Rupert Murdoch: The Succession prequel

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This is Good, Bad Billionaire.

I'm Zing Sing.

And I'm Simon Jack.

Each episode, we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

And then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

And this episode, a big one.

A man who bestrides the media world like a colossus, one Keith Rupert Murdoch.

You know you said in a previous episode that you were scared of El Chappell.

I feel like I'm more scared of Rupert Murdoch.

I mean, what can El Chappell do to me?

Yeah, and as a journalist, he owns an awful lot of media outlets, so job opportunities can be limited.

But we will dive straight into his profile and we'll figure out how he became a millionaire, then a billionaire, and how he uses that billionaire influence around the world.

So let us start with a few big numbers.

The first number we should note is he's 92 years old.

What do you call it?

A non-agenarian?

A non-agenarian?

Yes.

And he inherited his first newspaper, age just 22.

And from that paper, he built an entire global media empire that we're known as News Corp these days.

His right-wing Fox News channel became the US's most watched and most controversial cable channel.

While he's a media magnate, he's also talked about as one of the most powerful figures in politics.

And since 1979, his tabloid in Britain, The Sun, has famously backed every single eventual election winner.

This is really a story about power money and the influence of the two of them.

But various scandals have cost him.

His company's paid the family of murdered teenager Millie Dowler £2 million

after the phone hacking scandal.

To put it simply, that power has earned him enemies.

In fact, a man was sentenced to six weeks in jail after throwing a cream pie at him.

Yes, well, it was very interesting to watch one of his wives try and intercede in that episode.

He's also managed to fit in quite a lot into his personal life.

He's got four divorces under his belt and six children.

Everyone talks about who's going to succeed him.

In fact, one of our producers has cleverly and mischievously titled this episode the succession prequel.

For those of you who are familiar with Logan Roy and the jockeying for position of his three children will know we've talked a lot about succession the TV show on this podcast but this is the OG succession inspiration although apparently in an interview with James Murdoch he claims that he never watched it really I find that absolutely impossible to believe and do if you remember when he got divorced from Jerry Hall part of the divorce settlement he specified don't tell the producers of succession give them any more ideas which if you're the producer and the writer for succession you're punching the air at that point, right?

Yeah, 100%.

And actually, one thing that was really interesting about doing the research on this was seeing how all the kind of motifs and themes of succession to TV show, which has sadly ended, get repeated in Murdoch's own life.

Yeah.

So let's hear from the man himself, being interviewed by a very young David Dimbleby for a profile the BBC did on him in 1969, just after he'd bought his first UK newspaper, News of the World, and when he was on the brink of buying the sun.

It seems to me, you see, that it's very tempting for someone in your position with a new paper to start to turn it into a salacious scandal sheet, because there's absolutely no doubt that if it were that, it would get a big circulation.

How do you resist the temptation?

Well, I doubt very much whether you're right, that it would get a big circulation.

You might get one overnight, but it wouldn't stay with you, and you wouldn't have the loyalty of your readers.

You wouldn't have people wanting it to go into their homes regularly.

You might get people in the street corner buying it quickly, but you wouldn't hold the thing.

Well, let's see how that one goes.

Let's see how that pans out.

Yeah, interesting to hear a young David Dimbleby there.

And you don't often hear from Murdoch himself, very, very rarely speaks publicly.

So an interesting clip there, right at the beginning of his Empire Building.

But let's go back to the beginning.

So Rupert Murdoch is born in 1931 in Melbourne, pre-World War II, second of four children and the only boy.

Yeah, and his father was Sir Keith.

He was knighted two years after Rupert was born.

He had been

a first World War correspondent who built Australia's first media empire, and he was the chairman of multiple regional newspapers.

And, you know, coming back to the whole succession thing, you know, in the title sequence where you see this montage of colonial mansions and children playing on kind of grassy lawns, you know, Rupert Murdoch basically grew up wealthy in a similar kind of way.

He had the tennis courts.

Yeah, his mother, Dame Elizabeth, much younger than Sir Keith.

That's a behaviour that Rupert picked up from his father, as we will see in later years.

She was a renowned philanthropist, but she taught him the importance of family, very important to the Murdochs, but also she was a disciplinarian, made him sleep in the garden hut sometimes.

And this is a really great image, right?

Apparently, he grew up hunting water rats to sell their skins for sixpence, and he only gave his sister a penny out of that profit.

And he also sold rabbit manure, which is presumably for fertilizer.

and she says that I always say that Rupert got his start in life from rabbits and manure I never saw any of the money Rupert did he spent it on gambling at school yeah I don't know what the market for water rat skins is that is no I actually had to google what they were and they're huge they weigh up to 1.3 kilos so you can kind of imagine the beginning of the biopic a water rat scurries out of its hole and it's clubbed over the head by a teenage murder.

Well, when he wasn't busy catching rats, he went to an elite boarding school from the age of 10.

He was editor of the student journal, but he was bullied.

Rupert really disliked his time there, although it did set him up in good stead to eventually attend Oxford, where he did PPE, which I was quite surprised by.

I mean, I didn't expect him to study at Oxford.

I just kind of think he emerged from Australia fully formed.

Yeah, and being slight anti-elite, probably anti-some of these kind of august institutions.

But there he is doing the PPE, something has in common with some of the prime ministers that he helped crown, if you like.

But like many students, he was actually left-wing.

He had a bust of Lenin on his shelf at college, and he campaigned to be the treasurer of the University Labour Club.

I mean, wow, that's a real sliding doors moment, isn't it?

His father apparently said, he's at present a zealous labourite, but will, I think, probably eventually travel the same course as his father.

