On the morning of September 16, 2024, a convoy of black SUVs snaked through the Nevada high desert, looking for all the world like a funeral procession. But the destination wasn’t a cemetery; it was the Washoe County Courthouse in Reno. Inside one of the vehicles sat 93-year-old Keith Rupert Murdoch. He was dressed in a dark suit, but—in a detail that feels too perfectly scripted for television—he was wearing running shoes.

He had come to wage war against his own blood.

For 7 decades, Murdoch has been the “Sun King,” a man whose gravitational pull is so strong that prime ministers, presidents, and his own children have been forced to orbit him. He is the man who built the modern media world, toppling governments and reshaping the cultural consciousness of the US, UK, and Australia. Yet, in his final act, he was engaged in a “blood feud” with 3 of his children—James, Elisabeth, and Prudence—to break the irrevocable family trust he had once established to protect them,.

I have always been fascinated by the figure of Rupert Murdoch. There is something almost Shakespearean about a man who controls a global media empire, possesses a colorful and chaotic personal life, and whose decisions imprint themselves so deeply on the society and culture of the world’s most influential economies. He is a titan who seems to exist above the laws that govern ordinary men, shaping presidents and prime ministers while his own family fractures under the weight of his ambition.

The true depth of this tragedy and triumph is laid bare in Gabriel Sherman’s explosive new biography, Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family –– and the World, published by Simon & Schuster. Sherman’s book, released on February 3, 2026, offers a front-row seat to the “blood feud” that exploded in that Reno courtroom. Drawing from this definitive text, we can finally understand the machinery of the man who built the modern world’s most potent megaphone, only to find himself deafened by its feedback loop.

This piece is my way of taking notes and analyzing in my head what I read in Sherman’s biography on Murdoch. I’m sharing what I’ve learned about the terrifying consistency of a man who applied the same ruthless efficiency to his marriages and children as he did to his newspapers. Through Sherman’s lens, the saga transforms from a mere corporate history into a psychological thriller—a “Darwinian struggle” that begins with a lonely boy in a “sleepout” cage in Australia and ends with a 93-year-old patriarch in a Nevada courtroom, suing his own flesh and blood to preserve his ideology. It is a story of how the “Boy Publisher” conquered the world by proving that “money always wins,” only to discover that the ultimate cost of such a victory is the very family he claimed to be building it for,.

Sherman is uniquely qualified to guide us through this wreckage. A journalist and screenwriter who specializes in the “psychohistories” of right-wing power brokers, Sherman previously wrote The Loudest Voice in the Room (about Fox News founder Roger Ailes) and the screenplay for the film The Apprentice (about Donald Trump). He has been covering the Murdochs for ~20 years, building a “mosaic of sources” among the “courtiers” who populate the family’s royal-like court. Sherman argues that this book is not a standard business biography, but a “meditation on power” and a “biography of a family”. He wrote it now because the story has finally reached its “endgame”—with Murdoch in his 90’s and the succession legally settled, we can finally see the full arc of a “King Midas” who turned everything he touched into gold ($17 billion of it) but destroyed the things that actually matter: his wives, his children, and arguably, the stability of Western democracy.

Ultimately, this profile argues that Rupert Murdoch is the architect of the modern world’s polarization. He created the template for the “Boy King” CEO we now see in figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg—men who operate with impunity, accountable only to their own impulses. He proved that if you feed the public a steady diet of grievance and entertainment, you can monetize division on an industrial scale. But to understand how we got Trump, Brexit, and the fractured reality we live in today, we have to look back a century, to the broken boy in Australia who decided to burn down the establishment that refused to let him in.

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I. The Seeds of Grievance

To understand why Rupert Murdoch is the man he is today—why he seems incapable of retiring, why he treats life as a constant war—we have to look at the “seeds” planted in the soil of his Australian childhood. Sherman’s reporting reveals that Murdoch’s psychology was forged by two opposing forces: a father he worshipped but could never quite please, and a mother who withheld affection to “toughen him up.”

The ghost of Sir Keith

Rupert Murdoch lived his entire life chasing a ghost. His father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was not just a dad; he was an Australian national hero. He was a brooding Scot with an “anvil-shaped nose” and a deep belief that “newspapers are power”.

