Part IThe Story
The case was styled In the Matter of the Doe 1 Trust, docket PR23-00813. It would decide who controlled the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the Times of London, the Sun, the New York Post, HarperCollins, and most of the daily newspaper market of an entire continent, so the anonymity of the name was almost funny. On September 12, 2024, a Nevada probate commissioner named Edmund Gorman Jr. turned down a petition from the Associated Press, CNN, NPR, the New York Times, Reuters and the Washington Post to open the proceedings. These were six institutions the petitioner had spent seven decades competing with, mocking, or trying to buy. The matter, Gorman ruled, was "essentially a private legal arrangement." Four days later, on September 16, the trial began behind closed doors at the Washoe County Courthouse in Reno.
The petitioner was Rupert Murdoch, ninety-three years old. His request was easy to state and very hard to defend. In 1999, after his divorce from his second wife, Anna, he had signed a family trust whose terms everyone involved understood to be irrevocable. That trust divided the family's controlling votes equally among four of his children: Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James. He now wanted to take the votes away from three of them and give everything to Lachlan. His side's argument was that the siblings' interference would cost the companies money, so it would be "in their own best interests if they have their votes taken away from them." The plan had an internal name. Lachlan, who had set it in motion in mid-2023, called it Project Family Harmony. The same paperwork described his brother James as "the troublesome beneficiary."
The trust had one trustee, a company governed by six managing directors. The four children appointed one each. Their father appointed two, and each of his carried two votes. The company was called Cruden Financial Services.
Cruden is a parish on the Aberdeenshire coast. In 1882 a Free Church minister's son named Patrick Murdoch was ordained there and married there before sailing for the Colony of Victoria. Cruden was also the name Patrick's son Keith gave to his farm at Langwarrin, south-east of Melbourne. Keith honeymooned there in 1928 with a debutante not yet twenty, and he died there of cancer on the night of October 4, 1952. Seventy years later the word had become a legal entity in Nevada. The family had moved the trust to a state whose law permits "decanting," which means pouring a trust's assets into a new vessel with altered provisions, and which does not require that anybody be told.
This was not the first Murdoch document whose author needed it to reach the right people before the wrong ones intercepted it.
By the Numbers
Seven Decades of Leverage
£410,004Sir Keith Murdoch's estate at probate in 1952, much of it consumed by mortgages and death duties
$31MPrice paid to Dorothy Schiff for the New York Post in 1976
17% / 39%Murdoch family's economic stake vs. voting power in News Corporation, June 2013
168 yearsAge of the News of the World when it printed its final edition on July 10, 2011
$71.3BDisney's price for most of 21st Century Fox, completed March 2019
$787.5MFox's settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, April 2023
$3.3BCost of the September 2025 settlement giving Lachlan control until at least 2050
A Letter Written From Memory
In September 1915, French military police at Marseille arrested a thirty-year-old Australian journalist and confiscated the letter he was carrying.
The letter was not his. Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, the Daily Telegraph's correspondent at the Dardanelles, had written it on September 8, addressed to the British prime minister, H. H. Asquith. It was an uncensored account of what was going wrong at Gallipoli. Keith Murdoch had agreed to carry it, even though only weeks earlier he had signed an undertaking with Sir Ian Hamilton, the campaign's commander, promising "not to attempt to correspond by any other route or by any other means than that officially sanctioned." Hamilton found out about the letter. The police were waiting.
What Murdoch did next is the first entry in the family's operating manual. He reached London on September 21 and went to the Australian High Commission. Working from memory, he wrote his own version to his own prime minister, Andrew Fisher. It was angrier, more personal, and less accurate than the letter he had lost. He sent it to Australia, then gave two copies to David Lloyd George, the British munitions minister, together with a letter of introduction from Fisher. Within days it had reached Asquith and was circulating among senior ministers of the British government.
— Keith Murdoch, letter to Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, September 1915The conceit and self complacency of the red feather men are equaled only by their incapacity. Along the line of communications, especially at Moudros, are countless high officers and conceited young cubs who are plainly only playing at war. ... appointments to the general staff are made from motives of friendship and social influence.
The letter contained many mistakes and exaggerations. Its main points were supported by other evidence. Hamilton was relieved of command, and the evacuation that December went off with perfect effectiveness. In the meantime Lord Northcliffe's staff had obtained a copy of the private letter. Northcliffe owned the Times, the Daily Mirror, and a good deal of the rest of Fleet Street. Murdoch was alarmed at first. Then he became the tycoon's friend, and in time his student.
It is worth pausing on who this man was. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister, raised in the Melbourne suburb of Camberwell. He was shy, and he stammered so badly that in 1903 he became dux of Camberwell Grammar mostly by not having to talk. He skipped university and took a job as district correspondent for The Age in Malvern, raised the paper's local circulation, and saved enough for a ticket to England. In London, in 1908 and 1909, he studied part-time at the London School of Economics and took speech therapy from Lionel Logue. The stammer became manageable, though not before it cost him a job at the Pall Mall Gazette. The empire founder's original problem was physical: he had trouble getting words out. His solution, which in its way became the family business, was to arrange for other people to say them at enormous volume.
The method had a failure mode, and it appeared within three years. On the Western Front in 1917 and 1918, Murdoch campaigned against Major General John Monash, a commander of Jewish German ancestry. He promoted Brudenell White instead, and together with the official correspondent Charles Bean he told Prime Minister Billy Hughes that the Australian Imperial Force's senior officers were strongly opposed to Monash. Hughes went to the front before the Battle of Hamel intending to replace him. He consulted the same officers and found their support for their commander strongly positive. Hamel succeeded, and that closed the question. Murdoch kept lobbying against Monash anyway, trying to keep him from controlling the repatriation of the troops. It was the same letter-writer, with the same conviction, now pointed at the wrong target.
He came home in January 1921 as chief editor of the Melbourne Herald. He had the paper's general manager demoted and began applying what he had learned from Northcliffe, with Northcliffe still advising him by post. When Hugh Denison, proprietor of the Sydney Sun, tried to enter Melbourne in 1922 with the Sun News-Pictorial, Murdoch fought him until 1925, when the Herald, its own circulation up 50 percent, took the tabloid over. Melbourne gave him a nickname: Lord Southcliffe. In 1928 he became managing director of the Herald and Weekly Times, and that June he married Elisabeth Joy Greene. He had seen her photograph in Table Talk and asked a friend to introduce them.
