. But as McKay has reported, the business took precedence over the family, not the other way around.Coppins: Lachlan was chosen early on as the heir apparent and then, in 2005, after a big dispute with Roger Ailes and various other lieutenants of his father, quit in a huff and moved to Australia and actually stayed out of these companies for 10 years, while James was kind of grinding away in Asia and Europe and kind of building his résumé—Rosin: That would be Season 3. (Laughs.) which would take place half in Australia—Coppins: (Laughs.) That’s right—Rosin: —and it would be the moment that James could possibly take over, the moment when it seemed as if James was gonna be the heir apparent.Coppins: And that moment literally happened in 2015. James thought he was on the verge of becoming CEO, and he kind of got blindsided at this lunch where his brother showed up and they just told him, Hey, surprise, your brother’s coming back, and you’re going to report to him.And James was completely blindsided. He left the lunch. He basically threatened to quit. And then Rupert, kind of scrambling to control the damage and keep both of his sons in the fold, came up with this arrangement where they would both run the company together—James as CEO, Lachlan as executive chairman.It was kind of a disastrous experiment. They didn’t get along at all. They were based on opposite coasts. Every major decision had to be signed off on by both of them. And they often couldn’t get in touch with each other, or Lachlan would kind of stop responding to texts. It was a real kind of comedy of errors or farce, depending on your view of things.This also happened to coincide with the rise of Donald Trump and Brexit, a major kind of shift in Western politics that really left James feeling like he was totally misaligned with the mission of these media assets. And so he found his way out. He left in 2019—still, at first, retaining a board seat, then giving it up. But it really isn’t until right now that his involvement in the company is completely erased. Even after leaving his role in an official capacity, he still had these shares. He had these votes in the family trust that he was waiting to kind of be able to use when his father was gone. And now, with this buyout deal, he has no influence at all.Rosin: Mm-hmm. I want to ask you about The Wall Street Journal because they broke the story about Trump’s alleged birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein, which the president denies writing and called a “fake.” Trump tried to intimidate them, take legal action and, unlike some other media organizations, they didn’t buckle. What role do you think Rupert played in standing firm, and what does that say about the company and everything we’ve been talking about?Coppins: Yeah, I think you’re touching on the most interesting dynamic and the most interesting question about this kind of media empire once Rupert’s gone. Because Rupert has always been kind of divided between these two impulses, where he is a political operator, and he’s been very deft about accumulating political power through the media assets that he owns, first in Australia, then in Britain, then across Europe and the U.S. He has a very well-documented pattern of, basically, using his outlets to endorse or champion certain politicians and then cashing in on that influence by being able to further expand his empire, often by clearing certain regulatory hurdles with his political allies’ help.So on one hand, he’s a political operator, right? And after some early squeamishness, Fox News and even The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, certainly, kind of got behind Trump early on, and Trump was sort of an ally. But the other part of Rupert Murdoch is that he sees himself as a newsman, right? And he loves newspapers. His lifelong dream, or I don’t know “lifelong,” but for a very long time was to acquire The Wall Street Journal, and it took a lot of maneuvering and a lot of flattering and a lot of money, and he finally got it, and it was this trophy of his. It’s his most prestigious newspaper asset, certainly in America, you could argue in the world.And so when he came into conflict with Donald Trump over this story, and Trump is saying, I’m gonna sue you, and he reportedly got on the phone with Rupert and tried to convince him not to run the story, I think Rupert’s newsman instinct kicked in. And he, as a media mogul, as a news guy, sort of sensed blood in the water—also probably sensed, This is a great story—and backed his reporters and his editors, as a newsman should do, as a good media mogul should do.And so I don’t think he’s—he certainly hasn’t been perfect in this regard. He’s constantly politically conflicted, and he’s not a 100 percent champion of the free press. But when push came to shove in this incident, he backed his newsroom, and he came into conflict with a president that he helped get elected.My question is, when Rupert dies—he’s 94 years old—will Lachlan have the same stomach for that kind of fight? If he’s in a similar situation five, 10 years from now, and a president that his audience loves and that his media outlets have helped champion is upset about a story and pounding down the door, calling Lachlan, telling him, You need to retract this or not publish it, will Lachlan have that same newsman instinct that is coming into conflict with the political power player instinct, the profit-obsessed executive instinct?I don’t know. That’s a genuine open question. By all accounts, he does not seem to have the same kind of delighted love for journalists and being in a newsroom that Rupert seems to have. And so I don’t know if Lachlan will be able to kind of play the role of the good media mogul the same way that his dad has.Rosin: Yeah, I’m assuming—well, one, Rupert’s father was a newsman, so he has that respect. It might not just be a question of stomach; it might also be a question of taste. It sounds like Lachlan doesn’t necessarily respect that, didn’t grow up in that, doesn’t necessarily care about that.Coppins: Well, one interesting piece of context here is that, back in 2018, 2019, when Rupert started to talk to Bob Iger about selling their film division to Disney, James was basically in favor of it, in part because he believed that, strategically, it didn’t make