When The Book of Mormon musical first took Broadway by storm, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – so vigorously satirised in the show – responded by taking out adverts in the programmes. “You’ve seen the play,” the ads enticed audiences, “now read the book.”
Bonfire of the Murdochs could have taken the same tack. This is the book for fans of Succession, the HBO black comedy series about a fictional global media empire and the entirely fictional knife fight among the children of its very fictional patriarch, Logan Roy, over who gets to inherit it. Lest anyone doubt the link between the Roy family in Succession and the real-life travails of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his offspring, the man himself is there to set the record straight. The terms of Murdoch’s divorce from his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, in 2022 included banning her from offering story ideas to the show’s writers – so Gabriel Sherman reveals in this tidbit-laden chronicle.
This is one of those instances where the truth is stranger (or at least, bigger, bolder, more fantastical) than fiction. That Rupert Murdoch and News Corp have dominated the media and political scene on three continents for much of the last 70 years is not new information. Nor is the multi-decade battle between his children to succeed their father. Yet there is still something jaw-dropping about the twists and turns of this saga – part Greek tragedy, part soap opera – brought together and distilled into 200 pages of bloodthirsty corporate warfare and toxic sibling rivalry.
Sherman knows his material. This book follows his 2014 biography of Fox News president Roger Ailes, which details the colossal impact one man and his network have had on American – and, indeed, global – politics. He also wrote the screenplay for The Apprentice, the 2024 biographical drama about the rise of Donald Trump in the Seventies and Eighties. He has a clear fascination with viewing global events through the lens of a single, power-hungry protagonist.
But what is so wonderful (and so horrifying) about Bonfire of the Murdochs is the extent to which events of huge national significance become secondary plotlines. The clue is in the subtitle: “How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Media Dynasty Broke a Family – and the World”. Note which of the two takes precedence.
We begin at the end, in September 2024. A Nevada court case decades in the making now sees 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch at war with three of his children – Prue, Elisabeth and James – in service of a fourth: Lachlan, his eldest son and anointed heir. “This was much more than a boardroom battle,” Sherman writes. “It was a blood feud to win a father’s love.” How did we get here? What kind of father spends a lifetime pitting his adult children against one another? How does he have the time between buying up newspapers and networks, poaching and sacking executives, cosying up to heads of government and trying to rewrite the laws of the media?
I won’t rehearse the many deals that spread from Murdoch’s native Australia to London, New York and Los Angeles, securing him extraordinary influence over the global news agenda. What I will say is that the numbers involved soon cease to have any meaning: $31m for the New York Post in 1976; $75m invested in a satellite start-up called Skyband in 1983; $250m for half of Fox in 1985; $5bn for Dow Jones in 2007. The size of the debt is no less mind-boggling. During one particular crisis in 1990, Sherman gives us the helpful context that, “News Corp’s liabilities were the size of Ecuador’s sovereign debt. Liquidating the company risked the possibility of triggering a global financial meltdown.” (Murdoch escapes the catastrophe mostly unscathed thanks in part to a quick visit to enlist the support of Margaret Thatcher.) In 2017, there’s a deal with Disney that gifted each Murdoch child $2bn.
You might wonder whether a $2bn payout on top of significant existing wealth might be enough to free anyone from the tentacles of an overbearing parent. Why not walk away and enjoy a life of the utmost luxury and privilege? But that is not how this story unfolds. As dizzying as the deals are, they pale beside the contortions the Murdoch children at the heart of the succession saga – Lachlan, Elisabeth and James – inflict upon themselves in their scramble towards the centre of power. Alliances form, promises are made, trust is broken. Each time one of them appears to have escaped – building a life beyond their fickle, volatile father –Murdoch finds a way to pull them back into his orbit.
