Just as the Blair Affair was dying down, the Murdochs' marriage collapsed. Inevitably this focused attention on what this meant for the heirs, comparing the mixed results recorded by Elisabeth, Lachlan and James, and Prudence McLeod, Murdoch's daughter from his first marriage. Their battle to survive an overachieving father had taken the form of quiet acts of independence. They did what they knew their father would dislike. The advent of wife-to-be No. 3, Wendi Deng, turned the divorce process ugly. The key point in the divorce negotiations turned on ensuring the children's succession.

The worsening divorce fight coincided with Murdoch's bid to win England's Manchester United, the world's most storied, famous and wealthy football (soccer) team. Blair finally realized that the political fallout from the takeover of the team would be too great to let the takeover proceed. The Trade Minister, Peter Mandelson, had to break the news to Murdoch just as controversy had broken out over a series of "outing" claims about allegedly gay politicians, which included references to Mandelson by the Sun.

Meanwhile in the US, the Justice Department had moved to block Murdoch's satellite deal with the cable operators at Primestar. Murdoch was forced to do an abject deal to sell his satellite interests to Charlie Ergen, which in the end cost Murdoch and MCI more than $5 billion.

Chapter Seventeen: The Manhattan Window

Murdoch had finally made it back to New York with Wendi Deng, but he was forced to watch while the Internet stock boom made a lot of other people rich. In late 1999 he was becalmed, going nowhere. Then in January 2000 the AOL-Time Warner deal came along and again changed the way the world looked at media stocks. Murdoch picked the new wave of investment capital and rode it far and fast to set up a new worldwide satellite giant called Sky Global.

When the tech market imploded in April 2000, Murdoch knew he had one tiny window of opportunity to get the deal done. He threw caution to the wind. His family was fraying— he would accept that. He had prostate cancer— and the treatment had to be put on hold. To make Sky Global work he had to get past two men in his way— Bill Gates, who was trying to derail BSkyB in Britain, and Jean-Marie Messier at France's Vivendi, who was about to buy Seagrams and become a major American media presence.

The key to Murdoch's grand plans for Sky Global becomes winning the television rights to British football's Premier League. Murdoch outsmarts his rivals . . . again . . . but it looks like he has run out of time. The cancer treatments have delayed him just enough to miss the window of opportunity.