Money Talks: The Family Squabble That Could Change Right-Wing News
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Hello, everyone.

Welcome to Money Talks from Slate Money, our show where we talk to fascinating and brilliant people about fascinating and interesting things. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios, and my favorite thing that I've ever done, pretty much, is

is the series of Slate Money Succession recaps that we ran here on this show with a bunch of brilliant people. And now I am very, very sad because the one brilliant person that we never had on Slate Money Succession was McKay Coppins, currently of The Atlantic. McKay, welcome.

Thank you for having me. I'm sorry to have missed the Succession recaps as well, but we can probably get into it a little bit here. I feel like this is exactly what we're going to do. We're just going to have a conversation about something, well, which is probably even better than Succession, which is the real-life family drama of the Murdoch family, a subject which has been an obsession of many people, but that you seem to have become something of an overnight expert in, given...

I think I'm right in saying pretty much unprecedented degree of access to James and Catherine Murdoch. I think that's probably true as far as journalists go. And it's funny that you say overnight expert. And I know what you mean because the story, this profile of James and Catherine Murdoch

was a year in the making, but there are people, as you know, professional Murdoch chroniclers who have been doing this for literally decades. And that was kind of one of the, frankly, slightly intimidating things about coming to this story the way I did was that there are people out there who have written, you know, multiple books about the Murdochs who have been writing about this family since the 90s.

And I think I was lucky. And in a way, I think it was an advantage, at least probably James saw it this way, that I wasn't carrying decades worth of baggage into the story, that I was coming at it with fairly fresh eyes. And I think that's part of why he opened up to me.

How many Murdoch biographies did you read in the course of reporting this story? A lot. I don't know the exact number. I'm not in my home office, but at my home office, I have a stack up to my stomach, probably, of Murdoch books. And, you know, they're the famous ones. Michael Wolff's biography from 2008 of Rupert is a pretty fascinating document now, given all that's happened since.

He wrote another kind of quickie book about the Murdochs just last year, I think. But there are so many. David Falkenflik wrote one. There's some British and Australian journalists who have written interesting books about them. I did immerse myself in what James calls mockingly the canon of Murdoch books.

But also it was mainly helpful because James had some very specific things that he wanted to dispute to me and also kind of certain narratives about him and Catherine that he wanted to push back on. So I felt like it was important to fully get up to speed on those narratives so that I understood what he was quibbling with. Yeah, you don't understand what he's quibbling with if you aren't familiar with it. And I have to admit that being...

British and in the media, I am probably much more familiar with the cannon than most Americans. Also, I'm married to a woman who did an entire art piece about Rupert and Rupert's relationship with his dad, Keith, and which was called Daddy Issues and was up in a gallery in Tribeca last year. That's amazing. I wish I had seen that. We'll have to come over and check out some of the charcoals. But the level of Murdoch dysfunction, I think it will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone.

did not start with this generational war. But this generational war is quite astonishing. And I do want to ask you about it. I think the place to start

is the one question that everyone has been asking for at least, I would say, two or three years, which is when Rupert dies, he's in his mid-90s now, his mum lived past 100, but people reckon, you know, who knows? He has to die at some point, right? We're all mortal. When Rupert dies...

His empire gets split four ways between his four eldest children. Well, let me be a little bit more precise than that. The voting rights and the control of his empire gets split four ways between his four eldest children.

one of whom is very clear sort of Trumpist Republican than the other three of whom are not. And so just for people who care about things like American democracy, what are the chances that Fox News in particular will continue to be run by a Trumpist Republican upon Rupert's death? This

This is the animating question. It's what everyone cares about. And it's, I will say, the thing that James was most cagey about in our more than a dozen interviews because it's the subject of active litigation right now. Rupert is trying to rewrite the family trust to give full power and control of the family empire to that Trumpist Republican, his eldest son, Lachlan, once he dies, rather than splitting control equally among the four

oldest children, as has long been the plan. And part of Rupert's case for why he should be allowed to rewrite the irrevocable family trust is that he believes that if James has his way, he will tank the company's value by moderating Fox News, leading to a viewer exodus, and that therefore it's actually in the best interest of the beneficiaries to effectively disenfranchise them and concentrate control with Locklett.

