It’s all about the money. After a couple of weeks of “nothing to see here” stonewalling, we’ve got the first public leak — apparently from members of the Murdoch camp — about just what triggered the split of Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall’s six-year marriage and the first big post-COVID celebrity divorce.
It’s a reminder of why divorces are rare in billionaire families: there’s usually too much at stake. They bring disruptive instability to best-laid plans. Just ask Jeff Bezos. Or Bill Gates. Or a younger Rupert Murdoch, for that matter — this is his fourth divorce.
Since Rupert’s “I want out” email landed in Jerry’s inbox late last month, “off-the-record” voices have been stressing that the divorce won’t get in the way of the planned Lachlan succession to the twin media companies. Maybe. But what does it mean for the family’s wealth?
We’ve had reports from the Hall camp that she’s hurt and surprised after she carried the now 91-year-old Rupert through COVID in the English countryside.
Now we’re seeing harder-nosed leaks from the Murdoch camp courtesy of Lachlan’s unauthorised biographer (and former Crikey journalist) Paddy Manning in this past weekend’s Saturday Paper.
Bet they’re kicking themselves over at The Australian at being out-exclusived in its preferred domain of that rarified world of the billionaire class, incurious as it habitually is about the extracurricular doings of its billionaire owners.
It’s probably even more upset in Nine’s editorial management, where it’s been building its brand off high-octane celebrity gossip.
Like all good celebrity gossip, the divorce lights up a profound social truth. Indeed, it’s the nut graph in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s now nearly century-old short story “The Rich Boy“: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”
Thanks for the insight, Scott, but different how? Well, divorce by email, for one. And here’s another: it seems not everyone in that very richest 1% of the world’s population is equal. Status, determined by wealth, is as highly stratified as at the Versailles court of France’s Sun King, Louis XIV.
Hall, it seems, expects a cut that will keep her closer to the inner ring. Rupert can afford it, no question. But will his heirs and successors (aka his six children) allow it?
Within that 1%, as Thomas Piketty taught us to see, wealth and status scale logarithmically. There’s the 1%, with a cutoff estimated at about $US10 million. That’s where you’ll find Jerry Hall. (The Celebrity Net Worth (CNW) website puts her at about US$20 million).
Then there’s the 1% of that 1% (that’s 0.01% of all of us) where you’d find, say, Hall’s former partner (and father of her four children) Sir Michael Jagger ($US500 million per CNW) and the rest of the Rolling Stones.
Then there’s 1% of that, and 1% again, and now we’re way off the map, deep in uncharted “there be monsters” billionaire territory. Billionaires are not just different to you and me. They’re different to all the other one percenters. It’s a lifestyle where, as Joe Aston wrote this week about Gerry Harvey (in The Australian Financial Review of all places), billionaires have a bizarre expectation to be pandered to with a nodding seriousness.
Billionaires have the freedom to indulge their wildest fantasies — to, say, take over Twitter (or perhaps just upturn the company with an attempted takeover). Or they can astroturf their own political party (although, as Clive Palmer discovered in May, it can’t guarantee that many people will vote for it), or drive a takeover of an existing party.
So how much money are we talking about? Manning’s sources tell him there is a “firm pre-nuptial agreement” that, according to earlier Daily Mail speculation, means Hall “may be entitled to tens of millions of pounds [that] is more likely to be paid to her in the form of day-to-day expenses”.
Sounds more like an opening bid for a severance payout of a family retainer than a divorce settlement between the hyper-rich.
With Fox’s entertainment assets being sold to Disney, Murdoch has a lot more readily accessible cash than your average billionaire. And, like all billionaires, he’s a lot richer post-COVID. (Hall apparently received nothing from the sale to Disney. According to Manning’s sources, this was the original source of the tension.)
Hall has filed for divorce in California, with an initial ask for an accounting of just how much Murdoch actually has. Both excess wealth gained during a marriage and “inadequate disclosure” of wealth may be grounds for challenging a pre-nup.
Whatever happens, looks like there’ll be plenty of material for the next Succession.
She probably thought/hoped, like many of us, that he’d be dead by now.
He’ll be tormenting us all even after he hits triple digits 🙁
I’m not much interested in celebrity divorce news, but had a quick skim for Murdoch financials and inequality rant which I did enjoy. I would just take some issue regarding the “very richest 1% of the world’s population” as “There’s the 1%, with a cutoff estimated at about $US10 million. That’s where you’ll find Jerry Hall. ”
The world 1% from my sources is more like $AU 1M, so practically anyone who owns a house in a major city. Perhaps 1.6 million of us. In the US it is about 20 M people. The top 1% just of America is more likely $10M wealth.
It is impossible to conceive of the wealth of our oligarchs, but lets try and get what perspective we can.
I have however been dumped by email, so we have that in common 🙂
https://www.statista.com/statistics/204100/distribution-of-global-wealth-top-1-percent-by-country/
The rest of the Rolling Stones? All the revenue from the Stones recordings – famously – goes to that estimable old firm, Jagger/Richards. So they end up filthy rich and the rest – not so much. The musical contributions of all the other musicians gets overlooked when it comes to divvying up the spoils and they typically get treated as employees and only get a payday when they tour together. The resulting acrimony has led to the departure of some of their best musicians over the years and could be taken as a pretty good indication of how generous MJ is likely to have been towards his former spouses.
I think the spare guitarist has been on a salary for some years.
This article rings very true in my experience. I came from nothing but am now somewhere between “Hall” and “Jagger” money and have some experience of “Murdoch” world. The distortions that large amounts of money create are hard to fathom until you go through it yourself. The most jarring is how suspicious ultra-wealthy people become (often with good reason) about the intentions of everyone they meet eg. every interaction is assumed to be some variation of “what do they want from me” or “what can they give me”. “Normal” friendships fade into history and are hard to replace. They are left with a close circle of sycophantic hangers-on who know how to stroke their egos. I know most folks will say “boo-hoo” but the mental health and decision making of these folks has an outsized impact on our politics, culture and economies. Behind the corporate PR and polished interviews, many of them are deeply unwell. Succession is biting satire but like Veep there are some uncomfortable truths behind the humor.
Here’s hoping this divorce is so acrimonious, and Hall gets such a huge payout, that she’s both inclined and able to shred Murdoch’s legacy.