Chapter 1Melbourne

Foreword

Every morning for seventy years, editors in three countries have waited for a telephone call.

That is the mechanism, and this book is an attempt to document it. Not the personality, which has been described exhaustively and mostly badly, and not the wealth, which is a consequence rather than a cause. The mechanism: a single proprietor who owned newspapers and broadcast channels across Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, who read them all, and who told the people running them what mattered that day.

I spent twelve years writing about white-collar crime, which is a beat that trains you to look for structure. The lesson of that work is that large outcomes are almost never produced by a criminal mastermind and almost always produced by a system in which the incentives point one way and nobody in particular has to decide anything. Rupert Murdoch is the rare case where a single individual's preferences really do propagate through an enormous apparatus, and the reason is that he built the apparatus so they would.

The claim I defend at length in this book is that he is the most politically consequential private citizen of the past century in the English-speaking world.

That sounds like hyperbole and I have tried to make it a measurable proposition instead. The honest comparisons are few. Henry Luce shaped mid-century American opinion, in a press environment far more plural than the one that followed. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk own distributive systems whose political outputs are algorithmically produced and individually experienced, which makes their influence enormous and diffuse and hard to direct. Murdoch is different in kind. He owned the outlets, he chose the editors, he set the line, and he did it in three democracies simultaneously for seven decades. The influence was intentional, sustained, and aimed.

The book follows the money and the paperwork, because that is what I know how to do.

Adelaide in 1953, where a twenty-two-year-old inherited a newspaper from a father who had been a great editor and an indifferent businessman. Sydney in 1960. London in 1969, and the acquisition of a Sunday tabloid that taught him what circulation was actually made of. The New York Post in 1976. The Times and Sunday Times in 1981, acquired without the monopolies referral that the law appeared to require, in an episode I go through document by document. Twentieth Century Fox in 1985. A broadcast network in 1986, built against the settled view of the industry that a fourth network was impossible. Fox News in October 1996. The Wall Street Journal in 2007.

And then the reckonings, which arrive late and cost money rather than control. The phone-hacking scandal of 2011 and the closure of a hundred-and-sixty-eight-year-old newspaper in a weekend. Leveson. The Disney sale in 2019. The Dominion Voting Systems defamation settlement in April 2023, seven hundred and eighty-seven million dollars paid on the courthouse steps to avoid a trial at which he would have testified, in a case whose discovery record is the single most valuable primary source about how his organization actually works.

I want to be exact about the Dominion material, because it does a lot of work in this book. What the filings established is that people inside the network said in private that certain claims about the 2020 election were false while those claims were being broadcast. That is documented in their own messages. It is the closest thing to an internal audit of the enterprise that exists, and it exists only because a voting-machine company had the resources to sue.

Three things about method.

I have not psychologized him. There is a large literature that explains everything through the father, or through the outsider's grievance against the British establishment, or through a wish to be respectable. These are stories, some of them plausible, none of them documented, and I have kept them out except where he has said something himself.

I have not treated the marriages and the children as gossip or as irrelevant. Five marriages and six children, and a family trust that determines who controls the companies after him, which means the domestic arrangements are corporate governance. The Nevada trust proceedings of 2024, in which the family litigated the post-Rupert direction of the empire behind closed doors, belong in a business chapter and that is where they are.

And I have not written an obituary. He was ninety-five and alive when this manuscript closed. A biography written in advance of its subject's death is an awkward object, and it is the only kind available here, and I have said what can be assessed now rather than pretending to a final accounting that historians will make decades from now.

The morning call still goes out. The voice on it will change. The instruction, on the evidence of seventy years, will not.

Chapter 1 · Melbourne

The boy who would remake three democracies was born on March 11, 1931, in Melbourne, Australia, the second-largest city of a country that most of the world had never thought about. His father was Sir Keith Murdoch. His mother was Elisabeth Joy Greene. The house was comfortable but not rich. The family was Presbyterian, severe, ambitious, and Scottish in the way that mattered: the belief that God watched, that work justified the watching, and that softness was a sin.

Sir Keith had made his name at Gallipoli. In 1915, as a young war correspondent, he had written a private letter to the Australian prime minister describing what he had seen at the British landing: the incompetence of the officers, the slaughter of the soldiers, the administrative catastrophe unfolding on a beach eight thousand miles from home. The letter was passed to the British prime minister. It contributed, by most accounts, to the eventual evacuation of the Gallipoli peninsula. Tens of thousands of Australian and New Zealand troops had already died. But the evacuation was earlier than it might have been, and the country remembered who had written the letter.

