We live in an era of private dynasties. America’s billionaires are worth a cool $5.5tn at the last count. Three – Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg – are worth over a staggering $500bn between them. Americans dominate the global billionaire league table: Britain has none in the top hundred. But we still have enough to cause concern.
Individuals who have resources on this scale change the dynamics of the economies and societies in which they live, as the US increasingly dramatises. Their spending pulls economies out of kilter so that too much production is directed towards opulent, useless baubles, but, more dangerously, it spills over into buying political influence – directly in the political process and indirectly via media ownership. Unconstrained, the impact can only grow in the decades ahead, a phenomenon of which the dynastic founders are well aware, even if the wider public is not.
A dynastic courtroom drama to unfold this September in Reno, Nevada – hitherto secret but exposed by the New York Times last week – will further shine light on the new realities. Rupert Murdoch, controller of a vast media empire that ranges from Fox News in the US, the Times and the Sun in Britain, to the Australian, and the 31st richest billionaire in the US, is petitioning to change the terms of an irrevocable trust. It currently determines that after his death his four eldest children will have equal voting rights in the strategic and editorial control of his empire. The court hearing is his effort to change the trust and instead confer control on the child he considers most reliably rightwing, his son Lachlan.
It is, as the three children (James, Elisabeth and Prudence) to be stripped of their rights recognised instantly, a naked dynastic power play that makes the hit series Succession look tame. Murdoch, at 93, did not want to end up in court: he tried to use all his guile, dressing up the move as “Project Harmony”, to persuade his daughters Prudence and Elisabeth at a private meeting in London that it would be in their interests – and so not to contest it. The apparent ploy was to isolate James, the son who most openly disavows the maxims of the new conservatism – he is neither a climate change denier nor a supporter of the Donald Trump lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen – and so create a voting majority for the change.
He underestimated his daughters, who reportedly were livid. They have combined with James to challenge the change, which under Nevada state law must be done in “good faith” and for the sole benefits of all the trust’s beneficiaries. The most expensive lawyers in the US will face each other to try to prove Murdoch’s good faith on one side – and bad faith on the other. This more than rivals the most dramatic scene in Succession.
All four children are convinced capitalists and uncomplaining billionaires; that is not the bone of contention. But the trio neither agree with Lachlan’s strategic direction and how the companies have been run, nor with his political judgments that have been so sorely tested by Trump’s political rebirth, after the storming of the Capitol on 6 January. What is at issue is corporate probity, journalistic integrity and the direction of rightwing politics in the US, Britain and Australia.
James Murdoch as CEO and then chair of Sky between 2003 and 2012 was a leading champion of sustainability. A Joe Biden donor, he resigned from the News Corp board in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election citing strategic and editorial differences. He is no Trumpite, and surely will have agreed with his father’s email in the wake of 6 January that Trump should become a “non-person”. But that was then.
His father’s current attempt to ingratiate himself with Trump – though embarrassingly consigned to a mere balcony seat at the Milwaukee Republican national convention – by organising his affairs so his influence will extend beyond the grave must be resisted to the last. It is all part of a rightwing universe in which billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are reported to be organising massive campaign contributions for Trump, while Musk plans to use his own expensive bauble – X – to churn out a tsunami of pro-Trump propaganda.
Nor will any of the Murdoch trio be impressed with the empire’s corporate leadership. It has condoned the deletion of 35m emails in the wake of the hacking cases in Britain, as recently reported in Prospect magazine, and continues to pay compensation and legal costs to victims, now estimated to exceed £1bn.
In the US, Fox and the voting equipment company Dominion reached a $787.5m settlement in a defamation lawsuit, ending a dispute over whether the network and its parent company knowingly broadcast false allegations that Dominion was involved in a plot to steal the 2020 election.
In any other company these would be resigning issues. Not in the Murdoch empire as currently run. Nor, apart from the family, is there any pressure to change.
The political polarisation and increasing ungovernability of the US are there for all to see. No democracy can survive if losers do not admit the legitimacy of the winner’s vote; thus political debate veers towards open civil war. Billionaires overtly politicising the media as their easy-to-buy playthings – Musk’s casual $44bn purchase of X is an example, along with Murdoch’s attempt to change an irrevocable trust – are part and parcel of this descent. Fact checking and scrupulously honest reporting in American journalism used to be a global benchmark. No more.
Britain should mark and learn. Constrain the numbers and power of the super-rich with proper taxation of wealth. Care about who owns our media, including the digital media, and ensure that they comply with best-practice governance arrangements. The right successfully mobilised to ensure that the distressed Daily Telegraph could not be even partially owned by a foreign national government: it was correct. The principle should be extended to prohibit majority media ownership by foreign billionaires.
Build up and sustain the BBC and other public service broadcasters as guarantors of honest information, thankfully now likely to happen with a Labour government. Ofcom must ensure that, as a minimum, all television stations rigorously separate news from comment: Britain does not need overtly partisan TV channels like Fox News and as GB News aims to be. Carefully extend checks, balances, accountability and independent moderation on social media platforms (do not exclude the press from the same standards).
Above all, care and curate our public square to sustain its plurality and vigour, but as far as possible limit its abuse. It should never be in thrall to the whims of politicised billionaires.
• Will Hutton is an Observer columnist