The hero of Gallipoli : Sir Keith is famous in Australia for the “Gallipoli Letter,” and this story is the very first lesson Rupert learned about how the world works. During World War I, British commanders were sending Australian troops to their deaths in a disastrous campaign at Gallipoli, Turkey. They were using Australians as “cannon fodder” in a hapless campaign. The British military censored all news reports to hide their incompetence. Keith, then a young reporter, went to the front lines and was appalled. He decided to break the rules. He evaded the military censors and smuggled an 8,000-word letter directly to the Australian Prime Minister, exposing the “ghastly and costly fiasco”. The letter caused a massive political scandal that got the British general fired and led to the evacuation of troops, saving thousands of lives.

• The Lesson: This taught Rupert that the “establishment” (the elites in charge) is often corrupt and a liar. It validated the idea that a newspaper owner should use their power to topple governments and that “rules are meant to be broken”.

The “lowbrow” genius : But why did Sir Keith become a newspaper man? Sherman reveals a fascinating detail: Keith suffered from a debilitating stutter as a child. It was so bad he couldn’t even ask for a train ticket; he had to write his destination on a slip of paper. Because he couldn’t speak, he turned to the pen to find his voice. Keith learned the trade from the British “Godfather of Fleet Street,” Lord Northcliffe. Northcliffe taught Keith that newspapers weren’t about public service; they were about profit. The formula was simple: “health, sex, and money” (and crime). Keith took this “lowbrow” strategy back to Australia, shortening headlines and sensationalizing stories. It worked—circulation jumped 40%. Rupert learned early that “highbrow” journalism loses money, while “lowbrow” shock value builds empires.

The absent father : Despite his public heroism, Sir Keith was a distant god at home. He was “morose and withdrawn” and had “little patience” with Rupert. Sherman notes that Keith frequently wrote letters to friends lamenting his “disappointment” in his only son, worrying Rupert was too “callow” (immature) to survive the brutal media business,. The only intimacy Rupert ever knew was transactional. On weekends, the young Rupert would sit on his father’s bed, watching Sir Keith edit manuscripts and circle headlines with a fountain pen,. That was the only way to get his dad’s attention: through the business. He learned early that love is something you earn through work.

The lesson on ownership : The most traumatic business lesson came when Sir Keith died suddenly of a heart attack in 1952. Rupert was only 22. He expected to inherit an empire. Instead, he watched as the executors of the estate—the “establishment” men his father trusted—stripped the family of their major assets to pay taxes. Sir Keith had been an employee (Managing Director) of the powerful Melbourne Herald group, not the majority owner. The board kicked him aside at the end. Rupert was left with only a single, struggling afternoon tabloid in a minor city: the Adelaide News. The establishment sneered at him. They called him “The Boy Publisher” and predicted he would fail. Rupert viewed this as a theft. He realized that because his father didn’t own voting control, his legacy was vulnerable. This is why Rupert Murdoch spent his entire life obsessed with control—he structured his empire so that his family would always have the voting shares, ensuring no bank or board could ever strip him of his company again.

The mother and the cage: Dame Elisabeth’s brutality

If Sir Keith provided the professional template, his mother, Dame Elisabeth, provided the emotional scars. A strict, status-conscious socialite, she subscribed to a philosophy of “tough love” that bordered on emotional brutality. She later freely admitted, “Maybe they thought I was an old monster in those days.”

The sleepout : At their family estate, Cruden Farm, she forced Rupert to sleep in a “sleepout”—a wire-enclosed cage on the veranda—where he was exposed to the heat and cold, believing it would build character. She did not coddle him; she sought to harden him.

The swimming pool incident : The most harrowing story in the book—the one Sherman identifies as the foundational trauma—is the “Swimming Pool Incident.” When Rupert was 8 years old, during a voyage to England, Dame Elisabeth decided it was time for him to learn to swim. She didn’t hire an instructor. Instead, she simply threw him into the cruise ship’s pool. Rupert recalled “screaming and flailing” in the water while his parents stood on the deck and just watched.

• The insight: He didn’t drown, but the lesson was seared into his brain: No one is coming to save you. You are entirely on your own. Life is literally a matter of sink or swim. Sherman argues this specific brutality explains why Rupert later felt comfortable pitting his own children against one another in a “Darwinian struggle”—he was just doing to them what was done to him.

The radical shift: The outsider

The grievance that fuels the Murdoch empire further crystallized at Geelong Grammar, Australia’s equivalent of Eton. There, the wealthy establishment boys mocked Rupert for his father’s “lowbrow newspapers.” He was bullied and beaten by teachers for breaking rules. “I can remember one particular fascist type who let me have it with special brutal delight,” Rupert recalled.