By the time his son was born, Sir Keith had converted that reputation into something more durable than fame. He ran Australia's largest newspaper group, the Herald and Weekly Times. He sat on boards. He was knighted in 1933. He moved in the rooms where prime ministers were made and unmade. He taught his son, from the beginning, that a newspaper was not simply a business. It was a position from which a man could see the machinery of power, and, if he was clever, could operate the levers.

Keith Rupert Murdoch (Rupert, the name he went by, because a boy named Keith Murdoch was already taken) spent his boyhood at Cruden Farm, the family's country property outside Melbourne. The farm had a manor house, a lake, stables, a wood. The children were raised with horses, tennis, and the expectation that they would matter in the world. His mother, a formidable woman who would live to be 103, enforced a regimen of discipline and expectation that would mark him until his own old age. Idleness was not tolerated. Complaint was not tolerated. Emotion was not encouraged.

He was sent to Geelong Grammar School, the most elite Protestant boarding school in Australia, where the prime minister's sons went, where Prince Charles would briefly attend a generation later. He was not happy there. He was bookish and awkward and argued politics at a school where boys were supposed to play sport. He was, friends would later remember, a Labour sympathizer in a school of conservative money. He kept a bust of Lenin on his desk at Oxford. The socialism was real, for a while. It would burn off in the decades to come, the way most undergraduate convictions burn off when they meet the balance sheet.

Oxford was Worcester College, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, the degree read by the British governing class. He edited a campus magazine. He was known, among his peers, as sharp-tongued, quick-witted, rude about authority, willing to be disliked. He drove fast. He argued loudly. He cultivated the kind of deliberate abrasiveness that would follow him for seventy years.

Then, in October 1952, when Rupert was twenty-one and still at Oxford, his father died.

Sir Keith had been seventy-six. The death was not sudden (he had been ill for months) but the estate was. The widow was left in uncertain finances. The son discovered, on returning to Melbourne, that the empire his father had built for the Herald group was owned largely by other people. Sir Keith's personal holdings amounted to two small newspapers, the News and the Sunday Mail, both in Adelaide. Adelaide was a provincial city. The papers were not prosperous. The inheritance, stripped of its mythology, was a minor regional press in a minor regional market.

Rupert returned to Oxford, finished his degree, worked briefly at the Daily Express in London under Lord Beaverbrook (the original press baron, the man who had shown an entire century what a proprietor could do with a newspaper) and then, in 1953, at twenty-two years old, went home to Adelaide to run the papers.

He was young. The staff was older. The money was tight. The market was small. By every external measurement the situation looked like the beginning of a provincial career. Murdoch saw it differently. He saw that the News was the underdog to Adelaide's other paper, the Advertiser. He saw that the Advertiser was complacent and genteel, written for solicitors and bankers and the ladies who lunched with their wives. He saw that Adelaide had working people, and that the working people read papers, and that nobody was writing papers for them.

He had absorbed, from his time working under Lord Beaverbrook at the Daily Express in London, a lesson about tabloid journalism that would define his career. Beaverbrook, the Canadian-born press baron who had built the Express into Britain's most-read daily through a combination of populist politics and sensationalist reporting, had told him, in terms Murdoch recalled repeatedly over the following decades, that a newspaper should be written for the reader who was reading it on the bus, not the reader who was reading it at the breakfast table. The bus reader wanted to be entertained. The bus reader wanted stories about people like themselves, told in language they used. The bus reader did not want to be improved. The bus reader wanted to be interested. The lesson was not new. It was the formula of William Randolph Hearst in America and of Alfred Harmsworth in Britain half a century before. Murdoch learned it from Beaverbrook and applied it with a precision that neither of his predecessors had managed.

He cut prices. He ran sensational stories: crime, scandal, sport, pictures of women. He fought with the Advertiser in public, attacking their ownership, their pretensions, their hypocrisies. He sued. He was sued. He won most of the fights that mattered. Within five years the News was outselling the Advertiser. Within ten years Murdoch had added the Perth Sunday Times, the Sydney Daily Mirror, and a new national paper he founded himself in 1964 called The Australian, the first nationally distributed broadsheet in a country that had never had one.

The technical challenge of distributing a national paper across Australia was, in 1964, formidable. The continent is roughly the size of the contiguous United States but with a fraction of the population concentrated on its eastern coast. Getting a single national paper printed and distributed daily to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth required printing in multiple locations simultaneously, a logistics exercise that no Australian publisher had previously attempted and that cost Murdoch money, in the first decade, that the paper's revenue could not cover. He covered the losses from the Adelaide and Sydney operations. He did not close the paper. The deficit was the price of the position.

