, his first British paper, he was asked if he planned to stick his oar into its editorial output. “I did not come all this way not to interfere,” the Australian tycoon barked. How exactly he would interfere became clear with the purchase of his second paper, 

, whose editor Larry Lamb received the simple edict: “I want a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it.”

, back for its third season, always encourages fresh comparisons between its salty media baron, Logan Roy, and Murdoch. The show’s creators insist they have not based their character on Murdoch. But they have mined his life for details with such precision that some of the answers Murdoch gave to the Leveson inquiry in 2011 were repeated by Roy during a fictional grilling over wrongdoing in his media empire. The show is a case of art imitating life, a portrayal of the billionaires who sleep more frequently on private jets than in beds and file lawsuits more casually than they visit the dentist, for whom Earth is not a planet to be explored but eaten.

“I’ll grind his fucking bones to make my bread,” barks Logan in one of the latest episodes. It could just as easily have been Murdoch, who once said: “You can’t be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place.” Alastair Campbell, the svengali of spin, says the real Murdoch doesn’t swear as much as his fictional counterpart. In an article for the 

, Campbell recalled how Murdoch even upbraided his son James for swearing in front of the prime minister, then Tony Blair. “We both assured them Tony had heard far worse,” Campbell said.

A young Murdoch with his fledgling Daily Mirror


Murdoch likes to say that he’s not driven by money but the love of the job. “It’s nice to have money but I don’t live high,” he once said. “What I enjoy is running the business.” It’s all relative. As far as billionaires go, Murdoch might live more humbly than, say, the Malaysian business magnate Robert Kuok, who owns 

, the most expensive yacht in the world, which cost $4.8 billion and is made out of 10,000 kilograms of solid gold and platinum and features walls made of meteorite rock and a statue made of the bones of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. But he’s not exactly a hermit either.

Murdoch&#8217;s former yacht, the 200ft Vertigo


He has a fortune of $23.4 billion, according to Forbes, and owns a 200ft yacht named 

, which was reportedly sold to him by Leonardo DiCaprio for $80 million. It has six staterooms, a swimming pool, a gym, and a crew of 11. He also owns the best private jet money can buy – a Gulfstream G650 – at a cost of $84 million, a plane so large it can seat 19 passengers and sleep up to 10. “Our reputation is more important than the last hundred million dollars,” Murdoch has said, but presumably both are still worth pursuing.

Then there are the properties. His West Coast base is the Moraga Vineyards estate in the hills above Bel Air, listed in 2013 for $30 million. It’s a 16-acre spread that has a commercial winery, and in the 1930s and 40s was owned by Victor Fleming, the director of 

. There was a five acre waterfront mansion on Centre Island in New York – which Murdoch listed for $10.5 million – that came with a pool, tennis courts, and 260 feet of beachfront. When Brad Pitt and Jolie rented it in 2008, they paid $100,000 a month to stay there. Now there’s a Georgian pile in Henley, which he purchased for £11.25 million, that features a ballet studio, an infinity pool and sauna, and a dining room for 24 people. “Monopoly is a terrible thing,” Murdoch has said. “Till you have it.”

Murdoch&#8217;s Georgian pile in Henley-upon-Thames was bought for £11.25 million


Murdoch has married four times – to Patricia Booker (mother to Prudence; divorced in 1967), to Anna Torv (mother to Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James; divorced in 1999), then Wendi Deng (mother to Grace and Chloe; defended her husband from a custard pie attack at Leveson; suspected of an affair with Tony Blair, divorced 2013), and now to Jerry Hall (the Texan model and the former partner of Mick Jagger). For a man with six children, his main regret is not spending enough time with them. “I remember once taking the two boys on a three-or four-day hike around Aspen Mountain,” he has said. “I remember every minute of it, and they remember every minute of it. I should have done more of that sort of thing.”

His media empire is the child that takes up the most attention – the Australian division once accounted for 59 per cent of every daily newspaper sold in the country. Despite his mass market popularity, Murdoch recognises his mixed reputation. For Fox News in particular, critics have called Murdoch “deviant scum” and “the reigning media gorgon” and are counting the days he has left passing through this vale of tears now that he is 90. Not that he seems to mind. “I can go into restaurants and a whole table will get up and clap if they recognize me because they love Fox News,” he has said. “Other places – or even the same place – people will turn the other way.”

The patriarch flanked by sons Lachlan and James Murdoch — who he says he regrets not spending more time with


Despite his focus on staying in what he calls the “trenches” of his company, Murdoch is not interested in securing his own legacy. “Somebody talked me into writing an autobiography about six or seven years ago,” he said. “And I said I’d try. We talked into a tape recorder, and after a couple of months, I said, To hell with it. I was so depressed. It was like saying, ‘This is the end.’ I was more interested in what the hell was coming the next day or the next week.”

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