So because this is the narrative that Rupert has advanced, James was always a little skittish about talking about his plans for Fox News. But he was very clear with me about what he thinks of Fox News and what he thinks needs to change. And what he said to me was that,

Fox News has essentially become a blight on the Murdoch name, in his view, that it has come to define the entire empire in a really toxic way, that it's recklessness and disregard for the very most basic editorial and journalistic norms.

is not only a menace to American democracy, but has also made it a financial liability in some ways, as evidenced by the Dominion defamation settlement and the pending Smartmatic litigation that could be an even larger settlement. He basically believes that Fox News could still report from a conservative perspective, but while being grounded in

basic, normal editorial standards, journalistic standards. And that would mean a very different Fox News. How exactly those changes would happen once Rupert's gone is an open question. Now, there are some who believe that James and his sisters would essentially team up and boot Lachlan from the corner office and put a new CEO in. And then also that would mean probably a new leader of Fox News specifically back

when Roger Ailes was ousted, James wanted to put in the former president of CBS News in his place, which, you know, it's an interesting kind of crossroads to consider how the network would have been different if they had a more normal seasoned news executive there. But it is very possible, maybe even likely, that when Rupert dies, if the family trust stays the way it is,

we would have a very different situation with Fox News and with a lot of the other Murdoch outlets, different leadership, different standards, different culture. And that might mean that somebody like Donald Trump would have not quite so reliable an ally in the Murdoch media empire.

We've already seen the Wall Street Journal editorial page become quite more vocally anti-Trump than it was in the first Trump administration. But the Wall Street Journal is not something that Lutkin really cares about, right? And there does seem to be persistent rumors that the Wall Street Journal is low-key for sale already, even while Rubin is still alive. I think that's right. It's just, it's not a major profit center for the empire. And it's also...

The way that its editorial board is currently editorializing against Trump on things like tariffs and Ukraine is sort of true to its DNA as a organ of the center-right business class, whereas Fox News is much more populist, an organ of kind of movement conservatism and now Trumpian politics.

Yeah, I mean, Rupert has always been obsessed with the Wall Street Journal, and he saw it as kind of a crown jewel of his empire when he was able to buy it. But it's not clear to me that Lachlan cares nearly as much about the newspapers in general as Rupert does. And so I doubt that he is putting a finger on the scale of how their editorial board is operating. He's probably just not paying as much attention to it as he is the Fox News primetime lineup, for example.

Yeah. I mean, come on, Jeff Bezos, pay attention to Lacton and ignore your newspapers. It's fine. So as you say, this is all the

the subject of, well, you say active litigation, but it's not very active right now, right? Rupert and Lachlan quite dramatically lost the first round. And is there any realistic chance that that decision is going to get overturned? They are appealing. It's a weird system because it's like set up in Reno, Nevada, where

and it's family trust litigation. So it's actually a probate commissioner who made the original decision. Now a judge needs to sign off. It's complicated. Most of the experts I talked to said it's pretty unlikely that an appeal would be successful because the probate commissioner's decision was so decisive and sweeping that the

Rupert and Lachlan lost on effectively every count. It's an uphill battle for them to argue that it's in the beneficiary's best interest to disenfranchise them. It's an uphill battle to argue that irrevocable trusts, well...

Well, you know, you can revoke them. Right, exactly. That said, James and Catherine, at least, fully believe that this is not kind of the last scheme that Rupert and Lachlan will undertake. If they lose on this front, they'll start looking for some other mechanism to sideline James and concentrate power with Lachlan. So the story is not over, even if this chapter of the litigation is over.

So one of the wild things that we learned from,

from your story was that James was actually willing to sell his stake in Fox News to Lachlan and Lachlan wanted to buy it. But Lachlan was just being a sort of cheapskate and refused to pay full market value for it. And they couldn't agree on a price. And if Lachlan had just paid the market value of the shares, then none of this would have happened at all. Right. Well, it's interesting. There were a couple different times where buyouts were considered. And

Which, by the way, we have to mention is a standard plot point in Succession. It comes up at least two or three times. Right. Yeah. I should say, like, there were many occasions in reporting this story and talking to James where I was like, I feel like I've heard this story before. And he would say, no, I've never shared this with anyone. And then I would realize it was a story in Succession. It was just like, you know, slightly altered.

