The secret to media mogul Logan Roy’s global dominance, he once revealed, was simple psychology. ‘Don’t tell me about people. I didn’t make human nature, but I do know what they read and what they look at,” he said. “If I didn’t do it, I’d be bankrupt in a week.”
The Scottish-born multi-billionaire tycoon, who died of a suspected heart attack aboard his private jet on Sunday, aged 84, changed the way we get the news.
As part of a triumvirate of media magnates in the 1980s and 1990s—alongside Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell—Roy treated current events first as entertainment, then information, and never as a moral crusade.
“People come to us,” he proclaimed on his American news channel ATN, “because we don’t sell them on anything. Not a pack of bleeding hearts, United Nations, Volvo, gender-bending horse****.’
The tone of this uncompromising statement reflects both Roy’s business ethics and his notoriously foul-mouthed personal style.
Farewell: Scottish-born multi-billionaire tycoon Logan Roy died on Sunday aboard his private jet of a suspected heart attack, aged 84, changing the way we get the news
Succession stars: From left to right, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin), Logan Roy (Brian Cox), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Connor (Alan Ruck)
Executives at Waystar Royco who encountered their boss even in his milder moods routinely expected to be battered by the F-word — often used as a noun, verb, and adjective in the same sentence.
Phone calls, board meetings and press interviews often ended with a brutal dismissal: “F*** off!”
For the founder and CEO of Waystar Royco, business success was everything. It should come as no surprise that he died on the day of his eldest son Connor’s wedding: the media giant had missed the ceremony in favor of a trip to Sweden to strike a deal with tech giant rival entrepreneur Lukas Mattson GoJo.
In recent months, Roy had become estranged from all of his children: Connor, presidential candidate; Kendall, a recovering addict; Siobhan, known as ‘Shiv’, a former political consultant; and Roman, COO of Waystar Royco.
Some observers saw the GoJo deal as an act of sheer spite as it would ensure that none of them would inherit the company. However, as major shareholders, all four were expected to pocket billions if the takeover went through.
Roy himself called the disintegration of his business empire proof that his appetite for journalism was undiminished: during a surprise performance on the ATN studio floor last month, he stood on a stage made of boxes of printer paper to give a rousing speech.
“This is not the end,” he vowed. ‘I’m going to build something better. A little faster, lighter, meaner, wilder. Anyone who believes I’m getting out, please put the flags up your ass.”
ATN has become infamous for its provocative ‘chyrons’ or ticker tape that run along the bottom of the screen and can cause outrage and belly laughs at the same time. “A Chinese hack could bury 40 million Americans in their electric cars,” a typical teaser read earlier this month.
Logan: The third episode of Succession’s final season proved to be the most explosive yet, as a shocking death just before a family wedding rocks the Roys
Roy’s intensified association with cyclists was not just an old man’s roar. It was life or death resistance. For the past five years he had suffered a serious illness, a series of coup attempts and a corporate sex scandal that at one point threatened to destroy both him and his son Kendall – seen as his father’s most likely successor until they fell apart. – imprisoned for mishandling evidence.
Few outside of his immediate family (perhaps only Vice Chairman Frank Vernon and Chief Counsel Gerri Kellman, who had spent decades alongside him) knew how seriously ill he was in 2018 following a stroke.
He resisted this, but was faced with horrific allegations about sex parties on cruise ships from his leisure company Brightstar.
Women on the ships were rumored to be raped and murdered and their bodies dumped overboard. The Roy family has denied any knowledge of illegal conduct.
Off-the-record briefings placed the blame on former head of cruises Lester McClintock, who died in 2018. His reputation as a predator was so well-known that colleagues knew him as Mo – “Mo-Lester.”
He used the F-word as a noun, verb and adjective – all in the same sentence
At a congressional hearing last year, Logan Roy said, “Senators, when I read about the alleged abuse of power in my cruise division, well… that was the worst day of my life. To think that maybe bad things happened without my knowledge. And honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself.”
His repentance earned him a reprieve. But it came even as his iron grip on his family wavered, with estrangement from his third wife Marcia, and a public denunciation by Kendall during a live TV press conference after the cruise debacle. “My father is an evil presence, a bully and a liar,” he stated.
These blows wounded Roy more deeply than any legal or political attack. Throughout his career, the quality he most valued was loyalty. “When we’re good, we’re good” was a favorite comment from family and employees alike—perhaps meaning, “Stay with me and I’ll stay with you.”
Yet everyone around him lived on the thinnest of ice, fearing exile – though he often brought victims back from the cold by firing and rehiring them with equal carelessness.
His second wife Caroline Collingwood once explained, “He never saw anything he loved, he didn’t want to kick it just to see if it would come back.”
Anyone suspected of not being fanatically loyal was subject to his burning wrath. At a corporate retreat for senior executives, Roy accused executives, including his own son-in-law Tom Wambsgans, of leaking information to a journalist working on an unauthorized biography.
As punishment, the executives were forced to play a game Roy called “boar on the floor”—crawling on all fours, much like the wild boar they had shot earlier in the day—while Roy tossed them sausages to eat.
That long-awaited biography has yet to be published. Logan Roy has done an efficient job of suppressing even the basic facts about his life.
Born in Dundee in 1938, the middle of three children, he was sent to Canada as a war evacuee with his older brother Ewan and little sister Rose.
The children lived with an uncle, Noah, who was physically abusive. Roy bore the scars of his beatings in deep welts down his back, and as an adult he refused to take his shirt off in public, even on the beach.
Rose died as a child, a tragedy Logan never discussed, though he sometimes hinted that he somehow blamed himself.
Little is known about his first wife except that she had a nervous breakdown.
After divorcing Caroline, mother of Kendall, Shiv and Roman, he married his third wife, Marcia, a Lebanese divorcee with two children, although she and Roy had separated at the time of his death.
Working with brother Ewan, Roy built the family printing business into a global conglomerate, now valued at more than $16 billion, according to the Los Angeles Times. It includes the New York Globe and the Chicago Daily, as well as Les Temps in Paris and the Shenzhen Sun in China.
The siblings’ partnership fell apart when Ewan became an outspoken advocate for environmental issues — selling his $250 million worth of Waystar stock and donating the money to Greenpeace.
News was always a stronger choice for Roy than straight entertainment: He was dismissive of social media, bought the online news site Vaulter in 2018 for $1 billion and promptly shut it down.
The future of his empire has long been a subject of conjecture. Eldest son Connor kept aloof from business, preferring to concentrate on politics. Kendall was seen as the frontrunner until his relationship with his father degenerated into an open feud.
Shiv has political connections but little business experience. The youngest son Roman is considered too capricious, although insiders say that he was closest to his father in his last years.
The big question is whether the Roy kids will come together for the sake of the company – or fight each other for the top job.
Rumor has it that the rivalry between them was once presented as a TV series for the Waystar Royco cable channels, with a pilot episode called Succession. That would be a show worth watching – even if the towering lead character, the King Lear of American media, has now sadly left the stage.