The mogul vanishes

As any media mogul/desperate journalist knows, good trends come in threes. I was reading New York magazine in April, specifically a profile on the HBO boss David Zaslav by Michael Wolff, when I happened upon a sentence that made me lean forward over my eggs. “He [Zaslav] is in a sense the last member of this generation to have his hand firmly on the wheel,” Wolff wrote, “[our] last brush with the era of the mogul.”

Sixty seconds later, I looked up to the television in my hotel room to see the newsflash that Warren Buffett – surely the mogulist of moguls – was to retire as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the age of 94. And then, just hours after that, someone at lunch brought up media tycoon Barry Diller’s incoming autobiography, Who Knew, itself a soaring hymn to the 20th-century peaks of moguldom; a kind of literary swansong for the time. And I thought: well, who knew?

An era, it seemed, had been passing away before us, quietly but hugely, like some great, grand tanker slipping slowly below the waterline on the distant horizon. It happened, like Hemingway’s evocation of bankruptcy, “gradually but suddenly”. But it has happened, or is happening, to be sure. (The internet, as usual, is principally to blame. But also a distinct fading of various sensibilities, of ways of working and living, that, if not solely caused by the coming of the internet, is definitely coming-of-the-internet-adjacent.) Next year, Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, will step down from his role for the final time. (He originally quit in 2020 but came back – we are already, in one way, living in a post-Iger-moguldom moment.) In 2023, Michael Bloomberg, 83, announced that he would retire as head of his company in “around three years”. Mogul extraordinaire Rupert Murdoch, at 94, will also surely one day soon depart this earthly realm and its associated boardroom.

As societal demises go, it is one that will hardly be soundtracked by a chorus of violins. Moguldom is marked, almost by definition, by its maleness and its whiteness. Its members, as has been satirised in shows like Succession, often mingled charm with monstrosity; brutality with benevolence. But these moguls were, on the whole, interesting and somehow creative people, even if their grandest, dearest, and most fragile creations were ultimately the conceptions of their own perfectly tailored worlds – immaculate empires with beach house outposts, populated by movers-and-shakers and movie stars and, often, other moguls. These were bound to fragment and fall, as everything has in recent decades. (The great never-was mogul of all time, of course, is Donald Trump - a large harbinger of that decline.) “My name is Sumner Redstone, King of Kings! Look at my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

Nothing besides remains. And so I called up Michael Wolff himself, so long the grand inquisitor, friend and documenter of the moguled classes – the de facto biographer of Rupert Murdoch, for one thing – to see what he thought of this passing chapter; this quiet sealing off of a certain corridor of power.

____

MW: The moguls have been on their way out for a long time. Warren Buffett is kind of a unique figure. But certainly, in the media business, media moguls have been on their way out – because the media has been on its way out. The entire idea that a few guys dominated the media industry and essentially the means of expression has, to put it mildly, had its day.

JB: Are there any moguls remaining? Who are the last holdouts?

MW:This is a fade out. A lot of these guys try to hold onto these jobs, because what else is there? These jobs are less than they once were, but being out of them is also less than it once was. So you try to hang on, but there isn’t that much to hang on to anymore. All of these businesses are precarious; they’re all engaged in a transformation.

So this is an existential moment. You used to know what being a media mogul was, and it was a kind of glorious position. And now it’s, at best – at best – an equivocal one.

JB: How did the moguls become the moguls in the first place?

MW: The media moguls have had a long reign. Essentially it begins, you can argue, in the 1920s, and then goes on for something approaching around 100 years.

There’s an arc that begins with the Hollywood moguls, the guys who ran the studios – Hollywood kind of invented moguldom, in fact. They were later to be superseded by the people who acquired the studios, and the businesses that became ‘the media business’.

Then, beginning in the 1980s, in the course of about 15 years, the media industry goes from thousands of individual companies to a handful of companies. And the pivotal moment comes in 1985, when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, essentially a print publisher, acquires 20th Century Fox, the studio, and then acquires a collection of the independent television stations that then become the Fox Network.

So for the first time, we’ve gone from a media of vertical industries – print, movies, television, music, book publishing – to a media which is combined. Everything, every discipline, is under one roof – and that’s Rupert’s roof. But then, shortly thereafter, everybody else follows. Time Inc. acquires Warner; Viacom acquires Paramount and then CBS.

The consolidation takes place from 1985. It continues right up until the point where they all find themselves with these absolutely ungainly beasts, which on so many levels fail to work. And then suddenly, just at this moment, they’re confronted by technology and the internet – which threatens every single aspect of their business at once.

JB: Are the tech barons – Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos – the new moguls? Or would you say they’re different animals entirely?