This abuse crystallized his “general desire for retribution” against elites. To rebel against the snobbery of his peers and his father’s conservatism, Rupert adopted the persona of “Red Rupert” at Oxford. He kept a bust of Lenin in his room—not out of true conviction, but to shock the bourgeoisie. It was an early sign of his willingness to adopt any ideology that disrupted the status quo. He realized that being an “outsider” was a powerful brand, even if you were actually the rich son of a knight. He spent the next seventy years proving that the “Boy Publisher” could cast a longer shadow than the father who doubted him and the mother who threw him in the deep end.

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II. Building the predator’s empire

If the “Boy Publisher” provided the motivation, the “Great White Shark” provided the method. Sherman’s biography suggests that Murdoch’s business history is best understood not as a corporate resume, but as a series of hunts. Sherman describes Murdoch’s “spirit animal” as a great white shark: a creature that must keep swimming (expanding) or it will die. He operates with “catlike cunning,” identifying undervalued assets held by complacent establishment figures, charming them into a false sense of security, and then ruthlessly devouring them.

Murdoch is not an inventor; he is a predator. He didn’t invent the tabloid; he just made it meaner. He didn’t invent cable news; he just made it louder. His genius lies in his ability to spot weakness in the establishment he loathes and exploit it for profit.

The Australian laboratory

The pattern began in the 1950s in Australia. After taking control of the tiny Adelaide News, Murdoch bought the Mirror in Sydney and immediately declared war on the dynastic Packer and Fairfax families. He treated Australia as a laboratory for his lowbrow instincts. He pushed editors to “out-shock the competition,” leading to infamous headlines like “LEPER RAPES VIRGIN”. It was crude, it was shocking, and it sold. He learned early that outrage is a commodity, and he was the only one willing to mine it without shame.

The British invasion: Destroying Fleet Street

By the late 1960s, Murdoch had outgrown Australia. He set his sights on London, where the clubby, aristocratic world of Fleet Street was ripe for disruption.

The betrayal of the Carrs (1968) : His first target was the News of the World, the Sunday tabloid owned by the aristocratic Carr family. The paper was struggling, and the family was infighting. Murdoch presented himself as a “white knight” to save them from a hostile takeover by Robert Maxwell. He charmed the Carrs, promised to keep them involved, and then, once he secured the shares, ousted them. “He turns on lovers and chops them off,” a stunned executive noted. It was a masterclass in the “Trojan Horse” strategy he would use for the next 50 years.

The Sun and the “Page 3 Girl” (1969) : He bought the struggling Sun for a pittance and transformed it into a cultural weapon. Murdoch destroyed the polite norms of British journalism by introducing the “Page 3 girl”—topless models in a family newspaper. The establishment was horrified, but the working class loved it. Circulation exploded. Murdoch proved that “health, sex, and money”—yep, Sir Keith’s old formula—were what people really wanted, not high-minded lectures. The Sun became the engine of his empire, generating the cash that funded his global expansion.

The Times and the Thatcher Deal (1981) : His most audacious coup was buying The Times of London, the establishment paper of record. To bypass antitrust laws (he already owned The Sun and News of the World), he leveraged his political alliance with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Because his papers supported her, her government waived the deal through without a referral to the Monopolies Commission. To secure the sale, Murdoch promised editorial independence. A year later, he fired the legendary editor Harold Evans for being too liberal. A judge later remarked that “Rupert issued promises as prudently as the Weimar Republic issued marks”.

The conquest of America

In the 1970s, Murdoch turned his gaze to New York. The city’s liberal elites treated him as a “bad element” and a “carpetbagger,” but Murdoch knew how to find the cracks in their armor.

The betrayal of Clay Felker : The acquisition of New York magazine remains the most chilling example of Murdoch’s “intimacy as a tactic.” Murdoch befriended Clay Felker, the magazine’s founder, who naively took the Australian tycoon under his wing. Felker taught Murdoch “how status operates in New York,” introducing him to the right people and the right places. While dining with Felker and literally “stealing food off his plate,” Murdoch was secretly plotting a hostile takeover of Felker’s own magazine. When Felker realized the betrayal and fought back, Murdoch told him coldly, “It’s money that wins this kind of scrap”. He forced Felker out, leaving the man broken. It was a brutal lesson: friendship, to Murdoch, is just due diligence.

