Chairman Emeritus
In 1969 he hired an editor nobody had heard of to blow up how British newspapers were supposed to behave. Fifty-six years later, his kids paid $3.3 billion just to agree on who inherits the wreckage.
In 1969, Rupert Murdoch bought a dying British tabloid called The Sun for about a million pounds and hired an editor nobody had heard of to run it. Larry Lamb had never edited a national paper before. Murdoch hadn't run one this size, in a market this hostile, against titles that assumed Fleet Street belonged to them. What Lamb and Murdoch built instead, fast and on deadline, was more or less the modern tabloid: bigger headlines, football, sex, contempt for anyone who thought a newspaper should behave itself. It worked. Within a few years The Sun was the best-selling paper in Britain, and it stayed there for decades.
Danny Boyle's Ink — adapted from James Graham's 2017 play, Jack O'Connell as Lamb, Guy Pearce as Murdoch — opened the Venice Film Festival on September 2 and is screening at TIFF this week. Most critics liked it as a thriller about two men inventing a media formula under pressure. What split them was the ending: a montage that jumps straight from 1969 to Trump, Musk, Fox News, Facebook. Variety's Guy Lodge called it "riveting and needling," a film that "leaves you feeling pretty awful, right up to a closing montage that connects Lamb's and Murdoch's legacy to the unregulated cacophony of today's media and social media scenes." Other reviews thought Boyle was overplaying a point the real story had already made for him.
Because while Ink was in post-production, the actual Murdoch family was two years into a Nevada probate court fight over who inherits what Lamb and Murdoch built. In December 2024, a commissioner ruled that Rupert and his son Lachlan had acted in "bad faith," calling their attempt to rewrite the family's irrevocable trust and hand Lachlan sole control a "carefully crafted charade." Rupert lost that round. Then, last September, he mostly won anyway: a new deal paid his other three children — Prudence, Elisabeth, James — $3.3 billion combined to give up their shares and step away, leaving Lachlan in sole control of Fox and News Corp until 2050. Rupert, 94, kept a title: chairman emeritus.
Chairman emeritus is the kind of title a university gives a donor, or an old firm gives a founder it wants off the premises but still on the letterhead. It is not a tabloid word. Fifty-six years after hiring an editor nobody had heard of specifically to tear up how newspapers were supposed to behave, that's the job Rupert Murdoch actually has now.