And in fact, Sir Keith saw to it that the Aussie News correspondent Rohan Rivett took him under his wing, after which he wrote to Sir Keith, who was his boss at the time I am inclined to prophecy that Rupert will make his first million with fantastic ease.

That prophecy was proved to be pretty right because at age 21 Rupert's father Keith Sir Keith died and in his will quite a specific instruction this.

I think it's kind of unusual.

It said Rupert should continue to express ideals of newspaper and broadcasting activities in the service of others and that he would ultimately be occupying a position of high responsibility in the field of the media.

The thing I find so astonishing about this is that this will was written when Rupert was 16 years old.

Yeah, so Keith clearly had very, very clear ideas about what Rupert should do and he was up to it.

At the time of his death, Sir Keith's estate was valued at £410,000,

but he had a lot of debt on his hands.

So he was a chairman of the Herald and the Weekly Times, but he only actually owned the Adelaide News and a controlling stake in Queensland newspapers.

Which, against Rupert's wishes, his mother sold that controlling stake in Queensland newspapers to the rival, The Herald.

So that leaves Rupert with only one newspaper, the Adelaide News, which was a loss-making newspaper.

But he owns it.

And that ownership, that control is, I think, something that comes across as being really important.

And from this, I mean, let's face it, he's got a silverish spoon in his mouth at this stage.

We'll discuss Ragster Riches later in one of our categories.

But he's got the cornerstone to build a new family business.

So this is the moment in Rupert Murdoch's origin story where it sets him on this path of wanting to reclaim what was lost to the Murdoch family.

But first he has to kind of complete his tutelage and not just at Oxford.

So even after his father passes away he goes back to the UK to finish his degree but then he has this kind of moment where the Daily Express owner at the time, Lord Beaverbrook, takes him under his wing and kind of tells his deputy editor at the time, make sure that this 20-something-year-old learns something of the trade.

You know, take care of him.

You never know where he might end up.

It's amazing that.

So his father's a newspaper man.

A journalist takes him under his wing at university.

And then one of the biggest newspaper owners in the UK decides that he wants to sort of make sure he learns the trade.

He was not going to do anything else, right?

No, I mean, he was pretty much being groomed for that particular role, right?

And this is really interesting.

Apparently, he also inherits these secret notes on popular newspaper techniques from Lord Northcliffe, who is the owner of the Daily Mail and the Mirror.

Is there any newspaper proprietor around who's not involved in this kid's life at this point?

It's amazing.

I presume it says stuff like, if it bleeds, it leads.

You know, the classic maxim.

So he finishes Oxford, returns to Australia to run the Adelaide News.

And the journalist Rowan Rivet observed at the time, the metamorphosis of the young left-winger in the space of just four weeks to a right-wing, hungry, self-seeking conservative was the most remarkable thing I ever witnessed.

I just want to know what's in those notes.

In my head, it's like the Indiana Jones kind of lost arc of the covenant, where you open it up and it turns you from left-wing to right-wing.

The images we have of Rupert Murdoch from those early years are all with him holding the newspaper by the printing press.

Get the feel that he's someone to this day who still likes that newsprint underneath his fingernails, and he involved himself in all aspects of the paper's production.

Yeah, he said you can't make money just by being a backroom manager involved in union agreements and newsprint supply.

So he really likes to get his hands dirty.

And David Dimbleby's assumptions about what might happen with the News of the World and then to the sun were based on fat because he had an emphasis there on lurid stories, scandals, and that was good for circulation.

But he was also operating at a very different time for newspapers, right?

So at the time, newspapers were what you could call a penny business.

You want to make it cheap, sell it cheap, and sell loads and loads of papers.

But to make money, you need to kill the competition around you.

So to do this, to kill the competition, Rupert Murdoch goes into debt, buying up his rivals.

And that was a kind of unusual thing, being leveraged like that, borrowing money to buy new stuff.

It's a risky strategy.

However, as we'll see later, the thing is that newspapers, if you get the circulation right, they generate a lot of cash.

And the more cash you generate, the more money you can borrow.

He also switched the Adelaide News Bank from the National Bank of Australia to the smaller Commonwealth Bank.

It's kind of an interesting move, right?

Because you would assume you'd want to stick with the big, traditional, institutional bank, not the smaller one.

Well, the more important you are as a client to a bank, maybe the more attention you get.

There is a very famous old saying, and many people have said this, that, you know, you borrow £100,000 from the bank, you're working for the bank.

You borrow £100 million from the bank, the bank is working for you.

Right.

So the bank has a vested interest in making sure you succeed because if you tank, you take the bank with it.

Correct.

Right.

So using debt, debt, he buys a string of regional newspapers in Australia and New Zealand.

And in 1964, he launches The Australian, which is Australia's amazingly first national newspaper.

And he grows circulation across all those titles by employing the same tabloid techniques that we mentioned earlier.

Yeah, lyrid stories, scandals, photo splashes.

And at probably around this time, given the fact that he owns the first national newspaper in Australia, I think it's safe to call him at this point.

He's gone from zero to a million.

Rupert Murdoch is a millionaire.

So, while he's on the process of acquiring these millions and going from a million to a billion, he is also busy in his personal life.

He marries his first wife out of four, Patricia Brooker, in 1956, and they have a girl called Prudence.

Prudence Murdoch.

We never hear about her.

No, she's kept out of the headlines.

They got divorced after 11 years, so he marries wife number two, Anna Torve, in 1967.

They are together for 31 years, and they have three children together whose names you may know.

