Rupert Murdoch’s business gave him control over his children, as they wanted his approval and so they fell into his trap. When Murdoch made a fateful decision about who should inherit his media colossus, he believed that pitting his children against each other would produce the most capable heir. Twenty-five years later, that gamble would tear apart one of the world’s most powerful families and trigger a multi-billion dollar reckoning in a succession battle featuring betrayals, lawsuits, and revenge plots.

Estrangements between famous fathers and their children are often grabbing news headlines: King Charles and Prince Harry, David andf Brooklyn Beckham, Anthony Hopkins and his daughter Abigail

Bestselling author Gabriel Sherman, In Bonfire of the Murdochs, tells the inside story of this epic family war, one whose seeds were planted a half-century ago in Australia when the complicated patriarch left his homeland to conquer the world and please the ghost of his judgemental father. That quest culminated in a media empire that controlled Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and tabloids on three continents, which wielded more political and cultural power that any single company in modern times.

Rupert’s plan to rip up a secret trust controlling his empire and anoint his conservative firstborn son Lachlan as successor set him on a collision course with his three more liberal children. What price would aging patriarch Rupert Murdoch pay to secure his legacy and would this be final and most personal deal?

Sherman interviewed over 150 sources, and concocted a rich textured narrative where each child plays their predestined role in a blood feud that explodes in a courtroom showdown. Murdoch’s children, weaponize his own secrets against him, a tragedy even Shakespeare would have appreciated, where getting everything you want costs everything you love. 

94-year-old Murdoch and his older son Lachian were committed to Fox News’s hard right-wing politics, While Lachian’s brother James started calling out misinformation. Bonfier of the Murdochs, seeks to explain Murdoch’s broken family relationships not as a departure from his empire-building, but as a product of the same ruthlessness that facilitated his success.

Sherman focuses not on the 2024 court case between Rupert and his children, where tensions with James came to a head and about which more than 3, 000 pages of documents were leaked, but he returns to Rupert’s beginnings, starting with his father, Keith. In just 185 pages, where Keith’s sensationalist reporting on the first world war and the Gallipoli campaign- which his son said “changed history” – to Fox News’s role in the rise of Trump, summing up the most important plutocrats of our age.

Rupert bought The Times and The Sunday Times promising their independence from him, but Sir Harry Evans. The Times editor claimed that he meddled. Evans also said that Rupert empathised with him after the death of his father. Then the day after the funeral he sacked him.  How a proud Australian, Rupert became a US citizen in order to buy TV stations, shocking his mother. Rupert told Liz, James and Lachlan’s sister that she would be his successor, then cut her out shortly after. In 2023, Rupert tried to amend a trust, agreed in his divorce settlement from his second wife, Anna, in a way that would clearly benefit one child Lachlan, a move had the Orwellian name “Project Family Harmony”.

Murdoch dragged his children into the family business. He hired his daughter Prue’s husband, against her wishes. He acquired his children’s companies, and lobbied them to work for him.  Liz said that after the phone-hacking scandal broke in his UK newspapers, Rupert told her to fire her brother James-“as cruel a request as a father could make”, writes Sherman (although it was Liz who came up with the idea, which she came to regret deeply. The business gave him in effect control over his children, as they wanted his approval and attention, and so fell into his trap.

He sent a hand-written note to James during court proceedings: “PS Love to see my grandchildren one day’, a gesture interpreted as manipulation.

Rupert’s attempt to change the family trust rightly outraged James, Liz and Prue. In 2024, a court ruled for them. The warring sides reached a settlement, with the dissenting children receiving an extra $1.1bn each and Lachlan being bedded in as Rupert’s successor. James will not be able to lead a revolution at Fox News.

According to Sherman “Rupert built a $17billion fortune, but destroyed everything he loved in the process.” The Patriarch would counter that some of his children are ungrateful for the riches that they inherited. 

Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family- and the World by Gabriel Sherman, Simon & Schuster £25/$29, 256 pages.