The company spread. In Adelaide the Herald's publisher bought the weak Register in 1928 and remade it as a picture tabloid. By 1931 the Register had been closed, the evening News had been acquired, and the city's newspaper market was a monopoly. In 1933 Murdoch founded The Courier-Mail as Brisbane's daily. By 1935 the Herald was involved with eleven radio stations, while Murdoch campaigned to stop the government's Australian Broadcasting Commission from running its own news service. That same year he brought together the rival cable services as Australian Associated Press. He was knighted in July 1933.
He made prime ministers, and he said so. In the Depression his papers turned on James Scullin's Labor government and backed the breakaway Joseph Lyons all the way to the Lodge. By 1936, regretting it, he said of Lyons: "I put him there and I'll put him out."
He also collected modern art. In October 1939, as the war began, he persuaded the Herald's board to pay for an exhibition of contemporary French and British painting, arguing that "Gallipoli had given us one kind of maturity" and this would provide another. The show toured the eastern states in direct opposition to a conservative, government-authorized Australian Academy of Art. It would become one of the landmark events in Australian art history.
Eight months after that, the same man became the censor. In June 1940 the government made Sir Keith Murdoch Director-General of Information, and on July 18 he obtained authority to compel every news outlet in the country to publish government statements whenever required. People compared him to Goebbels. Press cooperation stopped. By November he had resigned.
In 1948 he was the main force behind the American Australian Association. In 1949, sick with cancer, he retired from almost everything except the Herald and struck a deal with its board. He would buy control of the Adelaide newspapers, and in return the board got first option on his Brisbane shares if he ever sold them. He died three years later. The estate was valued at £410,004, and much of it went to mortgages and death duties. The Herald exercised its option on Brisbane, and The Courier-Mail, the paper he had founded, went with it. His family was left with News Limited, proprietor of a single afternoon tabloid distributed only in South Australia.
His son was twenty-one.
The Foundation Stone Was Built to Break Unions
News Limited did not start as a Murdoch idea. James Edward Davidson founded it in Adelaide in 1923, with money from the Collins House mining interests, for the specific purpose of publishing anti-union propaganda. It bought the Barrier Miner in Broken Hill and the Recorder in Port Pirie, then Adelaide's weekly Mail, and then it started The News. The Herald's company acquired control. Keith Murdoch took a personal stake in 1949. The biographer Bruce Page later called The News the "foundation stone" of everything that followed. It was the one piece of the father's empire the son kept, and it had been laid down to defeat organized labor. Hold onto that. It comes back in East London sixty years later.
Rupert's first major move was out of the newspaper business altogether. In 1958 News Limited launched NWS 9, an Adelaide television station, after its young proprietor appeared before the licensing board and argued for an exclusive licence, which is to say, for a monopoly. He had help from the Masonic Grand Lodge of Adelaide. The station was charged with seditious libel at the very start. Sixty-five years later, a Guardian account of that hearing took its headline from a line the young applicant had apparently found persuasive: "It depends what you call monopoly."
Then he went to Sydney, the city his father's company had never conquered. He bought the afternoon Daily Mirror, and with it he took on the two families who ran Sydney's press: the Fairfaxes, whose Sydney Morning Herald was hugely profitable, and Frank Packer's Consolidated Press, whose Daily Telegraph led the tabloid market. Consolidated Press Holdings would turn up in his family's life again decades later, under the Packers, splitting the cost of a A$40 million settlement with News Corp over the collapse of a telecommunications start-up that his eldest son had backed. In early 1961 he bought a struggling record label, Festival Records, and within a few years it was the country's leading local recording company. He bought a television station in Wollongong to get a foothold in Sydney television and ran straight into Australia's cross-media ownership rules, which barred anyone from owning both a major newspaper and a television station in the same city. He lobbied against those rules, personally and in his papers, for the next forty-five years. In 2006 a Coalition government with control of both houses of Parliament rewrote them. The changes took effect in 2007, and in 2017 the remaining "two out of three" restriction was abolished as well.
In 1964 he founded The Australian, the country's first national daily, first in Canberra and then in Sydney. It was a broadsheet. It gave News Limited respectability, a readership of elites, and the political reach that comes with that, though never a large circulation. Its editorial page would back John McEwen of the National Party at one point and Gough Whitlam of Labor at another. The proprietor's loyalties were to outcomes, not to parties. In the same year he took a 29.57 percent stake in the Wellington Publishing Company in New Zealand. It was his first newspaper investment abroad.
The method was settled by then, and it hardly changed afterward. He bought loss-making papers, made drastic changes to management and content, and fought circulation wars without rules. Then he used the profits to fund the next purchase. He micromanaged. By the end of the 1960s that method had produced a financial base big enough to take abroad.
Fleet Street, Then the Fortress
He bought the News of the World in January 1969 and The Sun, from the International Publishing Corporation, that October. The sons of the man who had written to Lloyd George now owned two of the papers Lloyd George's successors read on Sunday mornings. Readers bought them in very large numbers.
In February 1981, after twenty-one days of negotiation with the print unions, he bought The Times and The Sunday Times from the Thomson family. This was Northcliffe's old paper, bought by the man Melbourne had called his southern copy's son, which is the sort of symmetry he tended not to discuss. Traditionalists were horrified and warned he would take the Times downmarket. In 1986 a group of journalists founded The Independent as a quality alternative, more or less in protest. The Times had an independent board, and Murdoch said the board and the law prevented him from exercising editorial control. The Spectator later wrote that the board had "never played much of a role in the 30 years Murdoch has owned the paper." On September 17, 2007, he told British parliamentarians who met him in New York that he acted as a "traditional proprietor." He meant that he exercised editorial control on major questions, such as which party to support at a general election and what line to take on Europe. He meant everything else, too, but that was what he said.
In 1986 he moved the London operation to Wapping.
The print unions had controlled Fleet Street's production for generations, and their contracts made new technology almost unaffordable. News International brought in a group of senior Australian executives, among them John Dux, formerly managing director of the South China Morning Post, and moved printing to a new plant in the East End. The National Graphical Association and the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades fought back. There were battles outside the plant every night, and delivery vans and depots were repeatedly and violently attacked. The building got a nickname, Fortress Wapping. In the end the unions gave in.