sense for Fox to try to compete in the streaming wars. They weren’t big enough. Also because he sensed that they were in a very good seller’s market for this stuff; every big streamer was trying to accumulate more library, and so they were saying, Oh, we can sell you all this IP. He ended up being right about that—they sold at an insanely high price that now everybody, every analyst, would say they got the best price they ever possibly could have gotten.But during all of that, Lachlan did not want to sell. He was actually based in L.A.; his office was on the Fox lot in Los Angeles. And he really was much more interested in the glamorous Hollywood element of the media business than the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, slumming it in the newsrooms element of the business.Rosin: Right, right, right.Coppins: And so I do think Lachlan was really upset that they sold. Since then, you’ve seen him kind of try to make moves to edge their way back into the entertainment world. And I just—I think that Lachlan, like you said, it might be a matter of stomach, it might be a matter of what’s in his DNA, but he doesn’t seem to care about reporting and journalism and news the same way that his dad does. He’s much more interested in going to the Super Bowl when Fox is airing the Super Bowl or going to the Oscars or whatever. That’s kind of more his world.Rosin: Okay, so the family now. First of all, have you talked to James since this happened?Coppins: Not yet. He’s being very quiet.Rosin: Okay. What is your sense of what their relationship is like? So they all had to come back to the negotiating table, moment of harmony—that name is hilarious: “Project Family Harmony.” And then, is your sense that it’s just their islands? It’s chilly?Coppins: Yes, that’s definitely my sense. I mean, this is where I have to basically speculate on recent conversations I’ve had with the family but not since this development.Last year, around Thanksgiving, the initial trial in this legal battle had ended, they were waiting for the probate commissioner’s decision, and James and his sisters were feeling kind of sentimental. I think they were also hedging their bets a little. And they actually got together and sent a letter to their father, basically saying, Look, this has been incredibly painful for all of us. We don’t know what the decision is going to be, but before the damage is really done, what if we put down our weapons, called off the lawyers for a minute, and why don’t we try to see if we can make a deal? Can we just try to come to terms as a regular family, right? Let’s get in a room and talk about it. And Rupert wrote back and just totally brushed them off. He said, If you wanna talk, talk to my lawyers. He said, actually, I feel more confident than ever that I’m right about what needs to happen to these companies.And I remember talking to both James and his wife, Kathryn, and Liz about this and basically saying, Is there any coming back from this? What does it look like to try to heal this family after this incredibly bitter, pitched legal fight that has become so personal? And none of them really had a good answer. None of them were like, Oh yeah, we can get past this. And so it is hard for me to imagine that they’re all gonna be hanging out on Christmas together. I think that they are more divided, bitterly, than ever before, and while they have come to this resolution, the initial reporting at least suggests that it wasn’t all of them getting into a room; it was their various lawyers and representatives. And so, to me, that suggests that they remain fairly estranged from each other, or at least some of them.Rosin: Then this is my ultimate question, and it’s also the ultimate question of the show Succession: Why? Why did Rupert conduct himself this way? Was it the love of a conservative voice in media? Was it something he believed in for the world? Or was it just the love of watching his children sort of dangle like puppets and fight against each other and just the fun of the manipulation?Coppins: This was the question that I had the entire time I was reporting the story and talking to James, because I would often finish a long conversation with James and Kathryn, and they would be kind of recounting all these painful episodes in the family, and I would be riding the train back to Washington, reviewing my notes, and just being like, This is incredibly twisted and sad, and it seems so unnecessary.Rupert could have put an end to this succession drama years and years ago. He also, by the way, probably could have had this exact deal, where he gave each of his children $1.1 billion to buy them out, a year ago, three years ago, five years ago, longer. But he wasn’t willing to do it; Lachlan wasn’t willing to do it. And I think that a couple things were at play here.[Music]I think that Rupert, as much as he said he wanted to build this family business and pass the empire on to the next generation, I think the truth was that he was always obsessed with his own legacy, right? And the whole idea of a dynastic empire can often be very fraught in this way, where the next generation—the heirs—are seen by the patriarch more as kind of reflections of himself, walking nodes of kind of immortality, right? Like, he wanted immortality.He wanted to ensure that the empire would continue to be run as if he was still there, and so he picked the successor he was most confident would do that: the one who was most eager to please him, the one who built his entire life around trying to seem like a younger version of him.The tragic irony in all of this—and in some ways, I do feel like this whole story is kind of a cautionary tale—is that he ended up wrecking his family in the process. He built the family empire, he succeeded, and he lost three of his children along the way.Rosin: Well, McKay, thank you so much for coming on and explaining this to us.Coppins: Thank you.[Music]Rosin: McKay’s story is called “Growing Up Murdoch.” I recommend you read it. It goes way deeper on the succession drama than we could here in this episode. We will link to it in the show notes.This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music, and Sara Krolewski fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/listener.I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.