I see Vanity Fair is running another excerpt from Michael Wolff's The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch. This one is about the (non) struggle for succession about Murdoch's offspring.
It includes pen portraits of the elder children. So we learn that Prudence, born to Murdoch's first wife, Patricia, is "the official Murdoch-family wing nut. She gets away with saying what the others won't, even things that the others won't think."
The next three are by the second wife, Anna. We discover that Elisabeth is "uncontrollable" at school, "restless" soon after her first marriage, "a harridan of a manager" when owning two TV stations in California, regarded as "a management trainee" by BSkyB's supremo and now runs "the biggest independent television production company in the UK".
Lachlan is "frictionless, affable" and "uncomplicated".
Once the heir apparent, his ambition for advancement within News Corp was blunted by executives who clearly don't like having the chief's children around. Now he's doing his own thing, which seems to be nothing much.
James is "aggressive, implacable, focused, remote, fit, precise" and "effortlessly programmatic, reductive, and process-oriented." So Rupert is "obviously proud, even perhaps slightly afraid of him." He is now regarded as the successor.
Rupert's two children with his third wife, Wendi, are too young to get involved in the succession race. There is Grace, born in 2001, and Chloe, both of them fluent in Mandarin and English.