But yeah, I mean, there were multiple buyout attempts. Actually, at one point, James approached Lachlan when they were still both in the company and tried to convince Lachlan they should buy out their sisters to at least concentrate control with the two of them, and Lachlan didn't go for it. My read on it is that Lachlan was always a bit half-hearted in his buyout approaches. It's possible he just didn't want to take on the level of personal debt that he would need to finance it. And also,

I think it was Rupert more that was pushing Lachlan to try to buy out James. You know, Rupert saw it as kind of the cleanest way to accomplish what he needed to. And at one point, Rupert even told Lachlan, you know, bet on yourself. You should bet on yourself, buy your brother and sisters out and make it happen the way that I did. Right. And.

James's read is that Lachlan just doesn't, he didn't want to bet on himself. He wanted to find some other way to get the control without taking the risk. And that's how we ended up where we are today.

So we now know much more about this family feud than we did last month, partly because of your story, but partly also because the New York Times managed to get umpteen thousand pages of transcripts, which they then turned into a story which came out, what, two days before yours? Yes. Yeah. So because everything is levels of media and it's turtles all the way down, I do need to ask about what, like, it is not a coincidence, right?

that, you know, you wait 10 years for a definitive piece on this feud and then two of them come out within a week. Yeah, I mean, I'm not even sure I'm entirely clear on what exactly happened there. I knew that the New York Times was working on a story. Those two reporters are among the kind of longtime Murdoch chroniclers that actually broke the story last year that this legal battle over the family trust was happening. So, yeah.

Even as I was talking to James and I started talking to him early 2024 before this was all in the public, I knew that they were working on it.

Kind of the way that two publications are probably always like listening for footsteps, right? I didn't know how far along they were. And I know that James and Catherine were not talking to them. But once they published their story, there's no big secret here. We were just about done with ours. We were closing our story. It was going to be on the cover of the April issue. Typically, it would run online a little bit later. But because the Times was out there, the editors here decided, well, let's just run ours.

So I think it was actually the day after they published and then we published ours the day after. Luckily, we had just wrapped up fact checking and the legal read and all of that stuff. So we were basically ready to go. But yeah, look, I mean, you said that it's not a coincidence and that's probably true, but I think it's really just the fact that

This lawsuit, this battle taking place in Reno is the climactic event of this succession story that has been widely covered and going on for decades. And so it makes sense that there's more journalistic attention being paid to it than ever before.

At the beginning of your story, you explain that one of the reasons why it was hard to get James to be open with you is that every one of Rupert's kids has it drilled into them from an early age that they don't talk to the press. And one of the things that really struck me about the New York Times story was that they didn't seem to have succeeded in talking to basically anyone.

Normally, what happens if you get your hands on absolutely everything and you have all of these pages of depositions and sworn depositions and transcripts and who said what to whom and text messages and all the rest of it? At that point, when you know everything, people will start talking to you because they want to explain their side of the story.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that even in that situation, when in any other family or any other company, like everyone would just start talking because the reporters knew everything. Even then, the Murdochs didn't talk to the New York Times. Is that right? Yeah.

I mean, I obviously don't know who they talked to. It doesn't seem that any of them are quoted on the record in this story. And James and Catherine, at least, have said that they certainly didn't talk to them. You know, I think that it's just a really hard behavior to unlearn, right, for these Murdochs. Like, I remember when I pitched James on doing this profile, it was early last year. Like I said, I didn't know that there was this battle over the trust. It was honestly kind of a stroke of luck.

Like, I sensed that he would have an amazing story to tell if he was willing to tell it. I also thought there was a good chance he wouldn't even meet with me. But as it turned out, just, I think, a month or two earlier, Rupert had revealed his decision to them that he was going to try to rewrite the irrevocable family trust. And...

James experienced that as kind of a profound betrayal by his father. And I think because of that, he felt liberated to talk to me in a way that he never would have before. But even as I was talking to him, there were many times where I had to really press him to go to places he didn't want to go.

He had this reflexive protectiveness of his family, certainly of his father. I would ask him questions about particularly painful moments in his life with his dad or in his career in the family business. And he would sort of clam up or find an excuse to leave the room or clear the dishes or say he needs to go wash up or whatever. He would get nervous and anxious about it. And his wife, Catherine, was often the one who would kind of get him back on track.

and be like, no, no, no, James, answer the question. He asked you this. What do you think about this, right? So it was really helpful to have her there for so many of the interviews. But I'm not surprised that the other members of the family weren't just going on the record with the New York Times because look, they...

It's almost like a code of omerta that mafia families have. It was so instilled in them from such an early age, not just that you don't talk about the family to anyone outside the family, but that news outlets and journalists that are not owned by Rupert are the enemy.

