Murdoch, Musk, water firms … Here are the ‘winners’ in another torrid year for business
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As 2025 dawns, we looks back at the star players over the last 12 months of economic drama, mishap and scandal. The end of the year is a time for pausing, reflection and exhaustion. But before throwing ourselves into 2025, it’s worth sifting through the remnants of 2024 to see who in the business world has done something worth remembering.
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So, once more with gusto, the Observer Agenda page brings you its awards for the brightest – or perhaps most glaring – lights in the business world this year. TV show Succession lives rent-free in the heads of the Murdoch family. Last year Vanity Fair reported that Lachlan Murdoch had told his billionaire patriarch father, Rupert, that his brother, James, was leaking stories to the writers of the series. But this year it is life imitating art.
![[bitcoin with sparks flying off it]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9b2a8737c90d3ce024eb8ed5e07421ef8e92c49e/0_134_4000_2400/master/4000.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Spoiler alert: as the show’s title makes pretty clear, it involves a big death. It was the culminating episode that, according to the New York Times, reminded his offspring that even a man with billions of dollars and the keys to the Fox News bile factory cannot put off the inevitable forever (even if Rupert’s fifth – yes, fifth – marriage in June suggests there is something left in the tank). Jostling for position ended up with Rupert trying – and failing – to install Lachlan as the sole inheritor of the media empire, instead of his more liberal siblings.
Rachel Reeves does not exactly have many female exemplars. She is the most powerful woman in the Labour party’s excruciatingly masculine history, and Winston Churchill’s old – and apparently unremovable – urinal in her private toilet stands as a particularly pungent sign that she is the first female chancellor in 800 years.