MW: I think everybody is waiting for them to emerge as the new moguls, and certainly, Elon is trying to emerge, and perhaps has emerged, as a mogul. In a way, Mark and his company are using this Trump moment to kind of grasp that, too. And Jeff Bezos clearly wants to be in that mode. The question is, though: can they? Moguldom was this kind of culture-shaping exercise. In some sense, the moguls wanted to be transformed by the medium that they were in, too.

But with the tech billionaires, I’m not sure they’re much interested in anything beyond money and technology. Now, that might be enough. But there certainly is a qualitative difference there.

JB: Is Rupert Murdoch the definitive mogul of the 20th century?

MW: I think he is, but I think Sumner Redstone is certainly up there, and Steve Ross, who died in the early 1990s, but who was instrumental in shaping Time Warner, which for so long was the mega company that sat on top of so much. And two figures at Disney, Michael Eisner and then Bob Iger: seminal, culture-shaping, industry-shaping, consciousness-shaping figures.

JB: Did you meet those people?

MW: I knew them all.

JB: Did they all have something in common?

MW: Murdoch is something of an exception, in that all of the others were at some level profound star-fuckers. They understood the relationship of talent to the mass market, the mass medium. They wanted stardom, and they wanted the proximity to that. For all of them, that proximity was transformative. I think you could make the sex connection here. They wanted sexiness. They wanted, I’m sure, sex.

“This is a fade out. A lot of these guys try to hold onto these jobs, because what else is there? These jobs are less than they once were, but being out of them is also less than it once was. So you try to hang on, but there isn’t that much to hang on to anymore”

For so many of them, the pursuit of women was a key element. Again, they were transforming themselves. This begins in the 1920s, with the guys who were these utter vulgarians that took over Hollywood. Part of their goal was to transform themselves, to make themselves into men of not just influence, but taste, even though you could argue that they never really became tasteful.

But Rupert was always somewhat different from that. Rupert was fundamentally a newspaper man, rather than a movie guy, or a television guy, or anyone who had much interest in actors and actresses. So, I’m not sure I can find the link there - except an idea of control; an idea of creating his own world.

That’s an important point: these moguls were interested in the creation of these holy, almost hermetic worlds. The Disney theme parks are actually the perfect model for them. I remember a guy I knew, who ran the Paramount theme parks, who would say that it’s just the greatest job in the whole world – because you get to be the king.

I think they were always creating these worlds in which they were in control, and the goal was to control all parts of them. These were remarkable jobs, the likes of which are not to be seen again.

JB: There’s a sense that moguldom comes with a certain personal style, too. Not necessarily just fashion, but also your personal presentation, your brand, a certain flair and panache.

MW: There was obviously a sense of living large. But also a sense that the moguls of yore actually had more control over their image than the tech guys. I’m not sure what tech guys want. But again, that could just be because we are now in the nascent phase of their mogul reigns, and we don’t yet see what they want.

JB: There’s a great line in your New Yorker piece when you say, “The best talker, or at least the most indefatigable, wins.” I remember your remarkable piece on Harvey Weinstein, just before his first trial, where you say that for him, the talking is the superpower. If you just keep talking and talking for long enough, you can make anything true and anything happen...

MW: This is, by the way, a very Trumpian trait. Trump, in a sense, is a would-be media mogul. But he was never good enough, and never talented enough, and never sharp enough to really succeed in that world. But the talk is kind of amazing. These guys, they talk great. I mean, to listen to them is a privilege - all of them. I’ve known Barry Diller, for instance, who’d be a figure who we could place near the end of the mogul reign. I’ve known Barry since he ran Paramount in the late 1970s. I seem to be on his calendar to have lunch with twice a year. Every time, it is a remarkable lunch. Those lunches last for 50 minutes. At 50 minutes, Barry gets up and goes. You’re aware from the moment you begin that the time is going to run out. And you’re just hoping, hoping, somehow that it keeps going.

JB: Do you think we’re in a nostalgic moment in the world of business? With all this talk of AI taking over, are we all harking back to a simpler age when people had big desks and bathrooms in their offices and vast expense accounts?

MW: Yeah. Which is also a little confusing, because that suggests that there was more money back then, when in fact there is more money now. We’ve now stepped into this age which will perhaps make the moguls look quaint: an age of billionaires and of people who have a level of money that they can never lose, never spend, never give away. Billionaires become super billionaires, and, in the not-too-distant-future, trillionaires. That’s a whole new level of moguldom, something that we’ve never seen before.