They're going to do everything they can to destroy us. And they're going to operate in bad faith. And they hate our success. And they hate our empire. And they want to take us down. This is the kind of mentality that Rupert has and that he taught his children to have. And so I think it's really hard, even in this moment of fracture with the family, for his adult children to suddenly pull a 180 and start talking. And it took a lot of work and a lot of time

with James and Catherine to get them to really open up the way that I needed them to for this story to work. Which raises the question then, who leaked all the transcripts to the New York Times? I don't know, but I can tell you it's a subject of a lot of speculation. Within the family too, I think. Within the family too. And would I be wrong in saying that the general consensus seems to be that it was Bill Burr? I can't comment on that.

I really, I can't comment on that. I'm not going to speculate on another reporter's sources. But as you can imagine, there was a lot of speculation inside the family about who did this because James and Catherine talked to me, right? But they talked on the record. It was no secret. They were kind of operating out in the open. They knew that everyone would know that they had talked to me. I quote them extensively on the record in the story to leak all these documents.

in a sealed trial is a different thing. So there's a lot of questions about who did it, but I can't comment on who did it. Did anyone benefit from that leak? I actually don't know. What do you think? Well, I mean, so Bill Barr was found to have acted in bad faith, which is a kind of kiss of death for any lawyer. Maybe you can just explain who he is and how he managed to get involved in this.

But even he doesn't seem to come out any better from this New York Times story than he entered it. Bill Barr, yeah, just let's do a little background. Two-time Attorney General, friend of Rupert's, was recruited onto what was euphemistically codenamed Project Family Harmony. This was Rupert and Lachlan's effort to rewrite the family trust, to concentrate power with Lachlan when Rupert died. And it was complicated, right? Yeah.

new managing directors had to be recruited to the trust. Barr was one of them. Before that, he was, you know, offering kind of legal advice, as I understand it, to Rupert. There's been, you know, a lot of reporting about this, but he is a main character in this saga. And, you know,

Again, I'm not going to really speculate who leaked to whom. You should honestly have the New York Times reporters on here and see what you can get. Oh, they'll tell me. I'll just ask them and they'll tell me. Felix, you're so charming. You can get them to open up a little bit. But I don't know. But, you know, like I will say that the story broke last year in the summer that this was happening. So there have been leaks already leading up to this.

The one thing that we can probably assume relatively safely is that the person who leaked the first time was the same as the person who leaked the second time. Or maybe not. Who knows? Your guess is as good as mine.

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One thing that I've been thinking about a lot is that Rupert in a probably the single best and most successful deal of his, you know, best part of a century in media sold for

Fox, not Fox News, but 21st Century Fox. 21st Century Fox is what it was renamed. To Disney for like a million gazillion dollars. And that money got divvied up between the six children. They got $2 billion each. And at that point, they are all dynastically wealthy in their own right. That was the super majority of the Murdoch empire by value got sold.

to Disney. What was left was a bunch of news and sports things that, you know, have a lot of cultural relevance, but don't have nearly the same cashflow. So it's almost as though they've, they've had their exit, they've made their money. And what that does is it means that when they start doing things like running Fox news, deciding whether or not to hold onto the wall street journal, et cetera, et cetera, these things become, uh,

Would it be fair to say kind of financially irrelevant once you have that $2 billion, like your shareholding in Fox Corp or News Corp just is not that important anymore? Yeah, I don't know that they're entirely irrelevant, but you're right that each of the four adult children...

walked away from that Disney deal fully independently wealthy in their own rights. Generational wealth has been created. All of them have complete flexibility to do what they want. James started his own investment firm. He's doing deals in India. He bought Art Basel. He's got his own stuff cooking. So you're right that after that Disney deal, all of the Murdochs had plenty of money.

But control over the family empire is about more than money. Right.

Right. And that's kind of my point, though, is that like Murdoch's conceit as part of Project Family Harmony was the way that we best work in the interests of the heirs is to maximize the financial value of Fox Corporation. And I guess like that's really not top of mind for any of the four kids. Right. Because they already or any of the six kids, for that matter, because none of them need the money.

