Rupert Murdoch has finally put to rest speculation about his succession plans.
From one single newspaper, the media mogul created a sprawling global empire that delivered him enormous influence, vast sums of money and made him a household name.
From Australia he went on to battle the UK media establishment, becoming the driving force behind the modern tabloid before making his mark in America as the shaper of conservative debate.
But at 92 years old, the matter of who would take over his life's work and help shape his legacy was still in doubt.
The possibility of being next in line has loomed over his children for most of their lives.
The next generation was often pitted against each other in a "Darwinian struggle" for their father's favour, a source close to the family told Vanity Fair.
Of his six children, the list of likely successors has often been narrowed down to just three: Lachlan, James or Elisabeth.
For reasons known only to Murdoch, he never considered his first born, Prudence, a viable contender.
By the time his next daughter, Elisabeth, was born to his second wife, Anna, Murdoch had evolved on the idea of a girl one day succeeding him.
But once she left the family business to strike out on her own, her two brothers were left to battle it out for heir apparent.
Despite James being known as the "smart one", Lachlan, as the first son, held a profound pull for the media mogul, according to biographer Michael Wolff.
Each man was groomed, at different times, to take over the Murdoch business.
They were both involved in their father's empire until 2020, when James resigned from the news conglomerate citing "disagreements over certain editorial content".
It left the path clear for Lachlan to inherit the leadership.
He is now set to become News Corp chairman and continue as chief executive officer of Fox Corp, after his father announced that he would be stepping down.
"Rupert Murdoch said in the 90s that Lachlan was the first among equals of the three siblings from his second marriage to Anna Murdoch — Lachlan, Elizabeth and James — and that is how it has panned out," Paddy Manning, journalist and author of The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch, told News Breakfast.
How Lachlan was groomed to take over
Lachlan was born in London, but raised in New York City, moving with his family to the United States as Murdoch sought to chase his fortunes across the Atlantic.
He is his father's eldest boy and since a very early age, Murdoch has made sure Lachlan was involved in his company.
His education was exactly what you'd expect for someone being groomed to run News Corp.
For the price of about $100,000 a year, Lachlan attended Dalton on the Upper East Side, then Trinity across the park, then Princeton where he graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1994.
All the while, he was competing with his siblings for the respect and favour of his father — even if he had already won the ultimate birth lottery by being the first boy born to a billionaire.
As children, the morning routine for the Murdoch siblings involved reading the papers they owned, and some others as well.
Their father would flag stories of interest and command "read that" before the heirs to one of the most powerful media empires in the world would catch the bus to school.
In the evening, the children would try to capture their father's attention by talking about politics and media and then they'd play monopoly.
As Lachlan and James were playing make-believe moguls and attempting to avoid make-believe jail as they moved across the Monopoly board, there was an intense rivalry.
At the age of just 22, Lachlan was sent to Australia, to his father's homeland, to run several mastheads, including Queensland's Courier Mail.
The only daily newspaper for Australia's third-biggest city was being run by a college graduate from New York City.
It was on a boat in Sydney Harbour in the late 1990s, at a party reportedly hosted by fashion designer of the moment Collette Dinnigan, that Lachlan met his future wife, model Sarah O'Hare.
They were married on a sprawling family estate in country New South Wales in 1998 before having three children — bringing the Murdoch family home to Australia for generations to come.
Lachlan's time in Australia in his mid-20s might have been a welcomed change from the halls of Princeton, with biographer Manning writing that his wife Sarah had "a whole group of fabulous friends" that came together "with his tight group of mates".
Nicole Kidman, Baz Luhrmann and other members of the 90s Sydney social scene royalty became close friends.
And when Lachlan eventually entered his rebellious era, he would return to the sandy shores of Sydney's Eastern suburbs and to his status as the biggest fish in the smaller Australian pond.
After he married Sarah, Lachlan went back to the US where he continued to climb the corporate ladder his father had built before him.
He was rapidly ascending to positions of power inside an institution that wielded more than most.
Of all Murdoch's children, Lachlan had the perfect position and the education to follow in his footsteps and he was gaining the experience to legitimise himself as the heir apparent too.