They are Elizabeth, Lachlan, and James.

One thing that is true between the fictional Logan Roy and the real Rupert Murdoch is that both of them have little time for anything other than work, and they don't actually have that many friends.

In fact, Rupert Murdoch himself said that he was too busy to have any.

One of the interesting questions I think is: too busy doing what?

What's the end game?

Is it money?

Is it it power?

What's it all for?

What drives him on?

So Rupert Murdoch has done very well for himself in Australia at this point, but he has his sights set on something much bigger, and that is the UK.

He moves there and he sets his sights on a newspaper called News of the World.

Been around for a long, long time.

It's been run by the Carr family for nearly 100 years.

So at the time, another very rich man, Robert Maxwell, is also trying to buy News of the World, and Murdoch couldn't quite match Maxwell's £34 million offer.

So he cozies up to Sir William Carr, the head of the family, playing on Sir William's apparent reported dislike of Maxwell.

And Murdoch promises Sir William all these things, right?

If Sir William just sells the paper to him, Sir William can remain as chairman, you know, he'll still have, you know, that kind of toe hold of power.

And it all comes to a head at dun dun dun, the famous succession plot line, the shareholders meeting.

Yeah, so Murdoch and Maxwell fighting bitterly.

Apparently Rupert Murdoch told the press yesterday Mr.

Maxwell called me a moth-eaten kangaroo.

He doesn't lose his words.

And ultimately, though.

Ultimately, though, the shareholders end up supporting Murdoch and the cars.

But then Murdoch goes back on his word to Sir William.

He ends up buying more shares in News of the World and just pushes the family completely out.

In fact, about this whole affair, the then MP Christopher Price said the assurance to William Carr and his family was not kept.

Some of us knew knew him well, and William Carr felt a deep sense of grievance to the end of his days.

So clearly, Rupert Murdoch is not a man who cares about making enemies or rubbing people up the wrong way.

That's for sure.

And in fact, one of the things I think you'll see throughout this, and I've spoken to a few people who work for him, one of his abiding driving forces is that he didn't like elites and the establishment, even though he is part of it.

So I think that's a common denominator.

So yeah, that's right.

So now he's got news of the world under his spell, and he sets his sights on another another newspaper, The Sun, which was at the time loss-making.

So Robert Maxwell is in the frame again in this contest.

So Murdoch again starts doing deals, right?

He speaks with the unions.

He promises them that if he gets The Sun, there'll be fewer redundancies.

And he buys it for a song, like 800K.

That's nothing, right?

If it's loss-making, who knows?

I mean, but newspapers are funny things, aren't they?

They have an influence and they have something which is very hard to value.

It's an intangible quality which can exert influence.

And of course, The Sun is a daily newspaper, whereas The News of the World was a Sunday, much more influence with a daily.

I mean, you could call it clout, the 21st century term for it.

Yeah.

So he turned The Sun into a tabloid format.

He reduced costs by using the same printing press, which proved to be very unpopular with unions.

There was huge strikes down at the Whopping Printing Press, for example, at that time.

It was a big deal.

So again, a guy who doesn't mind rubbing people up the wrong way.

And he actually told The Sun's first editor, Larry Lamb, I I want a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it.

Okay.

Can we say that?

And he got his wish.

The first topless page three model appeared in 1970.

I really struggle to think of the meeting where people were like, you know what this newspaper needs?

We need to get a random woman that nobody knows, get her to take her top off and put it on page three.

What used to be on page three before page three happened?

I honestly don't know.

It predates me.

Page three was a big thing.

Daisy from Dorking would tell you all about her views on the issues of the day.

It seems amazing now, but it was part of British life.

The people who appeared on page three, some of them became big stars.

People like Samantha Fox, Linda Lusazi, people like that.

They were household names.

God, and do you think that all came from Rupert Murdoch?

So these tabloid tactics, you know, page three is one of them.

The other one was lurid stories.

And the News of the World serialised the memoirs of Christine Keeler, who was

at the centre of the Perfumo affair, a scandal which in itself had rocked the establishment.

Right.

I think for people, could you explain the Profumo affair?

Because I think that some people listening will, this will have receded into the mists of time.

If not, they've never heard of it.

Okay, the Profumo affair, in a nutshell, it was a scandal that had rocked the establishment where a woman, Christine Keeler, was having an affair with this cabinet minister, John Profumo, and also a Russian operative.

You can see it all in the well-known film of the name Scandal.

So big,

big blow-up.

And News of the World serialised Christine Keller's memoirs of the Profumo affair.

But what the British establishment were cross about was what they saw as tawdry and vulgar sensationalism.

But what did it do to sales?

Let's guess.

Sales went up.

And in fact, David Dimpleby again quizzed him on that very thing.

Here he is.

What worries people is I think there was a comment of yours on this, that you said people can sneer as much as they like, but I'll take the 150,000 copies we're going to sell, and I believe we're now going to sell

printing at 200,000.

It suggests that you are, in fact, lining your pocket with rather sleazy material.

Well, I don't agree it's sleazy for a minute,

nor do I agree that it is unfair to the man or anything else.

As I say it once have greatest sympathy with him, but it doesn't alter the fact that everybody knows.

what happened.

Certainly it's going to sell newspapers.

And there'll be other stories

we'll put in which will sell newspapers.

I'm not ashamed of that.

Well, that's, and in a way, it goes back to the comment we made before.

It shows again his dislike of elites.

Why should John Profumo, former cabinet minister, have some kind of establishment protection, some sort of overmurta to basically protect him from the consequences of his actions?

I think that's kind of a guiding star for Murdoch in many ways.