The arc is plain enough without spelling it out. A company founded in Adelaide in 1923 to publish propaganda against unions broke the strongest unions in British newspapers within one generation of its inheritance. In 2007, opening a new plant in Lanarkshire, the man who had done it described it as "the largest and fastest print press in the world." By then the newsrooms had moved out of Wapping. The presses had won, at least for a while.
The Price of a Passport
America started small and cheap. In 1973 he bought the San Antonio Express and the San Antonio News, which later merged. Next he founded the National Star, a tabloid sold at supermarket checkouts. In 1976 he paid Dorothy Schiff $31 million for the New York Post. In 1984 he bought the Chicago Sun-Times from Field Enterprises for $90 million, and sold it two years later.
Then he went to Hollywood. In March 1985, News Corp paid $162 million for half of TCF Holdings, parent of the 20th Century Fox film studio, buying the stake from Marc Rich. Two months later, on May 6, it announced that it would buy John Kluge's Metromedia television stations, along with their syndication arm, for $3.5 billion. In September it bought Marvin Davis's half of Fox for $325 million. The plan was a fourth commercial broadcast network for the United States, a thing almost everyone in the industry regarded as impossible.
There was a legal obstacle. Only American citizens could own American television stations.
On September 4, 1985, Keith Rupert Murdoch became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Under section 17 of the Australian Citizenship Act 1948, that meant he was no longer an Australian. His father had founded the American Australian Association in 1948, a society for bringing the two countries together. The son brought them together in his own person and gave up one passport for the other, and the reason was not sentiment or ideology. It was a regulation about station ownership.
The Fox Broadcasting Company went on air on October 9, 1986. Its late-night program was Joan Rivers's The Late Show. Prime-time programming followed in April 1987. In 1995 the Federal Communications Commission looked into whether News Corp's Australian base made Murdoch's ownership of Fox illegal. The commission noted that the stations were held by a separate company whose chief shareholder was an American citizen, Murdoch, even though nearly all the stations' equity was controlled by News Corp. It ruled for him, finding his ownership to be in the public interest.
The new American made one more purchase in 1987. News Limited acquired the Herald and Weekly Times, the Melbourne company his father had run, the one whose board had exercised its option on the Brisbane shares the year Keith died. In 1990 its two Melbourne papers were combined as the Herald Sun. News Limited also acquired the remaining shares of Queensland Newspapers, publisher of The Courier-Mail. The paper Keith had founded in 1933 and lost in 1952 came back to the family thirty-five years later. The man who bought it had renounced Australian citizenship two years before.
He kept his headquarters in Adelaide for another seventeen years.
Leverage Is Another Word for Nerve
The late 1980s show what his deal-making looked like when nobody slowed it down. In 1987 News Corp paid $300 million for the American publisher Harper & Row. In 1988 it paid $3 billion for Triangle Publications of Philadelphia, owner of TV Guide, Seventeen and the Daily Racing Form. In 1989 it paid $721 million for William Collins, Sons, the British publisher, and merged the two book houses into HarperCollins.
Sky Television, the British satellite service, was losing money on a scale that would have sunk most media companies. News Corp kept it alive the way it had kept its other businesses alive, with cash from properties that made money. In 1990 its rival, British Satellite Broadcasting, accepted a merger on Murdoch's terms. The combined company, BSkyB, has dominated British pay television ever since. By 1992 the debts were large enough that News Corp had to sell many of the American magazines it had bought in the mid-1980s to K-III Communications and spin off its long-held Australian magazines as Pacific Magazines. He sold enough to survive, and nothing more.
Then he looked east. In 1993 News Corp paid more than $500 million to Pearson for 63.6 percent of STAR TV, the Hong Kong satellite network, and bought the remaining 36.4 percent in July 1995. At the time of the first purchase he made one of the most widely quoted remarks of his career, about telecommunications being a threat to totalitarian regimes and satellite broadcasting letting viewers in closed societies get around state-controlled television. His father had once held the authority to make every Australian outlet carry government statements. The son, at least in public, was now promising to help audiences escape governments that did the same.
On July 17, 1996, News Corp announced it would buy New World Communications for $2.48 billion in stock, having picked up a 20 percent stake two years earlier. On October 7, 1996, Fox Entertainment Group launched the Fox News Channel, a 24-hour cable news network set up to compete with Time Warner's CNN. The man behind it was sixty-five. In 1999 The Economist examined News Corp's accounts and reported that one arm, Newscorp Investments, had earned £11.4 billion in profits over eleven years and paid no net corporation tax. Its estimate of what the group might normally have been expected to pay was about $350 million. The company's structure was complicated, international, and made use of offshore havens, and those features were partly the reason it existed.
In late 2003 he paid General Motors $6 billion for a controlling 34 percent of Hughes Electronics, operator of DirecTV, the largest American satellite system. That put the empire in orbit as well.
The Arithmetic of Control
News Corporation Limited was incorporated in Adelaide on March 15, 1980, as a holding company for News Limited. For twenty-four years the corporate home of the largest media group in the world was a city of under a million people. Its subsidiaries owned The Sun, The Times, the New York Post, a Hollywood studio, and an American television network.
On November 3, 2004, after a shareholder vote approved reincorporation in Delaware, News Corp Limited stopped trading on the Australian Securities Exchange. Five days later, on November 8, News Corporation began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Its headquarters became 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan. Eighty-one years after Davidson's propaganda sheet, the company had become American, nineteen years after its owner did.
The structure of ownership mattered more than the address. News Corp had two classes of stock, one with votes and one without. In August 2005 the Murdoch family owned about 29 percent of the company's equity. By June 2013 that had shrunk to around 17 percent. Almost all of the family's shares were voting shares, though, and they carried 39 percent of the vote. That was enough to rule.
The one real threat came from John Malone of Liberty Media, who had built a large stake, roughly half of it voting stock. In November 2006 News Corp settled the matter with a swap: it gave Liberty its 38.5 percent of DirecTV, and Liberty gave back its 16.3 percent of News Corp. Murdoch handed over a satellite system to recover a block of votes. The Saudi investor Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal owned about 5 percent in 1997 and about 7 percent in 2010, worth roughly $3 billion. At the same time News Corp owned 19 percent of the prince's Rotana Group, the largest entertainment company in the Arab world. He sold all his shares in November 2017.
