Failing at succession? Try secession

IF YOU’RE a fan of HBO’s Succession, you might’ve spent a few delicious moments last month (July) imagining Lachlan Murdoch yelling, “I am the eldest boy!”.

The TV show about the feuding Roy clan might’ve ended its run, but the Murdochs’ power struggle is just getting started. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, 93, – synonymous with Fox News and News Corp – is trying to amend the family trust to give his son, Lachlan, control of his business after his death. Three of Lachlan’s siblings are contesting this effort in court. Thanksgiving will be tense for the Murdochs.

Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t be the first geriatric media titan asserting control well past his prime. Viacom’s Sumner Redstone battled his daughter Shari over corporate governance and succession issues well past his 80s. So acrimonious was their disagreement that in 2007, Sumner blasted Shari in an open letter, accusing her of having made “little or no contribution” to his media empire.

In matters of blood mixing poorly with business, it bears wondering if all parties involved would be better served if a firm was run by professional managers instead.

There must be something primal about the instinct to keep a business a family-run one. But it seems an awfully arbitrary aspiration – you’d have to wager that your child is up to the job, actually wants to do it, and is the superior option out of all the other chief executive officers you could’ve hired from a pool of non-relatives in the wider world. The odds that your child, having been born of a random melange of genetics and happenstance, is all three of these things is ridiculously minuscule.

And yet, generation after generation persists in re-enacting Game of Thrones with their children – one irrevocable family trust away from a Red Wedding – only for it to end in ignominy or acrimony. In understanding this phenomenon, it helps to see humanity in terms of two opposing tribes – the “holder-onners” and the “let-goers” – a dichotomy that features heavily in Stephen King’s 2023 novel, Holly.

I posit that a lot of unhappiness in this world arises from being a holder-onner. This is magnified in successful family dynasties because you don’t build a sprawling empire by being a mere let-goer. Everything you’ve built, you’ve constructed with the tenacity of the holder-onner that you are. When fame, fortune and status are finally yours, you must be loath to loosen your grip, let alone relinquish it.

Your children, having been held in an iron vise of conditional parental love all their lives, must not know any other way to grasp existence either. And so, they too become holder-onners – white-knuckling their grip on what they’ve come to count on as their birthright.

Sometimes, the inability to let go has wrenching implications. Just after Sumner Redstone’s death in 2020, his daughter reportedly asked one of his confidantes: “Do you think he really loved me?”

As the Murdoch children undertake their respective Oedipal struggles, they might benefit from the pathos-laden words of Connor, the least-damaged Roy sibling in the Succession universe. “You’re all chasing after Dad, saying, ‘Love me, please love me. I need love. I need attention.’ You’re needy love sponges... I don’t need love,” he said. “It’s like a superpower.” Billionaire or not, may everyone unfortunate enough to need this superpower eventually develop it.