The Man Who Owns the News by Michael Wolff Read Free Book Online Page B

family: former wife Anna, to whom he was married for thirty-two years, with their daughter, Elisabeth, born in 1968, son Lachlan three years later, and son James fourteen months after that. And now the new family: wife Wendi and daughters Grace, born in 2001, and Chloe, born in 2003. There is also his centenarian mother. And then his three sisters and their families and their various involvements with News Corp. Murdoch, the most famous lone gun in the age of business lone guns, is an extremely encumbered one.
    This can be difficult for the executives closest to him. They are often caught between their responsibility to keep the greater Murdoch family happy and his not-infrequent tendency to make his family quite unhappy.
    The consternation he is causing in late 2004 is related to what is perhaps the most confounding and dramatic moment in the history of News Corp. and of the Murdoch family: the fact that, against all indications, character, and personal beliefs, one day in 1998 he upped and left his wife for a woman thirty-eight years his junior—Wendi Deng, from Shandong Province in China. Within every other company, indeed with regard to every other powerful man, this surely would have been treated for what it was, a leveling human weakness, or even great comedy. At News Corp., his breakup and remarriage were treated with a level of sensitivity, graciousness, and respect as hardly exists in human nature and certainly does not exist on the gossip pages of his own newspapers. Indeed, several of his closest executives shortly followed suit and left their wives.
    Although there is nothing stylish about him, nothing young (except his wife), nothing particularly lifestyle-oriented about his lifestyle, he had, after the breakup, curiously moved to SoHo, Manhattan’s most chic-ishly aspirational neighborhood. His sons, Lachlan and James, both exceedingly fashionable, lived nearby.
    But as peculiar as downtown Rupert is, it is not nearly so jarring and out of character as what he does next: impulsively agreeing to pay $44 million for the most expensive apartment in New York.
    To his executives, this is not Rupert Murdoch, and certainly for his adult children, it is not their father.
    Rupert Murdoch doesn’t show off. What you see is what you get. He is an old man, with a crevassed face, in inauspicious suits, with an ever-present singlet under his white shirt. He might be worth $10 billion, give or take, but the money has never been the thing.
    His wife, Wendi, as she will tell me in an interview in 2007—as she was finishing decorating the apartment—finds his tightness particularly laughable and, in a sense, endearing. “His whole family like this. They so cheap. When he ordered the boat”—the 183-foot sailboat Rosehearty —“he worried,” she will relate in a Chinese accent as pronounced as his Australian one, “people think it’s too extravagant, too much money. I said, ‘Rupert, don’t worry. All our friends like Tom Perkins or David Geffen, they have like this huge ship. I don’t think you’re extravagant. Your boat is not as spectacular.’”
    His penuriousness, his aversion to pretense, his disdain for grandness or affectation or—his worst, most damning word—elitism, is the DNA of his company.
    But in a real-estate-mad city, it is hard not to give the most expensive apartment pretty glaring meaning. Real estate is the art of the obvious. Real estate defines the man. Murdoch is surely saying something pretty unsubtle and, it would seem, against his very nature.
    He might in fact be more appealing and less threatening as a slightly foolish rich man. If on one end of the rich scale there is Donald Trump, all mouth and affect, calling attention to himself, on the other end is Rupert Murdoch, shadowy and scowling, all head and no affect, his personality largely hidden from view. We actually seem, counterintuitively, to like it when the rich buy what they want—it brings them down to size, their needs. But