The company held a management conference every year, privately and with no published agenda. It met in Cancún and on Hayman Island. In 2006 it met at Pebble Beach, where an agenda leaked to the Los Angeles Times listed speeches by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tony Blair, Bono, Al Gore, John McCain and Bill Clinton. Shimon Peres sat on a panel called "Islam and the West." Newt Gingrich attended, and so did Nicole Kidman. No uninvited journalists were allowed in. The world's largest news organization was holding the most exclusive off-the-record meeting in the industry.
In June 2010, before the American midterm elections, News Corporation gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association. It gave another $1 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which campaigned hard for a Republican Congress. Nathan Daschle of the Democratic Governors Association wrote to Fox News chairman Roger Ailes asking, "in the interest of some fairness and balance," for a disclaimer on every Fox segment about governors' races. He did not get one.
The Last Newspaperman Buys the Internet
In 2004, at seventy-three, he set aside $2 billion and personally chose a group of young executives to work out how to use the web as a distribution channel. There were four of them: Ross Levinsohn, Adam Bain, Travis Katz and Michael Kirby. They became the core of Fox Interactive Media. In July 2005, outbidding Viacom, News Corporation paid $580 million for Myspace. According to the fairness opinion, about $327 million of that was attributable to Myspace itself. The deal looked smart. Within a year Myspace was worth three times what News Corp had paid.
Then Facebook arrived. In the last quarter of 2010 Myspace lost $156 million, more than twice what it had lost a year earlier, and those losses pulled down otherwise strong results for the parent company. News Corp put the site up for sale in February 2011, valued at somewhere between $50 million and $200 million. The bid deadline, May 31, came and went without a single offer above the $100 million reserve. In June, Specific Media and the pop singer Justin Timberlake bought it for $35 million. In October, Murdoch called the purchase a "huge mistake." He did not often say that.
What he understood better than almost anyone was the ambition of print. In February 2007, at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit, he announced a business news channel to take on CNBC, which he considered too fond of scandal. In July 2007 News Corp agreed to pay $5 billion for Dow Jones & Company, owner of the Wall Street Journal. That October the Fox Business Network went on air, even though Dow Jones had an existing contract to supply content to CNBC. The lawyers had read the contract. The new channel, its morning host said, would still "actively use" other Dow Jones properties.
So within two years he lost about half a billion dollars on the future and paid $5 billion for the most prestigious version of the past. The Journal was the paper Keith Murdoch would have wanted. Myspace was something he could not have imagined. His son was the one of them who wrote down the loss.
Wilful Blindness
The machine kept running whether or not anyone was watching.
By 2002 Britain had an organized trade in confidential personal information, and the newspaper industry used it heavily. That year the Information Commissioner's Office ran Operation Motorman and raided newspapers and private investigators. At the premises of an investigator named Steve Whittamore, it found more than 13,000 requests for confidential information from newspapers and magazines. It identified 305 journalists at 30 or more publications who had bought such information. The operation's lead investigator later said his team had been told not to interview any of the journalists, and accused the authorities of being too "frightened" to take them on.
The Metropolitan Police had already accumulated a large file on Jonathan Rees, a private investigator. Operation Nigeria, which ran until September 1999, had found that Alex Marunchak of the News of the World was paying Rees up to £150,000 a year for information. Rees bought information from serving and former police officers, customs officers, a VAT inspector, bank employees, and burglars. He was convicted in 2000 for planning to plant drugs on a woman so that her husband could win custody of their child, and served five years. When he got out in 2005 he went straight back to work for the News of the World. By then Andy Coulson had replaced Rebekah Brooks as editor.
Glenn Mulcaire had been the assistant to another investigator, John Boyall, until the autumn of 2001, when the paper's assistant editor, Greg Miskiw, gave him a full-time contract. In June 2002 Mulcaire obtained the home address, Met payroll number, date of birth and mortgage payments of Detective Chief Superintendent David Cook, an officer investigating a murder, and followed Cook and his family. Scotland Yard dealt with this through informal conversations with the paper's editor, Rebekah Brooks, and took it no further.
In 2007 Clive Goodman, the paper's royal correspondent, went to prison for hacking the phones of three members of the royal household. News International said he had acted alone. In July 2009 the Guardian reported that News Group had paid more than £1 million to settle cases that threatened to show otherwise. That included more than £400,000 to Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers' Association, a payment that, in the Guardian's words, kept the public from knowing anything about the hundreds of pages of evidence disclosed in his case.
On July 4, 2011, the Guardian reported that a private investigator working for the News of the World had hacked the phone of Milly Dowler, a thirteen-year-old who disappeared in 2002 and was later found dead. The hacking had led her parents and the police to wrongly believe she was still alive. It happened while Rebekah Brooks was editor.
What followed took eleven days. On July 6, Prime Minister David Cameron announced the public inquiry that became the Leveson Inquiry. On July 7, The Daily Telegraph reported that families of dead British servicemen had been targeted, and the Royal British Legion cut its ties with the paper. That same day James Murdoch announced that the News of the World would close after one more issue. It appeared on July 10, ending 168 years of publication. On July 13, Rupert Murdoch withdrew News Corporation's bid for the 61 percent of BSkyB it did not already own. The company had held 39.1 percent of the business it had saved by subsidizing it in the 1990s, and it was now prevented from owning the rest. On July 15, Rebekah Brooks resigned as chief executive of News International, thanking "Rupert's wisdom, kindness and incisive advice." Les Hinton also resigned that day. He had run News International for years before moving to run Dow Jones. He said:
"That I was ignorant of what apparently happened is irrelevant and in the circumstances I feel it is proper for me to resign."
The Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, resigned too. The Guardian published a list of what the investigators had collected: 4,332 names or partial names, 2,987 mobile phone numbers, 30 audio tapes, and 91 PIN codes. The names included British victims of the September 11 attacks and relatives of people killed in the July 7, 2005 London bombings. In Washington, Senator Jay Rockefeller called for an investigation, and on July 14 the FBI opened one into the alleged hacking of 9/11 victims.
At the Leveson Inquiry, Rupert Murdoch acknowledged that there had been a cover-up within the News of the World. On May 1, 2012, a parliamentary select committee published its report.
— UK parliamentary select committee report, May 1, 2012[Rupert Murdoch] exhibited wilful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications ... [and is] not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.