Global, catastrophic news stories become mere plot devices in this family psychodrama. Take the phone-hacking scandal that nearly destroyed News Corp, exposing the illegal interception of private messages belonging to celebrities, royals and even a murdered teenager. Entire books could be written about its consequences for politics, culture and public trust in the media. In this book, it is relevant because Rupert Murdoch’s response to the scandal was to order his daughter (Elisabeth) to fire his son (James, then executive chairman of News International) as a perverse test of filial loyalty. It was, Sherman reports, exactly what their mother (Murdoch wife number two of five) had feared the most: “Rupert was pitting their kids against each other in a corporate Hunger Games.”
Or consider Fox News’s role not only in Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House in 2016, but in stoking conspiracy theories about a stolen 2020 election – lies that cumilated in the 6 January storming of the Capitol. A profit-at-all-costs culture led executives who knew Joe Biden had won fairly to give airtime to pundits railing about rigged voting machines. That it was all done in pursuit of ratings carries bleak implications for the future of democracy. But the real story, in Sherman’s telling, is how it split the family. In the ensuing row, the power to influence millions of Americans and shape US politics for a generation is reduced to a toy over which aggrieved siblings quarrel. Think “it’s my turn on the scooter” – but for democracy.
This is not to downplay the geopolitical theatrics. If you want a whistlestop tour of how the Murdoch empire has shaped elections and political careers, this book has you covered – a treatise on the cosy but ruthless intersection of business and politics told in the style of a thriller. World leaders drift in and out of the action. After the phone-hacking scandal, James decides to “topple” Gordon Brown and elevate David Cameron to Downing Street. Tony Blair gets two cameos, first at a dinner in Downing Street where various Murdochs air their views on Middle Eastern politics, then when Rupert divorces his third wife, Wendi Deng, which, according to Sherman, happened after Murdoch became suspicious about an alleged affair with the former PM – something both she and Blair have forcefully denied. (This was a somewhat awkward episode, considering Murdoch made Blair godfather to his daughter Grace.) Further back, Thatcher reshuffles her cabinet in a way that enables Murdoch to close a deal. And a News Corp debt crisis is narrowly averted thanks – it is rumoured – to an 11th-hour phone call to President George Bush Sr.
But the most chilling revelations in Bonfire of the Murdochs aren’t about cronyism or undue influence. Rather, they come when Sherman – drawing on a staggering number of interviews with sources intricately intertwined with the drama – lifts the curtain on what it was like to be a child of Rupert Murdoch. “Corporate machinations were how the family communicated,” we are told; ruthlessly doing deals is their familial “love language”. The fixation on stock prices reaches farce when Murdoch is diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000 – his top priority becomes managing the corporate emergency it sparks. His children, Sherman writes, “loved their father and desperately wanted to know he would be OK. At the same time, they were confused and angry that he made them learn he was sick via a press release. Did he consider them senior executives or his kids?”
Despite this being set up as a Shakespearean family feud, the real question seems to be not which of the contenders is Rupert Murdoch’s favourite child, but whether any of them can hope to compete with his one true love: News Corp. “Who did Rupert love more: the business or his son?” Sherman asks at one point. The question contains the answer.
You might find that a bit too close to an HBO plotline. But there’s no need for musings on whether art imitates life or the other way around. If you don’t know who is victorious in the battle to be the favoured heir, I won’t spoil the ending. I will just mention that during the court case that decides the matter – as detailed in 3,000 pages of documents leaked to the New York Times – a secret meeting is defended by one of the children’s lawyers, “a self-described Succession addict”, on the grounds that its purpose was planning a comms strategy for when Murdoch dies. The lawyer had been “deeply troubled when he watched the episode that depicted the fictional mogul Logan Roy’s sudden death and the kids’ scramble to issue a public statement”.
Rupert Murdoch’s legacy spans the English-speaking world. But seeing up close the level of internecine warfare integral to this story of global corporate dominance, one wonders if everything – the luxury yachts, the newspapers and networks, the ability to call in favours from presidents and prime ministers – could ever really have been worth it.
Bonfire of the Murdochs
Gabriel Sherman
Simon & Schuster, 256pp, £25
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
[Further reading: How has Donald Trump escaped the Epstein files?]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 04 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Mandelson affair
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment