Logan Roy dies in the third episode of the fourth season, on a plane over the Atlantic, and what happens next is exactly what has always happened when a monarch dies without having settled the succession: chaos, betrayal, alliances of convenience, and the brutal revelation that everything that seemed solid depended on a single person.
This is not an exaggeration. Succession is, underneath everything, a series about the oldest political problem in the world. Not about media, not about late capitalism, not about the dysfunctional family as a television genre. About dynastic succession. About the question no founder of anything, from Augustus to Rupert Murdoch, has ever managed to answer satisfactorily: what happens when I die?
The Monarch Who Cannot Let Go
Logan Roy is a man who built an empire from nothing. Immigrant, miserable childhood in Dundee, beatings, poverty, the whole catalogue. He came to America and raised Waystar Royco into a conglomerate that buys elections and manufactures consent. He is, in the American tradition, a self-made man in his purest and most terrible form.
Logan’s problem is not that he doesn’t want to retire. His problem is that he cannot. And he cannot for a reason that has less to do with psychology than with the internal logic of power: in a system built around a single person, the person and the system become indistinguishable. Logan does not run Waystar. Logan is Waystar. Every relationship, every contract, every political alliance, every implied threat that keeps the company running passes through him. Removing him is like removing the spine from a body and expecting it to keep walking.
This is not fiction. It is the standard pattern of founder-led companies. The founder centralises because centralising is efficient when you are building something from scratch. Fast decisions, a unified vision, the ability to pivot at any moment without consulting anyone, all of that is competitive advantage during the building phase. The problem is that what works for building does not work for perpetuating. The centralisation that made you great is the same thing that makes you irreplaceable, and being irreplaceable is the exact definition of a fragile system.
Charles V understood this. When he abdicated in 1556, he divided the empire between his son Philip and his brother Ferdinand because he knew nobody could govern all of it alone. It was a rational, cold, strategic decision. Logan Roy is incapable of a decision like that, not because he is less intelligent than Charles V but because the nature of his power is different. Charles was a hereditary monarch; his legitimacy came from blood, not from personal ability. Logan is a founder; his legitimacy is himself. Dividing the empire means admitting the empire can exist without him, and that is the one thing Logan cannot admit, because it amounts to admitting he can die.
The series understands this with an almost cruel precision. Every time Logan makes a gesture towards retiring, towards ceding, towards letting go, what follows is an act of reconquest. The children get their hopes up, start making moves, form alliances, and Logan crushes them. Not because he is evil, or not only because of that, but because every attempt at succession is perceived as a declaration of death. The children wanting to inherit is, for Logan, the children wanting him to die. And against that, no amount of corporate rationality will do.
The Founder’s Children
There is a pattern that repeats in every dynasty, political or corporate, and that Ibn Khaldun described in the fourteenth century with more clarity than any McKinsey consultant. The first generation builds. The second administers. The third squanders. It is a simplification, of course, but like all good simplifications, it captures something real.
Logan’s children are the second generation, and the drama of the series is that none of them can resolve the fundamental contradiction of their position: they need to prove they deserve to inherit, but everything they have was given to them by the man whose approval they need. It is circular. It is a trap. And the most brutal part is that Logan designed the trap, perhaps without intending to, simply by being what he is.
Kendall is the spiritual firstborn, the one who most wants the throne and the one most destroyed by the pursuit. Kendall has everything that should work: education, intelligence, ambition, even a certain instinct for business. What he doesn’t have is an identity that does not depend on his father. Every move Kendall makes, including the betrayals, including the corporate coups, is ultimately directed at an audience of one. He wants to win, yes, but he wants Logan to see him win. And that condemns him, because you cannot overthrow someone whose approval you still need.
In dynastic history the parallel is obvious: the princes who rebel against the king but cannot sustain the rebellion because their own legitimacy depends on the throne they are attacking. Kendall is the Prince Charles of the corporate world, waiting for a turn that never comes, ageing in the waiting room, growing more erratic as the wait stretches on.
Siobhan is the most interesting case and the saddest. She is the most intelligent of the four, or at least the most analytical, and at the start of the series she appears to have found the way out: she left. She works in politics, has her own life, keeps an ironic distance from the family business. But the distance is false. Shiv comes back, always comes back, because Logan’s gravitational pull is too strong and because, at bottom, she too wants to prove she can. Her tragedy is that she chose to define herself in opposition to her father and that is still defining herself in relation to him. Rebellion as a form of dependence.
Roman is the one who most resembles Logan and the one who least wants to admit it. He has the instinct, the cruelty, the ability to read a room. What he lacks is seriousness. Roman turned irony into a defence mechanism so perfect he no longer knows how to take it off. He is funny, sharp, perceptive, but he cannot sustain anything because sustaining something requires believing in something, and Roman will not allow himself to believe in anything. In the dynastic taxonomy, Roman is the younger son who would have functioned as a counsellor or a cardinal, someone with lateral influence but without the weight of the throne.
And then there is Connor, the eldest, the son of the first marriage, whom nobody takes seriously and who for that reason is perhaps the freest of the four. Connor wants to be President of the United States, which is ridiculous, but at least his absurdity is his own. He is not competing for Logan’s approval because he gave up on getting it long ago.
The Unsolvable Problem
Why is succession the hardest problem in power? Because it combines two things that are incompatible: the need for continuity and the impossibility of replicating the founder.
Every system of power wants to perpetuate itself. This is almost a law of physics. The company wants to go on existing, the party wants to go on governing, the dynasty wants to go on reigning. But the system was built by a specific person, with specific talents, in specific circumstances that will not recur. The successor inherits the structure but not the conditions that created it. It is like inheriting a ship designed for a particular storm: it works perfectly as long as that storm lasts, but when the weather changes, the very features that were advantages become liabilities.
History is full of attempts to solve this, and all of them fail in one way or another. The hereditary model, the oldest, has the advantage of predictability and the obvious disadvantage that genetics does not guarantee competence. The elective model, like that of the Holy Roman Empire, solves the competence problem but introduces instability, because every succession becomes a negotiation between factions. The meritocratic model, which is what modern corporations theoretically use, sounds good in textbooks but in practice depends on the founder accepting that an outsider can do his job, which almost never happens.
What Succession shows, and shows better than any corporate governance text I have read, is that the problem has no technical solution. It is not a matter of finding the right mechanism. It is a matter of human nature. The founder does not want to leave because leaving is dying. The heirs cannot truly prepare because the founder’s presence infantilises them. And the system cannot adapt because it was designed for a person who will no longer be there.
Corporate governance manuals talk about succession planning, independent committees, orderly transitions. All of that exists and all of it works in companies where the founder is just another executive, replaceable by design. But in companies where the founder is the soul of the system, where the company is an extension of his personality, succession planning is a euphemism for a conversation nobody wants to have: sir, you are going to die, and we need to prepare for that. Try saying that to Logan Roy. Try saying it to Rupert Murdoch, or Silvio Berlusconi, or Amancio Ortega, or any founder who built something large enough to confuse it with his own identity.
Shakespeare, of Course
It is impossible to talk about Succession without talking about King Lear. Jesse Armstrong, the show’s creator, never hid the reference. Logan is Lear, the children are Lear’s daughters, the kingdom is the company. But the difference matters.
Lear divides the kingdom. That is the premise of the play: an old king who decides to split his territory among his three daughters based on who loves him most, which is the worst succession governance methodology ever devised. Lear lets go of power and the world collapses.
Logan divides nothing. Logan threatens to divide, feints, probes, uses the possibility of succession as a mechanism of control. The difference is enormous. Lear is a pre-modern monarch whose error is misguided generosity. Logan is a modern monarch whose error is a total incapacity for generosity. Lear destroys his kingdom by letting go. Logan destroys his children by not letting go.
What both share is something deeper: the confusion of love and power. Lear wants his daughters to tell him they love him before giving them the kingdom. Logan wants his children to prove they are worthy before giving them the company. In both cases, what they are really asking for is impossible. They are asking to be loved for what they are and not for what they have, but they did everything in their power to ensure that the only thing visible is what they have. They built identities so fused with their power that nothing remains beneath. How are you going to love Logan Roy separate from Waystar Royco? How are you going to love Lear separate from the crown? There is nothing there. They made sure there was nothing there.
The Ending as Thesis
The ending of Succession is perfect because it is exactly what the logic of the series demanded, and exactly what none of the characters wanted.
The children lose. They do not inherit. The company passes to an outsider, Lukas Matsson, a Swedish tech bro with no emotional attachment to Waystar who wants it for what it is worth, not for what it means. The Roys are left on the outside, rich but irrelevant, which is the worst possible fate for people who defined their entire lives by relevance.
And the final scene, Kendall staring at the water, is the perfect image of the defeated heir. He didn’t lose a company. He lost the only identity he knew. Without Waystar, Kendall doesn’t know who he is. He never did. That was the problem from the start.
What Succession teaches, in the end, is something political science has known for centuries but that every generation has to learn anew: personal empires do not survive the people who created them. Institutions survive. Dynasties survive, sometimes, for a couple of generations. But the creations of a single man die with that man, or shortly after. It is the lesson of Alexander, whose empire fragmented before his body was cold. It is the lesson of Napoleon, whose second abdication destroyed everything the first had not. And it is the lesson of Logan Roy, who built something so large and so personal that it could not outlast him.
The governance manuals keep searching for the formula to prevent this. Succession suggests, with the cold elegance of well-written tragedy, that there is no formula. That the problem of succession is unsolvable because it is not a technical problem but a human one, and human problems are not solved. They are endured.