It’s all about the money. After a couple of weeks of “nothing to see here” stonewalling, we’ve got the first public leak — apparently from members of the Murdoch camp — about just what triggered the split of Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall’s six-year marriage and the first big post-COVID celebrity divorce.
It’s a reminder of why divorces are rare in billionaire families: there’s usually too much at stake. They bring disruptive instability to best-laid plans. Just ask Jeff Bezos. Or Bill Gates. Or a younger Rupert Murdoch, for that matter — this is his fourth divorce.
Since Rupert’s “I want out” email landed in Jerry’s inbox late last month, “off-the-record” voices have been stressing that the divorce won’t get in the way of the planned Lachlan succession to the twin media companies. Maybe. But what does it mean for the family’s wealth?
We’ve had reports from the Hall camp that she’s hurt and surprised after she carried the now 91-year-old Rupert through COVID in the English countryside.
Now we’re seeing harder-nosed leaks from the Murdoch camp courtesy of Lachlan’s unauthorised biographer (and former Crikey journalist) Paddy Manning in this past weekend’s Saturday Paper.
Bet they’re kicking themselves over at The Australian at being out-exclusived in its preferred domain of that rarified world of the billionaire class, incurious as it habitually is about the extracurricular doings of its billionaire owners.
It’s probably even more upset in Nine’s editorial management, where it’s been building its brand off high-octane celebrity gossip.
Like all good celebrity gossip, the divorce lights up a profound social truth. Indeed, it’s the nut graph in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s now nearly century-old short story “The Rich Boy“: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”
Thanks for the insight, Scott, but different how? Well, divorce by email, for one. And here’s another: it seems not everyone in that very richest 1% of the world’s population is equal. Status, determined by wealth, is as highly stratified as at the Versailles court of France’s Sun King, Louis XIV.
Hall, it seems, expects a cut that will keep her closer to the inner ring. Rupert can afford it, no question. But will his heirs and successors (aka his six children) allow it?
Within that 1%, as Thomas Piketty taught us to see, wealth and status scale logarithmically. There’s the 1%, with a cutoff estimated at about $US10 million. That’s where you’ll find Jerry Hall. (The Celebrity Net Worth (CNW) website puts her at about US$20 million).
Then there’s the 1% of that 1% (that’s 0.01% of all of us) where you’d find, say, Hall’s former partner (and father of her four children) Sir Michael Jagger ($US500 million per CNW) and the rest of the Rolling Stones.
Then there’s 1% of that, and 1% again, and now we’re way off the map, deep in uncharted “there be monsters” billionaire territory. Billionaires are not just different to you and me. They’re different to all the other one percenters. It’s a lifestyle where, as Joe Aston wrote this week about Gerry Harvey (in The Australian Financial Review of all places), billionaires have a bizarre expectation to be pandered to with a nodding seriousness.
Billionaires have the freedom to indulge their wildest fantasies — to, say, take over Twitter (or perhaps just upturn the company with an attempted takeover). Or they can astroturf their own political party (although, as Clive Palmer discovered in May, it can’t guarantee that many people will vote for it), or drive a takeover of an existing party.
So how much money are we talking about? Manning’s sources tell him there is a “firm pre-nuptial agreement” that, according to earlier Daily Mail speculation, means Hall “may be entitled to tens of millions of pounds [that] is more likely to be paid to her in the form of day-to-day expenses”.
Sounds more like an opening bid for a severance payout of a family retainer than a divorce settlement between the hyper-rich.
With Fox’s entertainment assets being sold to Disney, Murdoch has a lot more readily accessible cash than your average billionaire. And, like all billionaires, he’s a lot richer post-COVID. (Hall apparently received nothing from the sale to Disney. According to Manning’s sources, this was the original source of the tension.)
Hall has filed for divorce in California, with an initial ask for an accounting of just how much Murdoch actually has. Both excess wealth gained during a marriage and “inadequate disclosure” of wealth may be grounds for challenging a pre-nup.
Whatever happens, looks like there’ll be plenty of material for the next Succession.