Yeah, it is.

And you know what?

This is maybe the red-pilled alternative take on publishing Christine Keller's memoirs.

But why does Profumo get to have the last say on it?

You know, her name was also dragged through the mud, presumably.

So why shouldn't she be allowed a platform to tell her side of the story?

Yeah, it was around this time David Frost, he of Frost Nixon, also interrogated Rupert Murdoch, and it was described as an interview so hostile that some people put that interview as a reason that Rupert Murdoch decided to leave the country.

And apparently he stormed offset and saying, I will buy this company.

But mysteriously, no footage of this televised interview seems to exist.

No, and actually Piers Morgan speculated online that Murdoch actually bought it off the market completely.

I don't believe this clip is completely out of circulation.

There must be some kind of I don't know someone in their 70s who was a runner who has you know.

But anyway, so by this point he's got the news of the world, he's got the sun and later in the 1980s he would acquire the Times for $28 million, once again thwarting Robert Maxwell.

The late Robert Maxwell must have, you know, had nightmares about Rupert Murdoch.

But as we'll find out, Rupert Murdoch doesn't just want to be confined to the UK.

He wants to go global.

And with that, he moves his family to New York in the 70s.

At the moment, his company is worth around $44 million in the early 70s.

Not a big player in the US.

But the Sun, as we mentioned earlier, is a big cash flow engine.

And if you've got cash flow, you can service debt.

So you can borrow to expand.

What do you mean by service debt?

There are some businesses which are highly cash generative.

For example, newspaper business, someone hands over their 20p to get their copy of the sun, you're selling millions of copy, you're getting millions and millions of pounds in cash every day.

That means you've got ready money to be able to pay the interest when it comes due on your debts.

Other types of businesses take longer for the cash to come in.

This is an instant cash generator and therefore banks are more relaxed about lending to someone who's got ready cash available to pay their interest requirements.

But presumably that also means that you have to be quite happy with risk, right?

Because one day people might decide not to buy newspapers.

That's true, but people's newspaper choices in many ways are a bit like, in these days, a bit like cigarette brands.

You don't change every day.

If you're a sun person, you're a sun person.

If you're a mirror person, you're a mirror person.

And whole dynasties have been built on the fact that people tend to have a spiritual home for news, which they go to.

Now, it could be very different in the modern age, and we can discuss whether newspapers still have the clout they had in these days.

But those cash flows will have been seen as being quite reliable, and the banks would feel comfortable about lending the money.

That is really true, actually, because in a day and age where you can swap your supermarket brands in and out, depending on your budget and what you want to eat or whatever.

News people don't really swap newspapers in the same way still.

Well, certainly not when they were sold on the newsstand.

You're about to get on your train or your bus.

You buy one newspaper and you tend to pick the same one every day.

Can't ask for more brand loyalty than that.

So he goes on a bit of a a spending spree.

He buys the San Antonio Express News first, then New York magazine, and then the New York Post, and that becomes a very important purchase.

Because the gossip section, i.e.

page six of the New York Post, becomes a really influential section of a newspaper because politicians and celebrities start fearing and courting the reporters from it.

It becomes like, I don't know.

The place to be seen.

The place to see and be seen.

In fact, Time magazine puts Rupert Word on its cover as a kind of King Kong figure across Manhattan.

Yeah you can actually Google it.

It's a very funny cover.

And in 1980 Rupert Murdoch established News Corps, News Corp,

which becomes the holding company for News Limited, which has now got Australian, British and US arms.

So the idea of a global media conglomerate begins to take shape.

And it starts growing rapidly during the early 80s because there's this dramatic upsurge in advertising.

Companies want to be seen in these newspapers.

So, you know, he's king of New York, according to Time magazine, King Kong of New York, and in 1985 actually becomes a naturalized U.S.

citizen.

So he's now legally permitted to do something else, which is own U.S.

television stations.

I don't understand why you need to be a citizen to own U.S.

TV stations.

Me neither.

You can buy newspapers, but you can't buy TV stations.

Very odd.

But it doesn't stop Rupert Murdoch because once he gets that naturalization, he buys 20th Century Fox from an oil magnate called Marvin Davis for a cool $600 million.

Again, a lot of money in those days.

He also acquires Metro Media's independent television stations for $1.5 billion.

So he is now a television presence in six major cities.

And in 1985, he's now worth $300 million, which makes him one of the richest people in America.

And a year later, he launched the national broadcast network Fox, which becomes an entertainment staple in the US.

Yes, and it's focusing on younger audiences.

So you'll remember shows like The Simpsons, The X-Files, 90210.

I mean, The Simpsons are still going on now.

I mean, I remember a time when Fox was just the pre-roll on a good TV show, you know, how times change.

Yeah, do you even remember 90210?

Yeah, I do actually.

I watched reruns.

And presumably those reruns were also making Murdoch quite a lot of money.

So over the next few years, he makes some sales, some purchases.

Just for old time's sake, he buys the Herald and Weekly Times in Australia, something his father never managed to do.

That really solidifies his massive grip on the newspaper market.

He owns over 60% of the newspaper market.

So does this give him a monopoly?

What exactly does

a monopoly constitute?

I don't know what that means really, because in this country, in the UK, there are rules about how much concentration of the news media you can actually have.

I would have thought that in the UK, owning 60% of the newspaper market would not be allowed, but clearly in Australia, they have slightly different rules.

It's a regular occurrence, actually for Rupert Murdoch that he pushes up against the limits of what is considered acceptable in different countries in terms of concentration of media power.

