James Murdoch: The Rise and Fall of a News Corp Scion

An interesting and unemotional look into the nest of vipers.

James Murdoch: The Rise and Fall of a News Corp Scion

As a story, it has everything: dynastic succession, Oedipal conflict, vaulting ambition, hubris, crisis, catastrophe … read on
Michael Wolff
4 April 2012




On Tuesday, James Murdoch gave up his last claim to BSkyB, the company that most defined him. He had not wanted to leave his job as CEO of the company in 2008, when his father first got the idea that James should instead run the Asian and European operations of News Corp. At BSkyB, only 39% owned by News Corp, James was at a distance from News Corp politics, and, more importantly, from his father's incessant interference.

What's more, BSkyB had made James. At 36, he was running a vast, successful, and rapidly growing media company. The business world had noticed.

But his father had just bought the Wall Street Journal and was moving the long-time head of the company's British subsidiary, News International, and family retainer, Les Hinton, to New York to run it. Rebekah Brooks, the editor of the Sun and herself a family favorite, was scheduled to take over Hinton's job, but Murdoch was not sure she was seasoned enough. He need someone he could trust – not least of all because, at 78, he wanted to travel a lot less and concentrate his attention on his pride and joy, the WSJ.

So why not move James? He absolutely trusted his MBA-talking son (more so, in a sense, because he didn't actually have an MBA, a degree Murdoch scorned). A father could hardly be more proud, almost in awe, of a son. And in truth, it rather rankled him that his son was getting so successful outside the company proper. Murdochs worked for News Corp. Period. Or they should.

And then, the succession: he knew had to maneuver one of his children into the second spot. The last time he had renewed COO Peter Chernin's contract, he'd had to promise Chernin the top job if anything happened to him – a bothersome situation that needed to be corrected.

But James balked. Running the foreign divisions of News Corp, and becoming merely the chairman of BSkyB, was a significantly lesser job than masterminding the growth of the world's most successful satellite broadcaster. So, father and son negotiated: the deal they struck was that if James agreed to come inside News Corp, the company would begin the process of bidding for the rest of the shares of BSkyB that it didn't own – which would, ultimately, put James in charge of the whole megillah.

Initially, Rupert didn't want to tie up all the cash the BSkyB deal would require; nor did he want to have another fight with British regulators. But James was adamant. Most persuasively, he argued that with BskyB, combined with all the other satellite, pay TV assets in Europe and Asia, James would be among the most powerful people in the world television industry – and an obvious and worthy, even inevitable, successor at News Corp. More Guardian