The transactional politics of the Post : He bought the New York Post not for profit (it lost money for decades), but for power. In 1977, he backed the underdog Ed Koch for mayor. Once Koch won, Murdoch called in the favor: Koch allowed the Post’s delivery trucks to use the highways, a regulatory tweak that saved the business money. It was pure transactional politics.

20th Century Fox and Fox News

In the 1980s, Murdoch decided to break the liberal monopoly of American TV (CBS, NBC, ABC).

• The studio: In 1985, he made a run at 20th Century Fox. The studio was owned by wildcatter Marvin Davis, a man of “Falstaffian appetites.” Murdoch charmed Davis, initially buying 50% of the studio to ensure he had a pipeline of movies and shows for his future network.

• The stations: To build the network itself, he spent $2 billion to buy Metromedia from billionaire John Kluge. This gave him TV stations in major markets like New York and Los Angeles, forming the backbone of what would become the Fox Network.

The Cost: Citizenship and Debt The cost of this conquest was total. First, he had to trade his identity. US law forbade foreigners from owning television stations. Without hesitation, Murdoch became a US citizen, effectively discarding his Australian allegiance to satisfy the FCC. It was a transactional nationality change that shocked his mother, but for Rupert, patriotism was secondary to expansion. Second, he nearly bankrupted the company. To fund these massive acquisitions, he took on an “expansionary lunge” of debt that led to the 1990 Debt Crisis.

The bankruptcy scare (1990)

This “expansionary lunge” almost killed him. By 1990, the “shark” had stopped swimming and started drowning. Murdoch had accumulated $8.2 billion in debt. He couldn’t pay a $10 million loan to a small bank in Pittsburgh, which threatened to liquidate his entire empire.

• The political fix: He had to beg 146 banks for mercy. It is strongly alluded in Sherman’s book that Murdoch survived not just by financial maneuvering, but by calling in political favors. His executives reached out to the White House, and it is implied that President George H.W. Bush (whom Murdoch’s papers supported) helped pressure the banks to clear the way for his survival (Read: intervened to pressure the Pittsburgh bank to back down.)
• The lesson: This didn’t humble him; it taught him he was invincible. He realized that to prevent future interference, he needed absolute control. The crisis turned him from a “buyer” into a “seller” temporarily, but it reinforced his belief that political influence is the ultimate insurance policy.

WSJ as ‘crown jewel’ and Dysney sale

Having survived the 90s, Murdoch returned to the hunt.

The Wall Street Journal (2007) : He coveted The Wall Street Journal not just for profit, but for respectability—he wanted the “crown jewel” of American journalism. The paper was controlled by the Bancroft family, a dynasty that Murdoch viewed as “dilettantes” who used the paper’s profits to fund hobbies like show-horse breeding. Murdoch wooed them with charm and a massive premium, paying $5 billion for the company. He promised to preserve its editorial independence. But, true to the pattern he established with The Times, once he owned it, he gutted their influence and installed his own loyalists to reshape the paper to compete with the New York Times,.

The Disney Sale (2017) : In perhaps his most shocking maneuver, Murdoch proved he was the ultimate pragmatist. Realizing that even his massive empire was too small to compete with the new tech giants like Netflix and Amazon, he decided to sell rather than slowly decline. He sold 21st Century Fox (the movie studio and entertainment assets) to Disney for $71.3 billion. It was a stunning pivot from “buyer” to “seller.” He was unsentimental about selling the studio he had spent decades building; he preferred to secure his family’s cash fortune and retreat to a smaller, fortress-like company focused on news and sports,.

The phone hacking scandal

However, the ruthless culture Murdoch cultivated—where “getting the scoop” mattered more than ethics—eventually metastasized into a cancer that nearly destroyed everything.

The scandal: In 2011, it was revealed that journalists at Murdoch’s British tabloid, News of the World, had been systematically hacking the voicemails of celebrities, politicians, and royals to get stories. The breaking point came with the revelation that they had hacked the phone of Milly Dowler, a kidnapped and murdered thirteen-year-old girl, giving her parents false hope that she was still alive because the journalists were deleting messages to make room for more,.

The fallout: The scandal was an “existential crisis.” It exposed the moral rot at the heart of the empire.