Sometimes he gets it over the line, sometimes he has to cut a deal, maybe he'll have to sell something in order to buy something else.

Sometimes he'll court the politicians involved and find a way of doing it.

He did that in the satellite TV market in the UK, which we'll see in a little bit.

So bit by bit, his influence and power increases.

Sometimes King Kong gets to climb the Empire State and sometimes he doesn't.

Yes.

So in 1987, Forbes declares his net worth to be $2.1 billion,

which is tripling on from the previous year.

So he is officially a billionaire.

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Hello?

Claude, it's Ed Gamble.

Hi.

Quick one.

I've had an idea.

I want to do an official Traitors podcast for the new series.

Go on.

Well, we've got these amazing reactions of the banished players when they find out who the traitors actually are.

Yes, yes, gold.

Plus, I can actually get them on the pod for their first post-show interview, ask them all about their experience in the castle, who ate the most croissants at the breakfast, all of that sort of stuff.

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The Traitors Uncloaked, the official companion podcast with me, Ed Gamble.

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So he's a billionaire, but like with so many of our billionaires, I'd have been out a long time ago.

I've been fishing, I don't know, sailing, whatever.

One newspaper's good enough for me.

Exactly.

But he goes on, he continues to amass and consolidate power.

So just to list a few examples, he launches Sky TV in the UK.

He buys the publishing house Harper and and Collins.

He buys Intermixed Media, which at the time owned MySpace.com.

And he also buys Dow Jones, which is the publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

That is an incredible list of very, very powerful brands.

In the Asian market, he buys the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong Star TV, and India's Z TV.

And in 1996, he launches the 24-hour cable news network, Fox News.

Yes.

Which becomes news itself pretty soon.

So with your business hat on, I just, I want to know: is spreading yourself this thin, if that's what you can call it, usually a good strategy?

Because he's in lots of different markets now, right?

I don't know for sure what the rationale of this is.

Maybe there's, you know, what often happens in business is that if you go to one market and the formula works, why not apply that to another market?

Now, I'm guessing that page three probably doesn't work in China.

It probably doesn't work for the South China Morning Post.

I don't suppose it does.

But that instinct of giving working people what it is they want to watch is something that I think is probably the common denominator in all of these things.

I suppose the rationale is if you're succeeding in building this empire, like any empire builder, where's the stop button?

Right.

Why not do more?

If that's the kind of thing that drives you,

where's the off switch and why would you press it?

I mean, it's a very compelling argument, I'm sure, that off switch doesn't exist in a lot of our billionaires.

No, I think that's right.

Like I say, I would have been, I would have quit a long time ago.

You would have pressed the eject button.

Yes, exactly.

But anyway, one of the things about having this incredible reach, he becomes a very important political figure.

So we said before that since 1979, his paper The Sun has backed every single eventual winner of a UK election.

Including in 1992, when John Major was behind in the polls to Labour politician Neil Kinnock, but went on to win unexpectedly with the help of The Sun.

Kelvin Mackenzie, who was the editor of The Sun, ran a headline saying, it's the sun what won it.

And I happened to know, talking to one of the previous editors of The Sun, that Rupert Murdoch did not like that headline at all.

He did not like the paper bragging about overtly about its political influence.

I think that's kind of interesting.

Yeah, I guess you can exercise influence a lot more effectively if you're working behind the scenes, right?

Yeah, I asked one person what drove, again, one of his former editors, what drove him.

What was the strategy?

What's the end game?

And he said, it was a bit like talking to a spy case officer, that you knew what you had to do, but you weren't let into what the whole project was.

Right.

You know, you've got to pick the briefcase up from the park bench in Regent's Park at 12 midday, but you're not going to know what's in it.

Exactly right.

And

fast forward to the 1997 election, and Murdoch told the then Sun to switch party allegiance and back Blair and Labour.

200%, he said, back them 200%.

Right.

So with a daily readership of over 10 million people, they ran the headline, the sun backs Blair, and we all know what happened next.

Yeah.

And it's interesting because I know for a fact that, you know, Murdoch had met Blair, was fascinated by him, liked him a lot.

And here's the other thing is that they say that they back every winner.

Sometimes they will have created the winner and sometimes they will have realized, uh-oh, this person's going to win.

So let's flip-flop and back them.

And I think that may have happened in the Trump election, which is what we'll come on to at some point.

Interesting.

And definitely, you know, he's not immune to moving support from his papers to do a U-turn.

So in a 2010 general election, they moved support from Brown back to the Tories, to David Cameron.

David Cameron won.

He likes to keep his politicians on side because they can help him very much in his business interests.

So, for example, Rupert Murdoch owned 39% of the satellite broadcast of B Sky B and wanted to buy the rest.

And there's some suggestion that he's switching his allegiance.

And if David Cameron would get into office, then that might help him

seal that deal.

Although Rupert Murdoch said his decision to announce the B-Sky bid after the general election was pure coincidence and said, I have never asked a prime minister for anything.

No, if anything, I think Prime Minister is probably asking for quite a lot.

Yeah, well, there is a rule in politics is don't upset Rupert Murdoch.

But becoming a billionaire doesn't make Murdoch immune to failure or criticism.

So let's look at a few examples, beginning with the phone hacking scandal.

And this one really hit home in a big way and actually ended up with him losing one of the cornerstones, one of the original cornerstones of his media empire.

There were allegations that News International journalists had been involved for many years in hacking people's phones for information and the outrage hit its pinnacle when Millie Dowler, a teenager who was abducted and murdered, had her voicemails hacked.