Right. And this is where I think it's important to understand that the psychological value, the psychic value of these assets to the Murdochs is kind of incalculable, right? I write in the piece about the kind of mythology of the Murdoch empire. And you mentioned it goes back to Keith Murdoch, Rupert's father and

The efforts that Rupert has made when all of his kids were very young to convince them that the most important thing in the world is to play their part in the family empire. He's constantly drawing them into his professional world at every opportunity.

when they're very young, he's taking them on tours of the printing press and he's bringing dignitaries and politicians home for family dinner. At breakfast, he spreads the newspapers across the table and teaches them how to be kind of budding media moguls. This is their whole world, right? And so...

To argue now, well, look, Fox News's profit margin will be 20% higher with Lachlan in charge versus the four of you fighting it out over every decision. It's not incredibly persuasive, certainly not to James and his sisters. But James would also argue that it's really not in the best interest of the beneficiaries to have Fox News continue to be this

Profit center that is also kind of this shrinking asset in a dying medium that is completely defining in every relevant cultural metric the rest of the assets. Every other asset that the Murdochs own is to varying degrees tainted by its association with Fox News, depending on how you look at it. That's certainly how James sees it.

Is that how he sees, I don't know, HarperCollins? Actually, I think he has explicitly argued behind the scenes against the recombination of News Corp and Fox because, remember, they were split into two different companies. Rupert and Lachlan, a few years ago, tried to recombine them, and James...

explicitly argued to the boards of each company that they should not do it. And one of the arguments was that associating the Times of London, for example, and HarperCollins, the Wall Street Journal, all these other better regarded companies with Fox News would be to their detriment.

So just to be clear, he thinks there are a lot of assets owned by the family that are doing great work and they're prestigious and they're forces for good in their respective industries. He just thinks that Fox News has repeatedly shown itself to be this incredibly divisive, incredibly polarizing asset whose kind of radioactivity seeps into the rest of the assets.

Obviously, Lachlan wants to continue to control Fox News, as he does today. He doesn't seem to have a massive rooting interest in much of the rest of the empire, although perhaps he cares about the Australian newspapers more than the average bear. In terms of the other five kids, have any of them expressed any interest in any of the bits of the empire? Or is it really only Fox News that is getting everyone excited?

Well, I can't really speak to Grace and Chloe. Those are Rupert's younger daughters that he had later with Wendy Dang. I know that Prudence, Rupert's oldest daughter, has generally tried to stay out of the family business, but has joined James and Liz in this effort to block the changes to the trust.

I don't know what exactly Liz and Prudence, what they would say about, for example, like the Daily Sun in London. I haven't gotten into that level of detail in their assessments of the various media outlets. And I didn't talk to Prudence. I did talk to Liz.

I think that it's fair to say that James has a lot of consternation about Fox News, but that he also thinks that there is a general what he calls a kind of tabloid mentality that permeates a lot of the other news outlets. And he pointed to some of the British and Australian newspaper and TV holdings as well. That makes them kind of fundamentally unserious in a way that he doesn't like.

You know, he talked about the coverage of the bushfires in Australia and the general aversion to and hostility to even any discussion of climate change as a factor in the Australian Murdoch-owned news outlets.

And he just thinks that's unserious. The way that the British media outlets owned by the Murdochs campaigned for Brexit and supported Brexit, there's actually a story he tells me that's in the piece about attending a board meeting in London shortly before the referendum vote. And he's

at a lunch before the board meeting with a bunch of executives and editors and Boris Johnson stops by and he's like kind of regaling them all with stories from the campaign trail. And somebody says, so is this going to pass? And he kind of smirks and he says, well, we'll see. And to James, he just felt like everybody was having a laugh and that the whole thing was like a big joke and it made for good copy. And that's kind of all that matters.

And that is the attitude that kind of drives him crazy. And he feels like there's just not enough seriousness in the way a lot of the Murdoch press approaches these really important issues where they have a lot of influence. And that's what he wants to see change.

And that really is Rupert, right? I mean, Rupert famously supported Tony Blair, like he is very instrumental in the way he sees the political positions and the positions more broadly of his outlets. And quite explicitly in this court case in Nevada, he basically said, look, being a Trumpy right wing TV station is really good for the bottom line. And that's why I'm doing it. And that's why I want Lachlan to keep on doing it. And you know, Roger Ailes,

made billions of dollars by making this sort of tactical decision and high-minded principles about, you know, the fourth estate reporting the truth and that kind of stuff is not something he's ever stood for.