• The sacrifice: Murdoch shut down the 168-year-old newspaper to stem the bleeding. But the personal cost was higher. To save the company and protect himself, he needed a scapegoat. He protected his favorite editor, Rebekah Brooks, but allowed his son James Murdoch (who was running the UK division) to take the fall. James was humiliated before Parliament and labeled “incompetent.”

• The break: This was the moment the family fractured. James realized his father would sacrifice his own son to save the stock price. It was the definitive proof that for Rupert Murdoch, the business always came first—even before blood.

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III. The architect of polarization

If the first half of Murdoch’s life was about acquiring power, the second half was about weaponizing it. Sherman argues that Murdoch is the “architect” of the modern world’s polarization, creating a template where truth is secondary to the “green” of the stock price.

Fox News and the “Green” ideology

Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to build Fox News, not just to elect Republicans, but to tap into an underserved market of viewers who felt looked down upon by the mainstream media. He monetized resentment.

The Trump paradox : Sherman reveals that privately, Murdoch thought Donald Trump was an “idiot” and “unfit” for office. In 2015, he even encouraged Ailes to have Fox anchors hammer Trump during debates to derail his candidacy. But when Trump won the nomination and resonated with the Fox audience, Murdoch ruthlessly pivoted. He suppressed his personal disgust to form a symbiotic alliance. He gave Trump a propaganda machine; Trump would later give Murdoch regulatory clearance for the Disney merger.

The Dominion betrayal : The most damning evidence of Murdoch’s values occurred after the 2020 election. When Fox News correctly called Arizona for Biden, viewers fled to rivals like Newsmax, causing the stock price to wobble. Murdoch panicked. Although private emails reveal he knew Trump’s fraud claims were “bullshit” and “damaging,” he allowed his hosts to broadcast conspiracy theories to stop the bleeding and keep the audience hooked to Fox. His rationale was stark: “It is not red or blue, it is green.”

This ‘betrayal’ cost the company $787.5 million to settle Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News moments before the April 2023 trial. It was one of the largest defamation settlements in U.S. history. He paid nearly a billion dollars to make the problem go away rather than have himself and his executives testify in court, proving that for him, the truth is a variable that can be settled with a check.

Sherman notes that Murdoch viewed this historic payout not as a moral reckoning, but simply as the “cost of doing business”—a necessary expense to avoid testifying and to keep the audience he had spent decades radicalizing. He sacrificed the truth to save the stock price, effectively enabling the January 6th mythos to take root.

The “Silicon Valley” template

Sherman points out that Murdoch’s most lasting (and toxic) legacy might be teaching a new generation of oligarchs—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos—that values are an obstacle to profit.

• The “Boy King”: Murdoch created the mold of the CEO who controls his company like a “Sun King,” immune to board oversight. He proved that you can rationalize any social harm (from “Page 3” to election lies) as long as the engagement metrics are up.
• Sucking up to power: Sherman highlights how modern tech moguls are using the Murdoch playbook. He cites Amazon (owned by Bezos) paying millions to license a Melania Trump documentary as a direct descendant of Murdoch’s transactional style—using media assets to curry favor with the White House to avoid regulation. Murdoch taught them that “sucking up to power” is a fiduciary duty.

Brexit and the transactional politics

Murdoch’s influence wasn’t limited to the US. In the UK, he treated Prime Ministers like employees. He supported Margaret Thatcher because she crushed unions. But when the Tories became weak, he switched The Sun’s support to the Labour Party’s Tony Blair because Blair promised not to regulate his business interests. When the EU threatened regulation, Murdoch turned his guns on Europe. The Sun spent decades “coarsening the culture” and blaming Brussels for British problems. This ecosystem of grievance was the fertile soil from which Brexit grew. Murdoch didn’t necessarily believe in Brexit ideology; he believed in a weak government that couldn’t touch him.

Ultimately, Murdoch proved that if you feed the public a steady diet of “health, sex, and money” mixed with grievance, you can manipulate the political landscape to serve your commercial interests. He built a machine that broke the world, simply because it paid to do so.

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IV. The Darwinian father

If Rupert Murdoch’s business strategy was predatory, his parenting strategy was experimental. Sherman’s reporting suggests that Rupert didn’t raise a family so much as he engineered a “succession struggle,” believing that a “Darwinian struggle would produce the most capable heir.” He pitted his children against one another in a lifelong game of King of the Hill, seemingly unaware—or perhaps unbothered—that the game would eventually destroy the players.