The Australian lost money for years. Murdoch did not care. It gave him a seat at the table of national politics, a seat his father had held only through the Herald group, a seat Murdoch now held in his own name, on his own masthead, with his own chosen editors writing his chosen editorials. By 1965 he was meeting privately with federal cabinet ministers. By 1968 he was advising them. By 1972 he was helping to decide, through the editorial position of The Australian, which party would form the government of Australia.

The method was simple and has never varied. He found markets that the existing press neglected. He wrote for those markets in a voice the existing press would not use. He undersold his competitors. He was willing to lose money for years to establish a position. Once the position was established, he used it: on behalf of the politicians he favored, against the ones he did not, on whatever commercial project he wanted next. The papers were products. The papers were also weapons. The papers were also, always, the instrument by which he converted circulation into access, and access into influence, and influence into more newspapers.

The Australian national experiment deserves close attention as the laboratory in which Murdoch developed the methods he would use globally. He founded The Australian on July 15, 1964, the first daily paper to circulate across the entire country, printed simultaneously in Sydney and Canberra and distributed nationally by air. No newspaper group had attempted this before. The economics were brutal: the printing costs were double those of a metropolitan paper, the distribution costs were triple, and the advertising market, fractured across six states with different commercial cultures, was not organized to buy national space at the rates a national paper required.

He lost money on The Australian for a decade. He kept it alive through the profits of the Sun and the Mirror in Sydney, and through the revenues of the Adelaide papers. He kept it alive because The Australian was not a business. It was, in Australia, precisely what the Times would be in Britain seventeen years later: a credential. The Australian gave Murdoch a seat at the table of national politics, a masthead respected by the federal cabinet, a vehicle through which the views of the proprietor could be delivered in the language of a serious newspaper rather than the language of a tabloid.

By 1972 The Australian was, in its editorial position, the decisive factor in the Australian federal election. The paper's support for Gough Whitlam's Labor Party (the first time Murdoch had backed a Labor government) was seen, by Whitlam's own campaign managers, as the endorsement that made Labor viable for the educated, professional, urban voters who read it. Whitlam won. He governed until 1975, when the Australian constitutional crisis of that year, in which the Governor-General John Kerr dismissed the Whitlam government, produced a federal election in December 1975. The Australian, by then, had turned against Whitlam. The paper that had helped him win in 1972 urged voters to remove him in 1975. Murdoch's editors were publicly embarrassed by the reversal; some of them threatened to strike if The Australian continued its anti-Whitlam campaign in its current form. Murdoch overrode them. Malcolm Fraser's Liberal-National coalition won by a massive majority. It was the first demonstration, in any country, of what the proprietor would do with his most prestigious paper in an electoral context: back the candidate he preferred, regardless of the paper's previous position, regardless of the editorial staff's objections, regardless of the readers who had been told, two years earlier, that the opposite position was correct.

By the time he was forty, he owned most of the significant newspapers in Australia. He was bored with Australia. Australia had twelve million people. Britain had fifty-five. America had two hundred. There were bigger markets to take.

In 1968 he bought the News of the World, a weekly London tabloid famous for its Sunday coverage of sex crimes and vicar scandals. He paid £34 million, which was more than he had, and borrowed the rest from an Australian bank on the collateral of the News of the World itself. The deal stripped the paper out from under the Carr family, who had owned it for generations and who had invited Murdoch in as a savior against a hostile takeover by Robert Maxwell. Maxwell, a Czech-born Labour MP and press proprietor, had expected to win. Murdoch arrived, promised the Carrs continuity, bought them out, fired most of the senior editors within a year, and moved on. Maxwell never forgave him. Neither did the Carrs. It was the pattern he had used in Adelaide and would use, with variations, for the next fifty years. Convince the target that you are the friendly buyer. Purchase at speed. Eliminate what remains of the prior leadership. Run the asset for cash.

The next year, 1969, he bought the Sun, a dying mass-market tabloid that the Daily Mirror's owners had been trying to unload. He paid £600,000. Within eighteen months the Sun was outselling every daily paper in Britain. It was the paper that would define him in the English-speaking imagination for the next four decades, and it is the subject of the next chapter.

There is a question that hangs over every biography of a man who becomes as powerful as Murdoch became. The question is: when did the ambition stop being normal?

A young man wants to succeed. Every young man wants to succeed. What Murdoch wanted, by the time he was running the News of the World in 1969, was something else. He wanted to own the voice of his adopted countries. He wanted to be the man whom politicians feared. He wanted, in a phrase that would later be used about his reporters but applied equally to him, to have the phone numbers in his pocket: the numbers that mattered, the numbers that could wake a cabinet minister at midnight, the numbers that made the morning papers arrive with his instructions already printed on the front page.