And the former News of the World editor Andy Cossen was found guilty of conspiracy to hack phones and was given an 18-month prison sentence.

Meanwhile, there were lots of cash payments and settlements made to people who were complaining, but suffice it to say that it ended up with Rupert Marlock closing down the News of the World, which had been around for, I think, for like 160 years.

It was a big deal.

But it was seen, I think, by the Murdoch family as the sacrifice in order to keep the rest of the empire intact.

And actually, Murdoch was hauled up before MPs to answer questions about phone hacking.

And when he did so, he said, this is the most humble day of my life.

Yeah that was also the moment when the foam pie was thrown in his face despite the efforts of Wendy Deng, his then wife, to intercept the assailant.

This scandal led to a big inquiry called the Leveson Inquiry which was split into two parts and controversially the second part of the Leveson Inquiry never actually happened.

The actor Hugh Grant was one of his biggest critics and was part of a campaign called Hacked Off who campaigned against the organization because of the phone hacking scandal.

and his Hugh Grant's quote was Murdoch is a proper danger to liberal democracies if liberal democracy is your thing

but it also isn't just the UK he also had to deal with recent scandal in the US in the Fox versus Dominion court case so rewind back to the 2020 US election right when Republicans including the failed presidential candidate Trump falsely claimed that a voting machine company called Dominion had rigged the election in favor of Joe Biden that was something that was repeated ad nauseam by Fox News.

They really amped up those allegations.

So Dominion claimed that its reputation was hurt after Fox knowingly spread these lies about its voting machines and they sued Fox News for $1.6 billion.

And it almost very nearly went to court, which would have seen Murdoch have to testify.

But at the last minute, Fox News settled for $780 million just hours after the trial began.

I mean, that is very, very close to the wire.

And understanding.

There's a check written on the court steps.

Oh, yeah.

But despite this, Murdoch still has time to find love many times over.

In 1999, age 68, he divorces Anatov, who reportedly receives 1.7 billion US dollars in assets, including 110 million of which was in cash.

So that would have made it the most expensive divorce ever at that point in time.

And she had some interesting reflections on this.

I began to think the Rupert Murdoch that I love died a long time ago.

Perhaps I was in love with the idea of still being in love with him, but the Rupert I fell in love with could not have behaved this way.

So he ends up marrying his third wife, Wendy Dung, 17 days after his divorce from Anatov is finalised.

They met at a party when Wendy was just an intern.

She's actually 37 years younger than him.

And the well-known singer in the UK, Charlotte Church, sang when she was only 13 years old and was offered £100,000

or a favour.

Right.

Real godfather stuff, I think.

Yeah, exactly.

If I was 13, I'll say I'll take the hundred grand, but she doesn't.

No, she's actually told by her managers that a favour from Murdoch is actually worth more than 100K, although she doesn't seem to think it's done her any good.

Yeah, but that's interesting, isn't it?

I mean, that's quite a thing for a manager of a young celebrity to say £100,000 in your pocket now is worth less than possibly a favour in the future from Rupert Murdoch.

I think he's wrong.

But it says a lot about what people think of Murdoch's power and influence.

Anyway, he's not done with his weddings.

He divorced Wendy Deng in 2013.

In 2016, age 84, he marries Jerry Hall, famous model.

He used to be married to Mick Jagger, of course, but they didn't last long.

They divorce in 2022, and in 2023, at the age of 92, Rupert Murdoch announces his engagement to a 66-year-old called Anne Leslie Smith, who is a former dental hygienist, turned conservative radio host.

To paraphrase a line used by a comedy show in the UK about the attractiveness of very rich people,

what is it about the 92-year-old multi-billionaire media mogul, powerful, one of the most powerful people on the planet that first attracted you?

Well, it only took six months after their first meeting to announce the engagement, although it was then called off within two weeks.

Now he's got a new girlfriend rumored as Elena Zukova, who is also 66 years old, and quite brilliantly happens to be billionaire, former Chelsea owner, oligarch Roman Abramovich's mother-in-law.

Right, his ex-mother-in-law, actually, because I think he divorced her daughter.

Oh, okay.

This is just the rarefied world of the rich, right?

I'm sure they just all meet at parties on super yachts.

Yeah, I'm sure that's right.

He has had some health scares over the years.

So, in 2000, he was treated for prostate cancer, receiving radiation therapy.

Newscop at the time said, doesn't require a change in his work schedule.

Yeah, well, that was 20-odd years ago.

Just five years ago, he was hospitalized after injuring his back when he had a fall on his son Lachlan's yacht.

And Lachlan will play an increasing role in the years to come because in 2019, Murdoch sells the entertainment empire he founded, 21st Century Fox, to Disney for 71 billion.

And this is an interesting one because James's son was running this.

He quite enjoyed being the head of a movie studio.

And people close to him say that he was a bit annoyed about having that sold out from under him.

But it goes back to his roots here.

He's such a newsman.

He's much more a newsman than he is a movie man.

So he sold 21st Century Fox, but he retains control of the Fox News channel and Fox's broadcast network.

Right.

So this sale is his largest accrual of wealth in his nearly 70-odd year career.

This is the move that truly makes him rich.

So he was a billionaire before, but this makes him billion, billion, billionaire.

So the Murdoch family wealth stands at $17 billion.

Around half of it is his personally.

The rest is split between the kids.

And I think he had a 34% share in News Corp.

And he said, is that enough?

And he said, it's enough to settle any argument.

So basically, he could be the deciding vote on anything that happens in the family.

But, you know, September 2023, he's 92 years old and he announces his retirement as the chair of Foxcorp and executive chairman of News Corp and becomes chairman emeritus.

Emeritus.

Emeritus.

What does that even mean?

It just means somebody who used to be really, really senior, and you keep them around for old time's sake, and they've kind of got some honorary title.

It's kind of an academic thing a lot of the time.

And his son, Lachlan, becomes sole chairman of both companies.

So it looks like he's won the succession race.

But a lot of people think that the succession issue is not settled once and for all, and we could see more action on that in the future.

The fictionalized series of that may be over, but the real-life drama about who eventually ends up being succeeding to the whole Empire may not be over yet.

So Lachlan's on top for now, but who knows?

So it's time, this is the difficult bit, being a journalist, being in a rather uncomfortable position of asking whether Rupert Murdoch is good, bad, or just another billionaire.

Now, as we always do, we're going to do this by a series of categories.

I'm going to start with wealth, just absolute wealth.

So the Murdoch family is currently 95th richest in the world.

He's also managed to hold on to billionaire status for nearly four decades, which is very impressive.

Yeah, we also look at things like how they spend, how they wear, how they exhibit their wealth.

And he's bought some of the usual billionaire trinkets in 1997.

He bought the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team for $240 million and sold them again in 2004.

In 2004, he also bought a $44 million apartment, which at the time was the most expensive in New York and previously owned by a Rockefeller.

Yeah, and in 2021, he bought the Beaverhead Ranch in Montana for over $200 million, buying from the Koch family.

People will be covering soon, very influential.

And he also has an extensive portfolio of luxury yachts.

Yeah, although apparently, Wendy Deng's saying it's always the same with his family.

When he bought his 183-foot sailing yacht, he thought it was too ostentatious.

It's always the same with his family.

They're so cheap, they're always wondering that they spent too much money.

I mean, how would you judge wealth?

I mean, in terms of absolute wealth, he's not in the top 10.

No, I think he's got enough money to be at the top table.

Somebody said to me, said the reason he wanted money as well as power was because 90% of the best deals are offered to the 2% of the richest people.

So you've got enough money to be in and around it.

In a way, he had enough wealth to be present at the very top table of rich people.

And that's where the big deals and the empire building gets done.

And he's probably one of the richer people in media.

And without doubt, the most powerful, but we'll get onto that in a minute.

So I would give him probably a six.

Well, I'll tell you what, I'd give him a six for personal wealth.

For family wealth, I'd give him a seven.

Interesting.

So rags to riches, that's the next category.

How far have they travelled from their humble or not so humble origins?

Not so humble in this case.

Dad was a knight, mother a dame.

He went to Australia's most elite school, then Oxford.

And at 22, he inherits a newspaper.

I mean, can you imagine?

Wouldn't that be fun to inherit a newspaper at 22 years old?

I mean, at 22 years old, these days, the most you inherit student debt.

So I would say for rags to riches, he scores pretty lowly on this one.

But he did turn a single regional Australian newspaper that was losing money into the world's largest media conglomerate.

So that is a pretty big and impressive journey.

Yeah, that is true.

Oh, maybe I should reconsider.

I would say personal journey, given the fact, you know he was born into money probably a one but the journey itself from australia all the way to the white house really yeah that's that's pretty impressive yeah what would you give him in terms of rags to riches out of ten uh one right we're both in agreement on a one so now we come to the juicy bit villainy how would you rank him on villainy

Well, like most, let's have a look at what he's actually done.

He butts heads with Robert Maxwell lots of times, ends up winning most of the time.

That's palf the course in love and war.

He cozies up to the Carr family when he buys the News of the World, only to oust them after a little while.

Again, pretty power for the course.

In terms of being hard-headed, maneuvering to

gain control of businesses, to build an empire, there's nothing in that behavior which is very different from some of the other billionaires we've seen.

At the same time, I think he has been held held as ultimately responsible, right, for a lot of the more salacious, distasteful side of journalism that a lot of his publications and channels have fostered over the years or have been accused of fostering.

You know, there's that really famous interview with Dennis Potter, who was terminally ill with cancer at the time.

And he said, I call my cancer Rupert because there's no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press.

And the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life.

And he said that in the 90s.

You could easily say, you know, the same thing about Fox News.

And some people have even drawn a straight line between the January insurrection at the capital and what the kind of things that Fox News was saying about the vote being rigged.

But then you can also ask yourself, you know, the guy at the very, very top, was he making the decisions to say things like that?

He could have stopped it probably.

And, you know, you're seeing right now now the

fallout from the Trump years and you've got Trump in court.

Some people are saying, you know, the US is on the verge of some kind of political chaos with an election about a year away.

A lot of people put that down to Fox News.

You look at incidents like that and it's easy to say that this is an organization which has got its fingerprints on some pretty murky stuff.

But do we know that, you know, Rupert Murdock at the top was the person who was directing this?

I think that you've got an empire that big, all sorts of things happen how much you can trace back to him personally I don't know you could argue that he certainly had the power to stop it again what we should probably say is that no one forced people to buy a newspaper with women with her tits out on page three no one forces people to watch Fox News there is an audience out there how much you're the agent and how much you're reflecting what the society you're in is an age-old debate.

I guess the other thing is he fundamentally believed in a free press.

Now, a free press majority owned by one person with a particular agenda, you know, is that a free press in the way that we'd normally understand it?

You know,

I think that if you went out and asked a straw poll in the street, I think you would get over 50% of people saying he's a villain.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I think he would, he's the kind of guy who would hate to be given a measly down the line five out of ten.

So I'm going to give him a six.

Okay, I'm going to give him I'm going to give him a seven.

