Does Everyone Have a Price?

In last Wednesday’s Financial Times, it was reported that Rupert Murdoch had resolved his family’s long succession feud with a $3.3 billion settlement. Three of his children, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence, accepted $1.1 billion each to withdraw from the family trust, clearing the way for Lachlan to inherit uncontested control of Fox and News Corp. The outcome was decisive, but the number itself raises a deeper question: does everyone have a price?

What sets that price? Why $1.1 billion, and not $900 million, or $1.5 billion? In moments like these, money is never just arithmetic. The figure becomes a proxy for dignity, recognition, and the quiet settlement of decades of grievance. In family negotiations, price is not calculated only by bankers. It is shaped by memory, rivalry, and what one feels owed. The number that closes the deal is rarely the highest that could be paid or the lowest that could be accepted. It is the point at which exhaustion outweighs resistance, and continuity becomes more valuable than conflict.

The contrast with the Steinberg empire in Canada is instructive. Founded by Sam Steinberg, who built it into Quebec’s dominant grocery chain, the company seemed unassailable at his death in 1978. But Sam left no clear succession plan. Control passed to his widow, Helen, and three daughters, whose husbands soon became entangled in bitter disputes over power and strategy. Resentments deepened, lawsuits followed, and family trust gave way to open warfare. Unlike Murdoch, the Steinbergs could not agree on a price for peace. There was no settlement to allow some to exit while others carried on. By the early 1990s the empire collapsed, sold off in pieces to competitors. A dynasty dissolved not by markets, but by the family itself.

One can imagine what lay behind the Murdoch deal: old wounds reopening, principles colliding with pragmatism, private calls filled with both defiance and fatigue. For the siblings, the choice was stark: influence without peace, or liquidity without voice. For Rupert, the price was the recognition that harmony could not be engineered, only purchased. For Lachlan, the price was responsibility, the burden of carrying both ownership and mission into a future no longer shielded by his father’s presence.

The lesson is clear. Price is not only measured in cash. It is measured in dignity, responsibility, and the limits of endurance. Families that design transparent mechanisms for exit and liquidity give their heirs dignity in choice. Those that do not risk repeating the fate of Steinberg, discovering too late that when conflict festers, everyone does indeed have a price, and when that price is left undefined, the cost may be the family itself.

W.