This wasn’t just neglect; it was a philosophical choice. Rupert viewed his children not as individuals to be nurtured, but as extensions of his own ambition. The emotional landscape of the Murdoch household was barren, best illustrated by a story about the “birds and the bees.” When his wife Anna asked Rupert to talk to their young sons about sex, Rupert took Lachlan and James into the elevator of their Manhattan apartment building. They rode down to the lobby and back up—a trip of about 45 seconds. When the doors opened, Rupert told Anna, “I did it”. That was the extent of his capacity for intimate guidance.

Instead of intimacy, he offered competition. Instead of parenting, he pitted them against one another in a blood sport. And in that competition, there were distinct roles that each child was forced to play.

Lachlan, the golden child : Lachlan was the anointed heir, sharing his father’s conservatism, but Rupert tested him until he broke. In 2005, feeling undermined by his father’s executives, Lachlan quit and fled to Australia—a “shattering” blow to Rupert. Rupert spent a decade wooing him back, eventually securing him not as a builder, but as a “caretaker” to protect the right-wing legacy,.

James, the human shield : James tried to be the “modernizer,” but Rupert used him as a scapegoat. The family’s definitive fracture occurred during the 2011 Phone Hacking Scandal. Needing a fall guy to save the company, Rupert refused to fire his favorite editor, Rebekah Brooks. Instead, he decided James had to step down. In a moment of “twisted” cruelty, Rupert forced his daughter Liz to deliver the fatal message to her brother. As Sherman writes, “He used one child to fire the other”,. This betrayal drove James to eventually resign in protest, citing “disagreements over certain editorial content”.

The Collateral Damage : The other siblings were marginalized by Rupert’s misogyny. Liz, arguably the most talented executive, was sidelined by Rupert’s “old-fashioned primogeniture”. Prudence, the eldest, was frequently “erased” from public statements entirely, leading her to join the lawsuit simply to be heard.

The family group therapy

The dysfunction of the Murdoch siblings wasn’t a secret; it was a corporate liability. In the fall of 2010, in a desperate attempt to fix the fractures he had engineered, Rupert agreed to a family group therapy retreat at their Australian sheep farm in Cavan. A celebrity counselor facilitated the session, asking the family to stand in a semicircle and scream their grievances at the person in the center. It was, as James later described it, a “car crash.” The family was so emotionally stunted, so accustomed to using business as a proxy for feeling, that they couldn’t handle raw human emotion. They never did it again.

In the end, Rupert’s “Darwinian experiment” succeeded in one way: it identified the survivor (Lachlan). But the cost was the total incineration of the family unit. He raised executives who viewed love as a zero-sum game, where one sibling’s rise required another’s fall.

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V. Wives as corporate divisions

If Rupert Murdoch’s children were employees he couldn’t fire, his wives were corporate divisions he could liquidate. Sherman’s biography reveals a chilling pattern: he acquires a wife for a specific “era” of ambition and divests when she becomes friction. As former editor Andrew Neil observed, “Even the wife was expendable.”

Patricia Booker, the starter division : His first wife, a flight attendant from Adelaide, represented his modest beginnings. When his ambition outgrew the provincial city, it outgrew her. She was left isolated and discarded as he moved to conquer Sydney, justifying the neglect as “the price of conquest”.

Anna Torv, the stabilizer with ‘poison pill’ : For 30 years, Anna was the bedrock of the empire, but she made a fatal error: she asked the shark to stop swimming. When she suggested he retire to write, he scoffed, “What about the household?” He didn’t want a partner; he wanted a support staff. He discarded her for a younger woman, but Anna left a bomb in the building: the poison pill! In their settlement, she forced the creation of the irrevocable Family Trust, ensuring her children held the voting rights. This specific mechanism is what forced Rupert to sue his own children in 2024 to try to break the shackles she placed on him.

Wendi Deng, the China pivot : Wendi Deng was the “Growth Strategy,” representing his expansion into China and tech. Yet, even the “Tiger Wife” was humiliated. In 2006, Rupert announced on Charlie Rose—without telling Wendi—that their daughters would not get the same voting rights as his older children. Later, after finding her diary entries praising Tony Blair, he executed a preemptive strike, blindsiding her with a divorce filing just as he had so many business rivals.

Jerry Hall, the redundant employee : The pattern culminated with Jerry Hall, who served as his “nurse” during the pandemic. When she became a “gatekeeper” to his children, Rupert ended the marriage via a cold email stating, “I have much to do.” He fired his wife like a redundant employee.