I think we’re seeing these people in what I might call a ‘post-economic condition’. The money for them has reached a point where it absolutely loses its meaning. Because you have so much of it that it just expands exponentially on its own. If you have a $100 billion dollars, which quite a number of people have now, just by doing absolutely nothing, you make $10 billion a year.

What does that even mean? We’re well beyond the point where moguls try to create their own worlds – but at a point in which billionaires see themselves as being able to own the actual world, or transform the world. The world-world, and not just their own worlds.

JB: Do you think that’s a good thing for humanity?

MW: It strikes me as being a terrible thing. I mean, these are people who bear nothing in common with the rest of us because they’re post-economic beings. At least with the moguls, you know, the box office was a real thing. You could be fired, as many moguls were. You could fail. That was probably the overwhelming fear of all moguls: that they’d fall. If you have $100 billion, you can’t fall.

JB: What were your biggest run-ins with the moguls? Obviously, you have had many intertwinings with Rupert Murdoch. Are there any other encounters that stick out to you?

MW: At one point, I kept writing about Michael Eisner when he was running Disney. He was widely hated. And so I would write these pieces about him. When he was in his last moment, or his last year, when it was really clear that he was going down, I remember Barry Diller called me and asked if I would write a piece about Michael for Vanity Fair.

I said to Barry, “But hey, you know what? I’ve written about him.” He said, “Yeah, but now everybody’s writing that, so I know that you’re going to have to write the opposite.” But then I called up Eisner, and Eisner said, “Barry says I should talk to you, but I just want you to know that I have read what you’ve written about me.” And he said that, almost in every instance, reading it had made him physically ill. I said, “Oh, OK.” But now we’re on extremely friendly terms.

Often, when your nose is pressed against the glass, people don’t want to see you or speak to you [as a journalist]. But when they take a gamble, take a risk and let you in, it can go badly for them, but it can also go well – because moguls have the ability to be incredibly appealing people. Even if they’re monsters, they can turn themselves into appealing monsters.

When Barry Diller was running Paramount, I was extremely young, and Barry was extremely young, and the The New York Times Magazine sent me to do a profile on him. I met him in Diane von Fürstenberg ’s apartment on 5th Avenue, overlooking New York’s Central Park, and we sat in two club chairs facing each other. I did the interview, and I was fairly nervous about it. At one point during our discussion he put his hand on mine with a notable amount of pressure, and said, “You know, you can’t write about my personal life.”

I said, “Oh, only to the extent that it’s relevant.” He said, “No, no, you can’t write anything about it – or I would have you killed.”

JB: So did he mean have your career killed?

MW: I don’t know, but I went back to The New York Times Magazine and said, “I can’t do this story, I’m just too freaked out.” And then, of course, I told this story at every opportunity for many years afterwards. Some years ago, in recent times, Barry was doing some panel, being interviewed in a public forum. The interviewer said, “Michael Wolff says that you once threatened to kill him.”

Barry pauses, and says: “And I should have when I had the chance.”

JB: Where did the moguls eat? Is there, or was there, a mogul canteen?

MW: There are still places that moguls, such as they are, hang out. And what’s notable about these places now is how old the clientele is. There’s a restaurant in Manhattan that people have gone to for years and years and years, a restaurant called Michael’s on West 55th Street. It is still filled to the brim. I was there not long ago; I have a table there. I was saying to someone who I was having lunch with: “Look around. What does everyone here have in common?”

This person said, “Well, they’ve all gotten considerably older.” I said, “Yes, but more importantly – no one here has a job.” All of the people are the same, the faces are the same – but the positions, their positions of power and grandeur, no longer exist.

JB: What does it mean to have a table at Michael’s, by the way – you’ve got one on speed dial if you ever need it?

MW: Yeah, basically.

JB: Because I suppose that you were almost a mogul yourself. [Wolff nearly sold a media company in the dotcom boom called Wolff New Media for many hundreds of millions before it crashed.] I remember we spoke about the business deal where you were about to be a multimillionaire...

MW: I’ve tried many times – but alas.

JB: Do you think you would’ve had a more interesting life if you had been a mogul?

MW: It probably would’ve been a horrifying life, because it turns out I’m not very good at it. And so it would have crashed around me. But I also think that these are very, very, very fraught jobs. Especially within the last number of years, the last generation, as the business has come undone.

JB: Will you be sad when the moguls are clearly gone, Bob Iger retires, and Rupert Murdoch shuffles off this mortal coil? Will that be the end of a certain era, do you think – for you, or for all of us?

MW: We move on. From the point of view of the new trillionaires, I think one thesis is that things always get worse. Which means that the old bad things seem to be good again.

For more on the upper echelons of business, read about the dying art of the long business lunch...