Okay.

We'll see how that comes back to haunt us.

Let's talk about his philanthropy, though, because this is the score where, you know, a lot of billionaires can kind of save themselves, right?

Yeah.

He scores pretty low on this one, Rupert Murdock.

So Forbes, which, you know, gives out these scores, he actually has the lowest philanthropic score.

And he's given away less than 1% of his wealth.

Okay, so that puts him well below people like Gates, Chuck Feeney, what have you.

He has made a few donations.

He gave £1 million to charities specified by the Millie Dowler family.

And obviously, that wouldn't have happened without the phone hacking scandal.

He's also given $100K to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.

And in 2013, he gave $15K to the Chelsea Pensioners Appeal in memory of Margaret Thatcher.

Both of the donations.

15 grand.

I mean, yeah, 15 grand is not very much, is it?

In the grand scheme of things.

That's not even a rounding area.

Probably, you know, there's a lunch bill.

I'm going to give him a zero philanthropy.

Yeah, I mean, even though, you know, I think News Cork does have a charitable giving program,

but the pot is only worth $100K to be shared between chosen charities by News Corp employees.

That's also not tons, is it?

Pitiful.

Yeah, so zero.

Okay, here's the here's for me the category that matters the most for this one, and it's power.

How powerful is Rupert Murdoch?

I mean, he apparently uses the back door of Downing Street for his appointments.

He says it's close to his apartment.

I don't believe that for a second.

He's got a reasonable claim to be one of the most powerful people on earth.

Oh, definitely.

I mean, I would say he's, given the fact his longevity and his influence, he has been a kingmaker for politics in Australia, in the UK, in the US.

You could argue he's more powerful than any sitting prime minister or president.

I feel like surely he should be a 10 on this.

Yeah, I don't think that you do this stuff.

Back one politician, then back another.

You know full well that your backing can make or break someone's political career and decide who the next prime minister or president is.

You don't do that for decades without slightly enjoying it.

So for power, I think it's 10.

I'd be surprised if we come up in all of our billionaires with someone who wields this much power.

And then legacy.

I mean, in a way, he's a bit of a throwback.

You know, the sort of newspaper media baron.

You just wonder whether there'll ever be anyone like him ever again.

No, if you want to make money these days, you don't get into newspapers.

And yet it's interesting, isn't it?

So newspapers, do they have, we've just talked about how powerful he is, he's still that powerful.

And you could argue that he's still wielding that power when some argue that newspapers aren't the force they used to be.

I mean, could newspapers make or break a political party in the same way that the sun has?

I still think they could, you know, because you can have a sea of 10 million TikToks and tweets or X's, whatever they call them now.

Yeah.

But a front page of a newspaper still has what's called cut through, right?

Yeah, it cuts through.

The other thing I think is interesting is that Rupert Murdoch did for the right what the left has never done.

And David Dimbleby said this recently, actually.

He said he created a mustering point for right-wing opinion in the US and in the UK in the way that the left has never done.

There is no Rupert Murdoch of the Left.

Oh, that's so interesting.

Because, you know, yeah, there is that sliding doors moment where could the young Rupert Murdoch, the guy with a Lenin bust on his college bookshelf, could he just have stuck the course and become a left-wing media magnate?

The world would probably be a very different place.

Well, given the fact that he has single-handedly helped pick or influence a number of different presidents, prime ministers of the UK and Australia,

you've got to imagine that he's changed the course of history and that gives him a pretty high legacy score.

So I would give him a nine.

I would give him a nine too, I think.

I think we're going to remember him in centuries to come.

Yeah.

Also, a lot depends on what happens with his kids.

But maybe we'll do a separate podcast on them.

That's very true.

It depends on what Lachlan, Elizabeth, and James end up doing.

So balls in your court, kids.

Cue the succession music.

Good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Okay, I'm the BBC's business editor.

Our instincts and our orders are for due impartiality.

Right.

Our job is to look at how they made their money and then judge them on certain categories.

It's not to take a view on their personal politics.

And the thing is, he's such a divisive, controversial, powerful figure that it's easy to get sucked into, as you say, your personal politics.

That's not our job on this programme.

And so I'm going to say he's

a very, very powerful billionaire.

I think this is a litmus test for your own personal politics

because whatever side of the political spectrum you're on, it's going to influence how you view him.

The thing I came back to is, you know, that eulogy that Kendall Roy delivers at Logan Roy's funeral.

It's a great piece of script writing, right?

You know, it was clearly written with someone like Rupert Murdoch in mind, someone who has a really kind of politicized, very Marmite, to put it mildly, legacy.

And Kendall Roy says he was a brute, he was a beast, but he built things.

And I think you can't deny that Rupert Murdoch has built things.

He's built something in absolutely, when you look at it, staggering, whether or not you agree with what it's accomplished and however much you think he had personal influence in some of the decisions that people take most issue with.

So for me, he's a billionaire.

He's not just another billionaire, but he's probably the billionaire of our times.

That's really interesting.

It's a really well put.

Okay, so who's our billionaire for next episode?

Well, you might know him as the father-in-law of the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

The father of Akshata Murti, as you say, Rishi Sunak's wife,

is a billionaire with a hotline to the British Prime Minister.

He's also known as the father of India's IT boom and the Indian Bill Gates.

Yeah, a hugely influential figure in the emergence of India as an economic and technology superpower.

So that's NR Nairayana Murti next week.

Thank you for listening to Good, Bad Billionaire.

This podcast is produced by Hannah Hufford and Mark Ward.

James Cook is our editor, and it's a BBC Audio Production.

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