Elena Zhukova, the final witness : Now, at ninety-three, he has married retired scientist Elena Zhukova to witness his final act in the courtroom, proving ultimately that he is incapable of a partnership of equals.

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VI. Conclusion: The King of Ashes

The final act of Rupert Murdoch’s life did not take place in a boardroom or a newsroom, but in a probate court in Reno, Nevada. It was here, in September 2024, that the “Sun King” finally burned down the village to save the castle. (Note: It was because of this ‘case ‘final act’ that led author Sherman to write the biography. It’s a sort of an ‘ending’ to this long drawn Murdoch saga.)

The Reno showdown: ‘Project Family Harmony‘

The conflict that brought the family to Nevada was born from a panic. Rupert realized that his 3 “liberal” children—James, Elisabeth, and Prudence (the “Objecting Children”)—held enough voting power in the irrevocable Family Trust to eventually outvote Lachlan and change the direction of the company after Rupert died. To Rupert, this was an existential threat. He believed that if Fox News became “moderate,” its value would collapse. So, he sued his own children. He gave the legal maneuvering the Orwellian codename “Project Family Harmony.”

The irony was suffocating: to preserve the “harmony” of his conservative legacy, he had to legally destroy the actual harmony of his family. The trial was a spectacle of “psychological abuse”. Rupert’s lawyers interrogated James, trying to paint him as a bitter, failed son. Rupert himself testified, dismissing James’s moral grievances about Fox News as “twisted”. In one of the most chilling details Sherman unearths, Rupert sent James a handwritten note during the legal warring that ended with, “P.S.: Love to see my grandchildren one day.” It was a masterclass in emotional manipulation—weaponizing his status as a grandfather to unbalance his opponent.

The verdict: The price of victory

In the end, money won. The legal battle ground on until September 2025, when the family finally reached an accord. The “Objecting Children”—James, Liz, and Prue—agreed to sell their voting rights to Lachlan. The price was $1.1 billion each. Rupert got exactly what he wanted. He secured Lachlan’s ascension as the unchallenged “King” of the empire, ensuring that Fox News would remain a bastion of right-wing populism. But the victory was pyrrhic. The settlement effectively severed the family ties. James, the son who wanted to be an architect or a historian, took his billion and walked away, finally free of the gravity that had crushed him for decades. Liz and Prue, too, were cashed out. The family business is now just a business.

The legacy: The midas curse

What, then, is the legacy of Keith Rupert Murdoch? Sherman argues that the comparison to Shakespeare’s King Lear is too generous because Lear learns humility in the storm. Murdoch never did. A more accurate metaphor, Sherman suggests, is King Midas. Rupert Murdoch possessed the golden touch. He turned a small Adelaide newspaper into a $17 billion fortune. He built a media ecosystem that elected presidents, delivered Brexit, and reshaped the modern world. But like Midas, he found that his touch was a curse. amassing that wealth required him to damage virtually anything he touched: the environment, the truth, and ultimately, the people he claimed to love. He turned his children into combatants and his wives into casualties. He holds the gold, but he cannot hold anything warm.

Final image: The shark swims alone

As I close the book, the image that lingers is not of the titan at the head of the table, but of the 93-year-old man (or 95, when I read Sherman’s book) in the Reno courthouse. He is wearing his dark suit and his running shoes, prepared to move fast and to win. He proved his mother wrong. He didn’t sink when she threw him in the pool. He swam harder and faster than anyone else. He became the Great White Shark he always emulated. But as he enters his final twilight, having cast a shadow longer than his father’s and wider than the world, he finds himself exactly where that terrified 8-year-old boy started: alone in the deep end, flailing in a sea of his own making, with no one left on the deck to wave back.

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Check the other posts in this BOOK NOTES on the Murdochs:

• LALA’S BOOKNOTES: Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the epic fight to control the last great media dynasty broke a family—and the world, by Gabriel Sherman
• RUPERT MURDOCH: The man who wanted everything
• MURDOCH’S 5 WIVES: Managing a portfolio of mergers and liquidations
• LACHLAN MURDOCH: A comprehensive profile of ‘the last prince’
• JAMES MURDOCH: The Redemption of ‘the Rebel Heir’
• ELISABETH ‘LIZ’ MURDOCH: A comprehensive profile of ‘the exiled queen’
• PRUE MURDOCH: A comprehensive profile of ‘the ghost in the room’