A year later, on July 3, 2013, Channel 4 News broadcast a recording of Murdoch speaking privately to staff earlier that year. He called the investigators "totally incompetent," said they had acted over "next to nothing," and explained what his papers had done as "part of the culture of Fleet Street."
Andy Coulson, by then a former communications director to the prime minister, was convicted. Brooks was paid a reported £10.8 million when she left. In September 2015 she was reappointed chief executive of the same company, by then renamed News UK.
Splitting the Signature
On June 28, 2012, Murdoch announced that News Corporation would be split in two. The statement spoke of unlocking "the true value of both companies." The investors who had been pushing for it were mainly thinking of the scandal.
The details came quickly. The board approved the split on May 24, 2013. Four days later, on May 28, at an investor presentation, the new publishing company revealed its logo. It was the words News Corp in a script based on Murdoch's own handwriting. Shareholders voted for the separation on June 11. On June 19 the new company's Class B stock began preliminary trading in Sydney at about $15, then fell 3 percent to $14.55, valuing the company at about $7.9 billion. The split took effect on June 28, with one new share for every four old ones. On July 1 both companies began trading on Nasdaq. Under the old ticker, the film and television business was renamed 21st Century Fox. On the first day, Fox rose more than 2 percent and News Corp fell 5 percent. The market had decided which half was the future. The founder's handwriting went on the other half.
In the same month that his signature became a corporate logo, he filed for divorce from his third wife, Wendi Deng, citing irreconcilable differences.
The new News Corp was run by Robert Thomson, previously editor of the Wall Street Journal. Thomson promised to "cultivate a start-up sensibility" inside what he called "the world's most established and prestigious diversified media and information services company." Coming from a company that had just written off Myspace, that was a brave thing to say. He sold the Dow Jones Local Media Group, 33 small newspapers, to a Fortress affiliate for $87 million, saying they "were not strategically consistent with the emerging portfolio." He bought Storyful, a Dublin social-news agency, for about $25 million, and Harlequin, the romance publisher, for $415 million. He bought Move, owner of realtor.com. By 2024 digital revenue had grown from 20 percent of the total in 2014 to 50 percent. In June 2025 his contract was extended to 2030.
The other half was sold. In 2014, 21st Century Fox talked about merging with Time Warner and dropped the idea on August 5. In 2017 Disney made an offer. Comcast bid against it, and 21CF accepted Disney's $71.3 billion. Comcast got Sky as consolation in 2018. On March 19, 2019, the broadcast network, the news channels, and the sports business were spun off as Fox Corporation. The next day Disney took the studio, the cable entertainment channels, and the film library.
The Fox film studio, bought in 1985 from Marc Rich and Marvin Davis, the purchase he had changed nationality to make work, had left the family. What stayed was everything that went out live: news, sports, and the network itself.
Three Heirs and a Network
Lachlan Keith Murdoch was born on September 8, 1971, at Wimbledon Hospital in London. He moved to New York at three, went to schools in Aspen and Manhattan and then to Phillips Academy, and graduated from Princeton in 1994 in philosophy, with a senior thesis on Kant. In 1989 he took a gap year and spent three months in Sydney doing a menial job at the Daily Mirror, the afternoon paper his father had bought thirty years earlier to break the Fairfax and Packer hold on the city. In 1994, aged twenty-two or twenty-three, he became general manager of Queensland Newspapers, publisher of The Courier-Mail, the paper his grandfather founded in 1933 and lost in 1952, and which his father bought back in 1987. On his first real job, the third generation was managing an inheritance the first had made and the second had recovered.
He moved up quickly. He was deputy chief executive of News Limited in 1995, joined the News Corporation board in 1996, and became deputy chief operating officer of global print in 2000. He ran the New York Post and grew its circulation by more than 40 percent. Then, in July 2005, he resigned abruptly after a confrontation with Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News. His father backed Ailes. Ailes took over Lachlan's role as chairman of the television stations, and Lachlan returned to Sydney with his wife and son, aged thirty-three and the third most powerful executive in the company.
He set up an investment company, Illyria, and bought into a set of businesses: the Rajasthan Royals of the Indian Premier League, Quickflix, Funtastic, and an Australian radio network that became Nova Entertainment. He bought into Network Ten. By late 2012, on paper, Illyria had lost A$110 million of the A$150 million it had invested there, and the share price had dropped about 80 percent. In June 2017 Ten went into voluntary administration after Lachlan and Bruce Gordon declined to extend its credit facility. Lachlan bid for it and CBS, Ten's largest creditor, outbid him, and he lost everything he had put in. The One.Tel collapse cost News Corp A$13.3 million of a A$40 million settlement. One bet worked very well. He had led News Corp's first investment in REA Group, $10.75 million, only $2.25 million of it in cash, and he argued against selling it when others wanted to. By 2014 it was worth more than $3.6 billion to the company.
James was the other son. He had run Festival Mushroom Records, the label that grew out of the record company his father bought in 1961. Later he ran BSkyB and became News Corporation's chairman and chief executive for Europe and Asia. On July 7, 2011, he was the one who announced the end of the News of the World. On July 31, 2020, he resigned from the News Corp board, "due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company's news outlets and certain other strategic decisions." The disagreement included how the company's papers had covered the 2019–20 Australian bushfires. He named one of his sons Walter, after the great-uncle who wrote essays and has a university named for him.
Elisabeth, the eldest of Anna's children, built and ran a television production company. Prudence, the only child of the first marriage, to a Melbourne flight attendant named Patricia Booker, had worked as a journalist at the News of the World and, according to Michael Wolff, had never shown much interest in the business. Wolff's The Man Who Owns the News is the closest anyone came to sitting at the family table. William Shawcross's earlier Murdoch describes the empire as it looked before there was any argument over who would inherit it.
Lachlan came back in March 2014 as non-executive co-chairman of both companies, the year after the split and his father's divorce. In 2015 he became executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, and in 2019 chief executive of Fox Corporation. In 2018 he described his politics as "conservative economically and more liberal on social policy." It was reported that during the 2016 campaign he had kept toilet paper printed with Donald Trump's face in his house. He also defended Tucker Carlson as Carlson's ratings climbed.
Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox in 2021 for $1.6 billion over claims, broadcast after the 2020 election, that its machines had rigged the vote. Judge Eric M. Davis found that Dominion had produced enough evidence of actual malice by Rupert and Lachlan to go forward. The documents showed Lachlan taking a hands-on role in steering Fox News toward Trump. In April 2023 Fox paid $787.5 million to settle. On April 24, Carlson was gone. Three days earlier, in Australia, Lachlan had dropped his defamation suit against the small website Crikey and was left paying more than A$800,000 of its legal costs. Smartmatic's $2.7 billion claim is still going.
In October 2022 Rupert proposed merging News Corp and Fox again, which would have strengthened Lachlan's position. James was against it, and so were major shareholders. On January 24, 2023, the father dropped the idea as "not optimal." In September 2023 he announced his retirement, and that November, at ninety-two, he became chairman emeritus.
In July 2024, the son who had once stood in front of Ailes and lost described what he was there to do.
— Lachlan Murdoch, interview with Paul Kelly of The Australian, July 2024I believe that if it wasn't for The Australian today, if the policy debate in Australia today was being driven by the ABC, then we would be a totally different country. I think our role is essential both here in Australia but also in Britain and the United States. This is absolutely how I see my leadership mission.
He has Australian citizenship. He has said he thinks of himself as Australian and that he wishes he could get rid of the American accent.
Irrevocable
His body had been failing for some time before the Reno filing. In April 2023, Gabriel Sherman reported in Vanity Fair a series of mostly unreported medical emergencies: a broken back, seizures, two rounds of pneumonia, atrial fibrillation, and a torn Achilles tendon. Sherman's later book, Bonfire of the Murdochs, filled in the rest. In July 2022 Murdoch collapsed in Oxfordshire with complications from COVID-19 and spent a week in Cromwell Hospital. He needed Lachlan's help to move around.
Television had already played out the scenario. In 2023, HBO's Succession, which drew on the Murdochs, aired an episode called "Connor's Wedding," in which the patriarch dies suddenly and the empire falls into chaos. People acting for Elisabeth Murdoch reportedly asked for a plan to make sure that would not happen to their family. They got one, though not the one they wanted. In December 2023 their father told the children he intended to change the trust. At a dinner for Elisabeth's husband, the artist Keith Tyson, Robert De Niro encouraged her to stand up to her father. Not long after, she went to the Super Bowl with him.
In June 2024, Commissioner Gorman ruled that Murdoch could amend the trust if he could show he was acting "in good faith and for the sole benefit of his heirs." That same month Murdoch married for the fifth time, to Elena Zhukova, a retired molecular biologist. Prudence, Elisabeth and James did not come to the wedding.
In November, at News Corp's annual meeting, the activist fund Starboard Value proposed abolishing the dual-class share structure and moving to one share, one vote. The Murdoch Family Trust held 14 percent of News Corp's equity and 41 percent of its votes. It voted no, and so did others, and the proposal failed. The family's control of the company still rested on the gap between those two numbers, as it had since 1980.
On December 9, 2024, Gorman ruled against Rupert and Lachlan. His 96-page opinion found that they had acted in bad faith and called Project Family Harmony "a carefully crafted charade" designed to "permanently cement Lachlan Murdoch's executive roles." Their lawyer, Adam Streisand, said they would appeal. William Barr, the former attorney general, whom Murdoch had made president of Cruden Financial Services in 2023, filed a challenge of his own. A Rutgers expert on estate law said the ruling was so strongly worded it would be hard to overturn.
In February 2025, a few weeks into Trump's second term, Rupert Murdoch went to the Oval Office. The president said he and Larry Ellison were "the most powerful people in the world."
The fight was settled on September 8, 2025. Prudence, Elisabeth and James received $1.1 billion each, $3.3 billion altogether, far more than they had been offered before. Lachlan received control of News Corp and Fox Corporation until at least 2050. According to Paddy Manning, Lachlan's unauthorized biographer, Lachlan had previously had the chance to buy out his siblings and had papers drafted, then decided the price was too high. Grace and Chloe, Rupert's daughters with Wendi Deng, remain non-voting beneficiaries. Their mother agreed to that arrangement.
The father would be 119 in 2050.
Anna Murdoch Mann, mother of three of the four children who fought in Reno, died in 2026. On March 13 of that year Netflix released a four-part series about the family. Its title was Dynasty.
In January 2026, fifty years after he paid Dorothy Schiff $31 million for the New York Post, the company launched a new tabloid in Los Angeles, a local edition of the Post, called the California Post. Its publisher was the same company whose logo, since May 28, 2013, had been its name written in his hand.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is an attempt to separate what can be learned from Murdoch's career from what cannot, and to keep the useful parts without endorsing the rest. Some of these principles hold up. Some describe things that worked for decades and then failed, and the way they failed is part of the lesson. Each is drawn from the record above and from nothing else.
The Murdoch Principles
- 1.Buy the paper nobody wants.
- 2.Make the cash machine pay for the siege.
- 3.Treat jurisdiction as a variable.
- 4.Own the votes, rent the equity.
- 5.Attack the cost structure everyone else accepts.
- 6.Enter the market incumbents believe is closed.
- 7.Lever up, but keep something to sell.
- 8.Distinguish an audience from a utility.
- 9.Sell the studio, keep the signal.
- 10.Culture outruns oversight.
- 11.Quarantine damage with structure.
- 12.Succession is a contract, not a feeling.
Principle 1
Buy the paper nobody wants
Murdoch's whole empire grew from what remained after his father's estate was settled: one afternoon tabloid circulating only in South Australia. The method he developed from there was consistent. He bought newspapers that were losing money, changed their management and editorial approach drastically, and fought for circulation without limits. The Daily Mirror was not Sydney's leading paper when he bought it. The Sun was not a success when he bought it from the International Publishing Corporation in 1969. The New York Post cost $31 million.
There is a reason this works. A failing asset is cheap because the market has already priced in the current owner's inability to fix it. If the buyer's skill is precisely the thing the seller lacks, which for Murdoch meant tabloid instinct, control of costs, and willingness to fight, then the gap between price and potential is his to keep. The danger is buying a loss-maker whose problem is not management but structure. The 33 local papers sold in 2013 for $87 million were the second kind.
He also bought prestige, and paid full price for it: the Times in 1981, Dow Jones for $5 billion in 2007. But the base was built on distressed assets, and the cash from those businesses paid for the later purchases.
Tactic: When you assess a struggling business, ask whether its problem is something you specifically know how to fix. If it is, the discount is your margin.