The Adelaide inheritance was small. The empire he built on it was not small. By the time the Sun was launched in its new Murdoch-owned form in November 1969, he had already, at thirty-eight years old, done more than his father had done in a lifetime. He had quadrupled the size of the family holdings. He had crossed the oceans. He was, in London, a brash Australian whose tabloids were considered vulgar by the class that ran the country. He could not yet have dinner at the clubs. The editors of the Times would not return his calls. The BBC referred to him, in internal documents, as "the Australian."

He did not mind. He had a theory, developed early, refined constantly, never abandoned. The theory was that the people who ran the clubs would eventually sell him the clubs, if he had enough money and enough time. The people who looked down on his tabloids would eventually need his tabloids to support their candidates. The BBC would eventually be forced to cover the stories his papers broke. What looked, from the clubs, like vulgarity was in fact the future. What looked, from the Murdoch side, like vulgarity was simply the market. The market paid. The clubs lost.

The boy who had kept a bust of Lenin on his Oxford desk was gone. The young man who had been Labour at school was gone. What remained, at thirty-eight, was a proprietor, the cleanest English word for what he had become. A proprietor owns. A proprietor decides. A proprietor does not explain himself to editors or shareholders or politicians or the readers who buy his papers. He tells them, through the headlines he chooses, what they should think about the world.

What had also remained, and would remain for the rest of his career, was the chip. The Australian chip, the outsider's chip, the sense, felt viscerally rather than articulated, that he had been underestimated by every establishment he had entered and that every establishment had eventually paid for underestimating him. Fleet Street had sneered at the brash Australian with the Sunday-sex tabloid. Fleet Street was printing on his presses within fifteen years. Oxford had dismissed him as aggressive and undisciplined. Oxford had sold him its most prestigious masthead for what amounted to pocket change. The BBC had referred to him internally as "the Australian." He had built a cable news channel that had reduced the BBC's claim on public attention more effectively than any government regulatory review. The establishment always underestimated him. He had spent seventy years making the establishment regret it. The regret was not a side effect of his ambition. The regret was the point.

This combination of commercial genius driven by social grievance is the engine beneath everything this book describes. He did not set out to reshape democracies as an abstract project. He set out to beat the people who had told him he could not. The reshaping of democracies was the accumulated consequence of beating enough of those people, in enough places, across enough decades, that the world had bent around the force of what he was doing.

The rest of this book is the story of what he told them. The chapters will proceed roughly by decade, by acquisition, by crisis. The Sun in Chapter 2. The Times in Chapter 3. Fox Broadcasting in Chapter 4. Fox News in Chapter 5. The kingmaking (Thatcher, Blair, Trump) in Chapter 6. The Wall Street Journal in Chapter 7. The phone hacking in Chapter 8. The parliamentary inquiry and Wendi Deng's pie in Chapter 9. The predators he hired and protected in Chapter 10. The Dominion settlement, $787.5 million for knowingly broadcasting lies about an American election, in Chapter 11. The decades of climate denial in Chapter 12. The four marriages in Chapter 13. The retirement in Chapter 14. The succession war among his children, the real war that HBO's Succession fictionalized, in Chapter 15. The pending Smartmatic case in Chapter 16. The reach of the empire in Chapter 17. The assessment, in Chapter 18, of what a single man did to the information ecosystem of three democracies over seventy years.

He is ninety-five years old as this is written, in April 2026. He is retired but not absent. He still reads the papers every morning. He still calls his editors. He still, according to people who know him, keeps a list in his head of the politicians who owe him and the politicians who have crossed him, and he still, at ninety-five, expects the owed to pay and the crossed to suffer.

The list, at ninety-five, is long. It spans seventy years. It reaches from the Adelaide Advertiser's editors who dismissed him as a young upstart in 1953 to the Nevada probate commissioner who declared his succession petition a "carefully crafted charade" in 2024. It includes prime ministers who defied him (Edward Heath, who refused to see him during the 1970 British election campaign and then lost) and prime ministers who courted him and eventually disappointed him (Gordon Brown, who had once flown to Murdoch's yacht in the Aegean for a personal meeting and who had then, as prime minister, declined to grant Murdoch's executives the media regulatory freedoms they had requested). The list is a record of seventy years of keeping score in the most consequential private ledger in the English-speaking world.

The boy from Melbourne, at ninety-five, still knows who owes him. He still expects to be paid.

The boy from Melbourne took the inheritance and made it the largest private media empire in human history. What that empire did to the countries it served is what the rest of this book is about.