There's a scene in this story where James is being deposed by one of Rupert's lawyers in this litigation. At one point, the lawyer actually says, you know, are you aware that Fox News lost a huge amount of its viewership after it called Arizona for Biden in 2020 on election night? Correctly, by the way, we should stipulate like Biden did win Arizona.

But there was a viewer revolt and a bunch of people tuned out. And James said, yes, I've read that. And then the lawyer said, and are you aware that Fox News was able to win back most, if not all of that audience through their election denial coverage? Effectively saying that the whole strategy of amplifying Trump's lies about the 2020 election being rigged was a purely cynical play to win back the audience that they had lost on election night by telling the truth.

right? And that's the kind of thing that I think James is most eager to see change. And I should say like,

Often when I would ask him about this, he would make this point that he's not going to turn Fox News into MSNBC, right? He's not interested in seeing all the Murdoch outlets become organs of progressive politics. He just doesn't think that it should be so mutually exclusive. You can either be conservative in your politics and incredibly reckless and defamatory in your coverage,

or you have to be left wing. He believes that there's a way to retain a lot of the audience, but by being responsible and telling them the truth. And that does not seem to be the approach that Rupert has taken with a lot of his news outlets.

This is an evolution that we see quite often in the tech world where you have a very aggressive, go-getting, corner-cutting founder who builds an empire. And then once it becomes an empire, that founder needs to soften a bit and start doing government relations and start caring about larger universes of stakeholders. And eventually it gets handed over to a professional CEO who they've hired from outside somewhere.

And things get run in a much more sort of grown up manner. And it strikes me that James was kind of positioning himself as the executioner.

External grown-up CEO, but just not being external. He was like, you could have the best of both worlds that way. It's a great comparison. It's so true. Because this was the central tension between James and Rupert the entire time James was inside the company. Especially in 2005 after Lachlan resigned after multiple clashes with Rupert's lieutenants, including Roger Ailes.

Lachlan resigns, moves back to Australia, says, I'm done with all of this. And James, for like 10 years, becomes sort of de facto heir apparent. And during that 10 years, James has some successes in Asia. He did well for himself. He then takes over Sky, has some wins there. He's then promoted to chief executive of Europe and Asia for News International. And

Throughout this time, James saw, he kind of saw his mandate. The project he was on was to civilize his father's empire. There's this one indelible part of your story where he's like saying something about compliance being like, you know, actually important. It's not just an obstacle. And what he said is that all of Rupert's sort of handpicked deputies who were working with James just hated

hated every time James would bring up something like, you know, maybe we should consult the lawyers on this, or maybe we should like talk to HR about this issue, or they totally bristled at it because it was so contrary to the culture that Rupert had instilled, which was, he wouldn't use this term, but it is kind of the move fast and break things ethos that you're talking about.

And also like it's the, not to put too fine a point on it, but like if you're in the business of distributing tabloid newspapers in New York, that is a very mobbed up business. There's just a bunch of stuff where you don't spend a lot of time worrying about compliance. Rupert famously had, what was it called? News America or something? The little leaflets that fall out of the newspaper with all of the ads for the local supermarkets and stuff. That was a huge business for him and no one there cared about.

compliance or HR or anything. And this was the thing, right? So James kind of immerses himself in like modern management theory and starts caring a lot about culture and believes that, you know, outcomes flow from a healthy culture. And this stuff is just totally anathema to Rupert and his guys, right? And James, yeah, James said that there's this one point where he was kind of talking about compliance and they were like, oh,

There he goes again using MBA speak, business jargon. And James is like, actually, it's just the English language and it's kind of an important concept. Compliance is probably something we should think about more. But it was always the tension. And I think that the psychological, like the kind of family dynamic at work is that Rupert saw that as James being obsessed with respectability.

And that he wanted to be taken seriously, you know, on Wall Street and at Davos and places like that, that Rupert always kind of sneered at, that he thought that James just wanted to be taken seriously by fancy people.

whereas Rupert had always sort of delighted in his villainous reputation. And I think that was a big part of why James never really fit perfectly in the successor role and why Rupert eventually recruited Lachlan to come back in 2015 and reclaim his mantle as heir apparent. Although Lachlan is not that Rupertesque in that regard either, right? Like he...

While Rupert was just very sort of swashbuckling in his disregard for norms, Lachlan seems like he's more of a right-wing true believer.