Principle 2
Make the cash machine pay for the siege
Sky Television lost money for years. News Corp kept it going with profits from its other holdings until British Satellite Broadcasting accepted a merger "on its terms" in 1990. BSkyB then dominated British pay television for a generation. The same pattern, routinely using one set of profits to fund the next acquisition, ran from Adelaide through Sydney to London.
In a war of attrition, the winner is often whoever can afford to keep losing longest, not whoever has the better product. Murdoch's newspapers, which looked like old businesses, were really the funding for the newer ones. The point is not cross-subsidy as such. It is that he deliberately built a portfolio in which some assets throw off cash and others need it, so that he would always be able to outlast a rival that depended on a single business.
Tactic: Before starting a fight over market share, know how many quarters of losses you can absorb from your other operations, and how many your opponent can.
Principle 3
Treat jurisdiction as a variable, not a given
In 1958 he argued for a monopoly television licence in Adelaide and got one. In 1985 he became an American citizen so he could own American television stations, and lost his Australian citizenship as a result. He lobbied against Australia's cross-media ownership rules for decades until they were changed in 2006 and further loosened in 2017. In 2004 he moved News Corp's incorporation from Adelaide to Delaware. In 2024 the family trust was moved to Nevada, whose law allows decanting and does not require reporting.
Most executives treat the regulatory setting as fixed and plan around it. Murdoch treated it as one more thing that could be changed: nationality, domicile, or the law itself, if the prize justified it. That is the most powerful item in this playbook and the most dangerous. Nevada also produced a 96-page opinion finding that he had acted in bad faith. The flexibility he relied on for seventy years let him down at the very end.
M
Changing the Rules: A Jurisdictional Timeline
Moments when the ground beneath the business was moved rather than accepted.
1958
NWS 9 Adelaide wins an exclusive television licence after arguing for monopoly before the licensing board.
1980
News Corporation Limited incorporated in Adelaide as a holding company for News Limited.
1985
Murdoch naturalizes as a U.S. citizen on September 4 to satisfy station-ownership law; loses Australian citizenship.
1995
FCC rules Fox ownership in the public interest despite questions about News Corp's Australian base.
2004
Reincorporation in Delaware; last ASX trade as News Corp Limited on November 3, NYSE debut on November 8.
2006
Australian cross-media ownership reforms pass after decades of lobbying; further loosened in 2017.
2024
Family trust litigated in Nevada; commissioner rules against the amendment on December 9.
Tactic: List the rules that limit your business and sort them by how easy they are to change. Then confirm the changes you want can be defended in public, because eventually a court or a reporter will ask.
Principle 4
Own the votes, rent the equity
By June 2013 the Murdoch family held around 17 percent of News Corporation's equity and 39 percent of its votes. Even after the split, the family trust held 14 percent of News Corp's equity and 41 percent of the vote. Dual-class stock let one family run a global company while other investors supplied most of the capital.
He protected the arrangement carefully. In 2006, when John Malone's Liberty Media held 16.3 percent of News Corp, half of it voting stock, Murdoch gave up a 38.5 percent stake in DirecTV to get it back. He traded a satellite company to remove a challenger at the ballot box. In 2024, Starboard Value's one-share-one-vote proposal failed because the trust voted against it.
%
Equity vs. Control
The gap between what the family owned and what it decided.
| Moment | Economic stake | Voting power | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| News Corporation, August 2005 | ~29% | Effective control | Secure |
| Liberty Media stake before 2006 swap | 16.3% held by Malone | ~Half voting shares | Threat |
| News Corporation, June 2013 | ~17% | 39% | Secure |
| Murdoch Family Trust in News Corp, 2024 | 14% | 41% | Contested internally |
What this structure cannot do is shield the controlling family from itself. Once outside shareholders could not challenge control, the only people who could were inside the trust. The Reno case was a vote fight over the dual-class structure, held among relatives.
Tactic: If you separate economic ownership from control, put as much effort into governing the controlling block as into defending it from outsiders, because the danger moves inside.
Principle 5
Attack the cost structure everyone else has agreed to live with
Every Fleet Street proprietor knew the print unions' grip made new production technology uneconomic. Most of them accepted it as a permanent cost. In 1986 Murdoch moved production to Wapping and took on the NGA and SOGAT. There were nightly battles outside the plant and attacks on delivery vans. The unions gave in.
An industry's agreed-upon costs often look like natural laws to the people inside it. The first company willing to absorb the fight to remove one ends up with a lasting structural advantage. It cost a great deal: violence, enmity, and years of being "Fortress Wapping." It also reset the economics of British newspapers.
This principle reaches its limit when the cost being cut is legal or ethical rather than operational. It is a short distance from "the unions are an accepted cost we can remove" to "privacy law is an accepted cost we can remove," and a newsroom culture that is rewarded for the first may drift into the second.
Tactic: Write down the three largest costs your industry treats as fixed. For each one, estimate the price of the fight needed to remove it and how long the advantage would last afterward.
Principle 6
Enter the market the incumbents believe is closed
In 1985 the American networks were understood to be a three-player market, permanently. Murdoch bought a studio and a station group, changed his citizenship, and launched Fox on October 9, 1986. In 1996 CNN had cable news to itself, and he launched Fox News. In 2007 CNBC owned business television, and Dow Jones was under contract to supply it. He launched Fox Business anyway.
The common thread is not only aggression. In each case he concluded that the incumbent's audience was underserved in some specific way, and built for the people it was neglecting. When incumbents think a market is closed, they often stop paying attention to what customers say they lack.
Tactic: In any market described as having "no room for a new entrant," find the customers the leader seems indifferent to. They are your first market.
Principle 7
Lever up, but keep something you can sell
From 1987 to 1989 News Corp spent more than $4 billion on Harper & Row, Triangle Publications, and Collins, while Sky was also losing money. By 1992 the debts forced sales. The American magazines went to K-III, and the Australian magazines were spun off as Pacific Magazines. The trade titles from Triangle had already been sold to Reed International to raise money.
The empire survived because it held assets that could be sold quickly and whose sale did not hurt the main business. The newspapers, the studio, the network, and the Sky stake were not sold. Magazines were. Using a lot of leverage is survivable if you know ahead of time which parts are expendable.
Tactic: Before taking on debt, divide your assets into those you will never sell and those you would sell first, and make sure the second group could cover your obligations in a bad year.