As he takes control of the empire now, Lachlan shares many of his father's political sympathies, but there was a time when he went his own way and when the world questioned whether he really would be king.
The prince in exile
During a confrontation with his father in LA in 2005, Murdoch tried to talk him out of quitting, offering him promotions and perks to tempt him to stay.
"Look, that's not going to work," Lachlan tearfully said over lunch, according to Manning's book The Successor.
"I have to do my own thing. I have to be my own man."
He got up, walked out of the restaurant, and boarded a private jet back to the safety of Sydney's Eastern Suburbs.
Murdoch told reporters that he hoped his son would one day return to the family empire that was meant to be his birthright.
Lachlan needed space from his family, but believed his father was secretly proud that he was striking out on his own.
"Proud that you are doing your own thing and that you've got the balls to do it, the guts to leave, the courage to leave," he said, according to New York Magazine.
Lachlan's first venture under his own steam was to found a private investment company, Illyria, splashing his cash on an Indian Premier League cricket team, an online DVD rental company, and a struggling toy maker.
After his two-year non-compete clause was over, Lachlan struck a deal with James Packer — a longtime friend who had inherited the Australian empire owned by his father's oldest rival.
The two would spend $3.3 billion to privatise the publicly listed Consolidated Media Holdings and hand themselves a fat stack of Australian media assets.
"My dad's not involved," the young Murdoch proudly announced.
"There's no News Corp money or association in any way."
But the deal quickly collapsed, and the two went their separate ways again, with Lachlan setting his sights on DMG Radio, which would become Nova Entertainment, one of his most profitable investments to date.
In 2010, Lachlan teamed up with Packer again, joining the board of television's Network Ten and parachuting into the role of interim CEO, then chairman.
At the head of the boardroom table once again, Lachlan oversaw many strategic and programming decisions, including wrangling his wife a gig hosting the revamped So You Think You Can Dance after she stepped away from Australia's Next Top Model on Fox.
"I find that long period in the wilderness for Lachlan confusing," Wolff told The Monthly in 2012.
There were questions around why Lachlan had not "clarified his position" within the family and News Corp.
Wolff said it shone a light on "the fundamental ambivalence at the heart of where he finds himself".
"There is almost something Prince Charles–ish about him," he said at the time.
From the outside, the Australian Murdochs appeared to be thriving.
Sydney became a sanctuary for Lachlan and his family. When you have all the money in the world, Sydney can be like that.
A beachfront mansion, kids in elite schools, a deep tan from surfing the Bronte break every day and an easy entry into the city's tightest circles — business or otherwise.
But the honeymoon didn't last long — Ten's share price was plummeting.
In a Crikey opinion piece titled Who really killed Channel Ten?, Glenn Dyer laid the blame squarely at Lachlan's feet.
"In other words, the billionaires, led by Murdoch, have helped blow up more than a billion dollars in balance sheet value at Ten," he wrote.
With the writing on the wall, the young Murdoch made a plan to reunite with his father.
After almost a decade away, Lachlan was back.
The relationship between Lachlan and his baby brother
Sibling rivalries can shape the dynamics of even the most functional family units, but when this amount of money and power is up for grabs, the stakes are sky high.
Though he may have been seen as Murdoch's "golden child", Lachlan's baby brother had been climbing the ladder, and their competitive childhood set the stage for an almighty showdown.
After years in exile, Lachlan was welcomed back into the family fold in 2015, just as James's mission to cement himself as heir apparent was beginning to come unstuck.
He'd spent years working to reposition the company as future-focused media conglomerate embracing the industry's digital transition.
The prodigal son's return was "a big slap in the face", a person close to James told Vanity Fair.
After years devoted to modernising the media empire and chasing the warmth of his father's approval, James would now report to his older brother.
And the fact that it was Lachlan — rather than his father — who delivered the news only twisted the knife.
"James was livid. The two brothers and their father had explicitly discussed succession not even two years earlier. James was supposed to take over, and Lachlan would never assume more than a symbolic role," Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg wrote for New York Times Magazine in 2019.
"As James saw it, he had not only been promised the job; he had earned it."
Within three years, Lachlan was appointed as Fox Corporation CEO in the 21st Century Fox-Disney merger.
While he retained the jewels in his father's crown, Fox News and Fox Sport, James walked away from the empire with $US2 billion and a "clean slate".
In the years since, James has increasingly distanced himself from his family business, railing against climate change denialism and election conspiracy peddling at Fox News.
Cutting the final ties in 2020, he resigned from the board of News Corp, noting "disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company's news outlets and certain other strategic decisions".
While he rarely comments on his relationship with his father, James conceded in a 2019 profile with the New Yorker that "there are periods of time when we do not [talk]".
In 2021, as the family was preparing to mark the patriarch's 90th birthday, Murdoch got word to James that it would mean a lot if all of his children could attend.
James skipped the event.
But the rift between the brothers is seen as the central tension.
According to Vanity Fair sources, Lachlan told his father that James had been leaking stories to the writers of Succession, HBO's elite family drama that creators have openly acknowledged is inspired by the Murdochs.
And if there is any grain of truth to be taken from the fictionalised version of this media dynasty, Lachlan's relationships with his siblings could ultimately decide his fate after father is gone.
Why now?
Since last year, Lachlan has been steadily taking on a greater role at Murdoch's biggest money-maker, Fox.
Tim Burrows, journalist and media commentator, says there was a baton passing moment from father to son in early 2022.
"Lachlan brought the boards of both Fox and News Corporation together at his Beverly Hills mansion in Chartwell and that kicked off talks about merging Fox and News Corporation," he told News Breakfast.
"And …really that proposal was designed to entrench Lachlan as the undisputed person in charge of the empire and I think that is what we have seen [with this recent announcement]."
But lingering questions over Lachlan's appointment remain, including why Murdoch has chosen this moment to finalise his succession plan.
They say in business, one must always have an exit strategy.
For someone with the business instincts sharp enough to leverage a single newspaper in Australia's fifth biggest city, to a global empire with undeniable influence over the highest powers in the United States, there will be a reason for dropping this news now.
In April, Fox settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems — a company that produces equipment used to cast votes in American elections.
The hefty $787.5 million payout ended legal action brought by Dominion that alleged Murdoch's network had defamed it by knowingly broadcasting false claims that it was involved in a plot to steal the election.
Days later, Lachlan dropped his own defamation proceedings against Australia's Crikey. The Private Media brand had published an article referring to the family as "unindicted co-conspirators" in the US Capitol riots.
It was also April when Donald Trump was indicted for the first time. The former president is now facing charges in four different states — two of the cases are over his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
For Trump, those dramas are only just getting started, but for the Murdoch family, there is a quiet lull between the fallout of the last US election cycle and the start of the next one.
The first Republican caucus is on January 15.
This move hands Lachlan editorial control over how the empire covers the candidates and who they select as their ultimate favourite.
Also, Murdoch will be approaching the age of 94 at the next inauguration.
The media mogul has stared down his share of health scares in recent years, but none that moved him to name an heir.
"It strikes me as probably about solidifying Lachlan at the top of the company, because the longer he's in that seat, the longer he might hold on it," Burrows said.
While the expectation is that Lachlan is unlikely to make any big changes in the short term, observers say when Murdoch eventually passes, his other adult children — James, Elisabeth, and Prudence — might look to take the company in a "much more dramatic, a different direction".
All four will inherit a family trust with a 40 per cent stake in News Corp and Fox Corp, giving them a powerful voice in the future of the company.
But with equal voting rights, decision-making will be a delicate process of negotiation between the siblings.
The same appears to hold true of a possible succession battle. To unseat Lachlan from the top job, James would need the support of Elisabeth and Prudence.
"It's not like a real succession scenario right now, this minute," Alice Enders, head of research at Enders Analysis, told Reuters.
"It's more in the future I'd say."
Complex sibling dynamics are not the only challenge to Lachlan's leadership.
There is also the question of what the Murdoch empire is without the man who built it.
For now at least, Rupert Murdoch will continue to have a role to play, despite handing his son the keys to the kingdom.
"In my new role, I can guarantee you that I will be involved every day in the contest of ideas," he wrote in a letter to staff.
"Our companies are communities, and I will be an active member of our community. I will be watching our broadcasts with a critical eye, reading our newspapers and websites and books with much interest."