That's James's sense. For him, the clarifying moment was Trump's 2016 campaign. He said that once Trump started running, at first, Rupert was pretty contemptuous toward Trump. And, you know, they had known each other forever, right? Trump was like a fixture of the New York Post. They were both kind of New York characters for a while. And he, you know, Rupert

actually said to James that if Trump wins the Republican nomination, that'll be the end of the Republican Party. And he was right. But the thing for James was that once Rupert realized Trump really resonated with Rupert's audience, especially on Fox News, but really, you know, his broader audience in general, he pivoted. He immediately started cozying up to Trump. He gave Trump an enormous platform on Fox News and elsewhere. And to James, that was kind of an indication that Rupert had no real ideology.

But Loughlin, on the other hand, internally, actually was pretty defensive of Trump. Like when James would bring up things like the proposed Muslim ban, expecting that Loughlin would agree with him that it was outrageous and terrible, Loughlin would immediately go to this kind of knee-jerk anti-Hillary Clinton stance that kind of surprised James. And what he told me is that, look,

I had never really thought that much about Loughlin's politics. Loughlin is kind of this affable, friendly, dilettante-ish guy. He never seemed like this secret right-wing ideologue. But once Trump came onto the scene and James and Loughlin were kind of running Fox together, he started to see that Loughlin actually did seem to be a true believer in a lot of this stuff.

And that might have been part of what Rupert saw in Lachlan as a more viable successor. I'm not sure about that. I would frankly like to do more reporting on what Rupert thinks of Lachlan's politics, but it is fascinating.

Final question in terms of people who we had no idea that this was their politics until we did exhibit a is of course, Elon Musk, who has gone from like, I'm going to create a clean EV company. That's going to save the planet to Elon Musk. James is on the board of Tesla. He joined the board of Tesla back when Tesla was a clean EV company that was going to save the planet. What can you tell me about his relationship with Elon? Yeah.

I don't know that much about it. You know, we talked about Elon here and there, but honestly, Elon's kind of full pivot happened late in the reporting process for me. So it just didn't come up as much. I know that they first...

connected when James and Catherine were living in Europe. And James told me that they bought the second ever Tesla Roadster sold in Europe. And so Elon kind of connected with them. James and Catherine are big environmentalists. So they got to know Elon when he was in his kind of former iteration as this like innovator of electric vehicles.

I don't know what they make of his pivot now. I can guess that they are not happy about it as pretty big Trump opponents, but I'm not really privy to their private conversations about this latest turn and certainly not the Doge turn, which all happened after my reporting was done. If you had to guess, would you expect James to stay on that board for much longer or do you think that it's not worth it to him?

I don't know. I mean, clearly there's no financial stake. I do know that Catherine has talked about believing that they should, where they have friends that they feel like they could have some influence on, especially friends that are going in a more Trumpy direction. She wasn't talking specifically about Elon, but I could see this applying to them, that they should try to stay close and try to steer him. I don't know how much steering Elon can take at this point. It's not easy to steer Elon. I don't think even Trump can do that.

Yeah, so I don't know. But James stays on. It won't be because he cares about whatever money or investment he has in Tesla. I think he would be doing it because of his relationship with Elon would be my guess.

So, yeah, I guess it's very clear that Lachlan is pro-Trump. It is also clear that a bunch of other billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, are moving in that direction or at the very least refusing to be part of the resistance or refusing to be vocally anti-Trump.

How much do James and Catherine see themselves as, I mean, they've been big democratic donors. They've been open about that, but how much did they see themselves as being like, we are definitely going to be the part of that shrinking cadre of anti-Trump resistance billionaire types.

I don't think they see themselves as part of the resistance. They would bristle at that characterization even before Trump was elected and you see the entire billionaire class starting to bend the knee. I think Catherine runs the political and philanthropic work that they do. She's a big believer in systemic democratic reform, small d democratic reforms. One of her big causes is

opening primaries and trying to get more centrists elected. And that's the stuff that she cares about. I do not see them. Well, I guess never say never about anyone at this point, but I do not see them cozying up to Trump. I don't see them, you know, suddenly becoming best friends with him.

But I think that they'll continue to support the causes they support. I don't think they want to define themselves by their opposition to Trump. And that's always been the case because they see their work and their project is bigger than him.

Okay, Carpins, this has been absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for all of your time and thank you for coming on Money Talks. Thanks for having me. Thanks also to Jessamyn, Molly and Merritt Jacob for producing and we will be back on Saturday with more Slate.

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