Principle 8
Distinguish an audience from a utility
The internet record is the clearest lesson in the history, and one of the people who learned it was the son who would inherit the company.
$
Digital Bets: Audience vs. Utility
Two kinds of internet asset, two very different outcomes.
| Bet | Entry | Outcome | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Myspace (2005) | $580M, outbidding Viacom | Sold June 2011 for $35M; Murdoch calls it a "huge mistake" | Audience |
| REA Group | $10.75M, only $2.25M in cash | Worth more than $3.6B to News Corp by 2014 | Utility |
| Network Ten (2010–2017) | A$150M via Illyria | Voluntary administration; entire investment lost | Audience |
| Move / realtor.com (2014) | Acquisition by new News Corp | Part of digital real estate, now the company's largest business | Utility |
Myspace was an audience, and audiences leave as soon as something better appears. Facebook appeared, and the deadline for bids passed without one above the reserve. REA ran a transaction people had to complete: buying, selling, or renting property. An audience can be rented and taken away by the next platform. A utility becomes part of how people do something they cannot avoid doing. Lachlan backed REA when others wanted to sell it, and it ended up worth more than many of the newspapers.
Tactic: For any digital acquisition, ask whether its users would have to rebuild a habit or a workflow to leave. If they would not, value it as an audience that can walk away.
Principle 9
Sell the studio, keep the signal
In 2019 the family sold most of 21st Century Fox to Disney for $71.3 billion. That included the studio they had changed citizenship to buy. What they kept, spun off on March 19 as Fox Corporation, was the broadcast network, the news channels, and the sports business.
This was harder than it looks. Owning the studio had been the founding move of the American empire. But at the moment of sale, scripted entertainment was the area where the biggest buyers wanted scale, and live news and sports were what kept viewers watching broadcast television on its own schedule. Murdoch kept the part people watch as it happens and sold the part people can watch any time.
Tactic: When a well-funded buyer wants part of your business, check whether what they want is the part least connected to your real advantage. If it is, take their money.
Principle 10
Culture outruns oversight
The phone-hacking scandal was not one failure. Operation Nigeria showed that by the late 1990s the News of the World was paying an investigator up to £150,000 a year for information gathered by illegal means. Motorman in 2002 identified 305 journalists buying confidential data. Jonathan Rees went back to work for the paper as soon as he was released from prison in 2005. Goodman's 2007 conviction was presented as the work of one rogue reporter. The settlements were made to keep evidence private. Every time a warning appeared, the system shut it down.
Les Hinton's resignation statement put it most clearly: being ignorant "is irrelevant." A proprietor who built a hard-driving, results-only culture with little oversight should not be surprised when that culture produces results by any means. The select committee's phrase, "wilful blindness," was a description of how the company was governed. The scandal cost the paper's 168 years of history, the BSkyB deal, and eventually the unity of the company.
Tactic: Find the incentives that reward your people for results regardless of method, and fund a compliance function that reports to someone with no stake in those results.
Principle 11
Quarantine damage with structure
The split announced on June 28, 2012, was presented as a way to "unlock the true value" of the businesses. Its effect was to separate the newspapers, which were damaged by scandal and declining, from the entertainment business, which was valuable and growing. On the first day of trading the market's verdict was plain: Fox up more than 2 percent, News Corp down 5 percent. The parent company held its value, and the troubled half stood on its own under new management.
The new News Corp, led by Thomson, then rebuilt. Digital revenue went from 20 percent of the total to 50 percent over a decade, and digital real estate became the biggest business. The split did not resolve every problem, as later revenue declines in Britain showed, but it stopped one division's problems from spreading to the other.
Tactic: If one division carries reputational or legal risk, ask whether it should be in a separate legal and financial entity, before a crisis makes that decision for you at a worse price.
Principle 12
Succession is a contract, not a feeling
The 1999 trust was simple: four children, one vote each. That simplicity was its weakness. It assumed the heirs would agree with one another and with their father about what the company was for. When James resigned in 2020 over editorial disagreements, that assumption failed. Rupert's attempt to rewrite an irrevocable instrument produced a bad-faith finding, three estranged children, and a $3.3 billion settlement.
According to Paddy Manning, the cheaper option had been on the table years before. Lachlan could have bought out his siblings, had the paperwork drafted, decided the price was too high, and judged that none of them posed a threat. The price only went up after that. Ambiguity in succession planning does not make a family more harmonious. It postpones the bill, and the bill grows.
Tactic: Write succession arrangements on the assumption that your heirs will disagree with you and with each other, and settle the price of disagreement while everyone is still willing to talk.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Rupert Murdoch, 1993, following the STAR TV acquisition(Telecommunications) have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere ... satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels.
— Rupert Murdoch, on CNBC, McGraw-Hill Media Summit, February 2007[They] leap on every scandal, or what they think is a scandal.
— Rupert Murdoch, announcing the News Corporation split, June 28, 2012...unlock the true value of both companies and their distinct assets, enabling investors to benefit from the separate strategic opportunities resulting from more focused management of each division.
— Sir Keith Murdoch, persuading the Herald board to fund the 1939 exhibitionGallipoli had given us one kind of maturity. A great Herald exhibition of contemporary French and British art would give us another kind of maturity.
Maxims
- Inherit the remnant, not the empire. The estate left Murdoch one South Australian tabloid, and everything else was built from that.
- The discount is the skill gap. A loss-making asset is cheap because its owner cannot fix it, so buy it only if you can.
- Votes outrank equity. Seventeen percent of the capital and 39 percent of the vote was enough to control the largest media company in the world.
- Rules are an input. Citizenship, domicile, and ownership law were all variables Murdoch was willing to change for the right prize.
- Fund the siege from the fortress. Profitable businesses carry the money-losing ones until the rival gives up.
- Audiences leave; utilities stay. Myspace fell from $580 million to $35 million, while a $2.25 million cash stake in REA grew to billions.
- Keep what is watched live. When selling to a bigger buyer, give up the content that can be stored and keep what people need in real time.
- Ignorance is irrelevant. A culture you rewarded but did not supervise is still yours, as Hinton acknowledged when he resigned.
- Structure contains contagion. Splitting a damaged division from a valuable one protects the value before the damage spreads.
- Irrevocable means expensive to revoke. The trust could be changed, but the change cost $3.3 billion and three estranged children.
