There are many ways to describe Elon Musk – the meat in a Murdoch sandwich is just the latest. The Twitter owner was captured by Fox’s Super Bowl cameras sitting between Rupert Murdoch (91) and daughter Elisabeth Murdoch, representing Rupert’s biggest dalliance with the world of social media since his ill-fated purchase of MySpace.
“Brilliant minds,” marvelled the Fox commentator, before providing a vital disclaimer. “Rupert pays our cheques, too, so that’s always good.”
The seating arrangement came as some surprise to people who thought Musk was genuinely anti-establishment and that by tweeting, just one day earlier, that “some of the smartest people I know actively believe the press... amazing”, he somehow disapproved of the business opportunities milked by Murdoch.
But it came as no surprise to anyone aware that billionaire owners of influential media platforms will always have more in common with each other than they will with anyone else inside a stadium in Glendale, Arizona. That is how the elite operates. As both men own companies that are no stranger to misinformation, there is frankly no reason why their interests shouldn’t align.
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The power dynamics are fascinating. Although the younger man is the richer on paper, this highly visible summit must surely have been in the gift of the man who made his money from papers. He may be almost 92, but it’s tough to envisage Murdoch, surrounded by his people, just allowing Musk to slide into the front-row pew beside him unless he had pre-decided there was something in it for him.
In any case, there are those for whom Musk’s presence in the Super Bowl box is the least interesting aspect of the line-up.
Sitting to Murdoch’s left and presumably hoping to enjoy her hot dog in peace was Ann-Lesley Smith, who is Rupert’s new companion following his divorce from Jerry Hall, to which you can only say the best of luck with that.
But for succession watchers – and, indeed, Succession watchers – it was Elisabeth’s flanking of her father that triggered the most intrigue. So let’s have a quick recap of the state of play in the multi-decade saga of who will get to control Murdoch’s assets after his death.
Elder son Lachlan Murdoch, rather incredibly said to be more right-wing than his father, is the current best boy and is in situ as executive chairman and chief executive of Fox Corporation and co-chairman of News Corp, Rupert’s two main companies.
Younger son James Murdoch is reportedly estranged from both Rupert and Lachlan, having resigned from the News Corp board in 2020 citing “disagreements over certain editorial content”.
James has criticised the fervent climate scepticism of his father’s Australian media outlets, and was allegedly no fan of Fox’s former support for Donald Trump. He does, however, sit on the board of Musk’s electric vehicle maker Tesla.
Elisabeth Murdoch, co-founder of a screen production company called Sister, has had a quieter time of it since selling her first television production outfit Shine to her father’s former holding company.
But Elisabeth and half-sister Prudence MacLeod, aka Prue, may hold the key to the future drama. Alongside Lachlan and James, they are beneficiaries of the Murdoch family trust, with voting rights. The speculation goes that after Rupert dies, they will side with James and Lachlan will be out.
Evidently, Rupert is not keen on this outcome. An attempt to merge Fox Corporation with News Corp to create a single company, similar to how it used to be before the assets were split in 2013, was regarded as a method of consolidating Lachlan’s power, but it was abandoned last month after opposition from shareholders.
The scrapped plan lends further weight to the theory that Murdoch’s Midas touch is not what it once was. In 2017, when he agreed to sell his 20th Century Fox film studio and other entertainment assets to Disney, the media mogul denied that this was a retreat, classifying it instead as a pivot. But a year later, when he lost out to US cable giant Comcast in the battle to buy 100 per cent of Sky, the legacy questions resurfaced. What kind of empire will remain for his children to fight over anyway?
The reunification of News Corp with Fox was also seen as a means of ensuring the financial security of news publishing interests vulnerable to the decline of print.
On Thursday, News Corp’s chief executive, Robert Thomson, announced plans to cut its global headcount by 5 per cent or about 1,250 people this year after the fallout from inflation and higher interest rates meant it missed Wall Street expectations for quarterly profit and revenue.
In Ireland, where News Corp does business through the Irish editions of the Sun and the Sunday Times and also owns half a dozen radio stations through Wireless Ireland, the company’s cost control measures were felt just last year, with 11 journalists leaving the Sunday Times Ireland and Times Ireland in the wake of a restructuring, changing the nature of the product on offer. Cutbacks in Scotland are now the next target.
But the fate of Murdoch’s empire is, of course, bigger than either Ireland or Scotland. This is one succession issue where the consequences will be deeper for those outside the family than those within it.
While Musk says he talked to Murdoch about the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, this was crucially in response to a tweet calling for “wrong answers only”. In the snippet shown by Fox, he mostly seemed to be chatting to Elisabeth.
But the two billionaires not only share political ground, they also appear to favour the same presidential candidate. In November, Murdoch’s New York Post title branded Trump “Trumpty Dumpty” and declared that book-hating Republican governor of Florida Ron DeSantis was “DeFuture”. The same month, Musk indicated he might back DeSantis.
Human longevity guarantees the Murdoch succession story has fewer seasons ahead of it than behind. At some point, it must reach its denouement. Before then, the sight of Musk alongside Rupert at the Super Bowl serves as a useful, striking reminder that media power can be concentrated so fiercely, vast swathes of it are liable to manifest on just two seats in one corporate box.
