Gabfest Reads | The Real Succession

March 21, 2026·25 min·2 clips

Rupert Murdoch made his daughter fire her brother during the London phone hacking scandal.

The March 2026 Gabfest Reads starts with ads. Once the sponsor copy is out of the way, David Plotz brings in Gabriel Sherman and asks what Rupert Murdoch's children call their father. The answer says plenty: Pop, the old man, the chairman, the boss, and dad all sit in the same strange pile, where family language turns into chain of command. Sherman does not flatten the Murdoch children into cartoon heirs. He gives them flaws, but also texture. Plotz pushes for the less flattering read, moving from public power to the private question of what would grate after enough time with them. Lachlan gets the political charge sheet. Sherman says Lachlan sits much further right and calls him Tucker Carlson's biggest supporter at Fox News. The 2020 election is the hinge. In Sherman's account, Lachlan helped let the network's conspiracy mongering run after that vote, which makes politics his big liability. James gets a different kind of judgment. His issue is not mainly ideology, but temperament: discomfort, argumentativeness, anger, resentment. The portrait gets unusually close. Sherman remembers a friend's line about James having everything and still seeming unable to settle into contentment. That lands because it turns billionaire succession into grievance, not just inheritance. Lachlan is the political consequence. James is the personality problem. The ads keep breaking the spell, but the interview material is dry, sharp, and pretty revealing about character, power, and resentment inside the Murdoch family.

As heard by us

A sharp Murdoch-family conversation about how temperament, resentment, and Fox politics can feed into power.

Political Gabfest turns a Murdoch succession conversation into a study of family temperament and political consequence. David Plotz asks Gabriel Sherman what Rupert Murdoch's children are like up close, and Sherman answers by stressing their complexity before sharpening the…

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Why you'd press play

You get a close look at Murdoch's family when politics, temperament, and family power pull in different directions.

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