Rupert Murdoch (Melbourne, Australia, 92 years old) and Elena Zhukova (Moscow, 67 years old) are already husband and wife. The couple married on Saturday, June 1, at Moraga Vineyards, the media mogul’s vineyard and estate in California (USA). The property was originally the home of Victor Fleming, the American director behind gone With the Wind either The Wizard of Oz. The grounds include a Mediterranean Renaissance-style mansion and guesthouse with nine fireplaces, a Provençal-style garden, and nearly 65,000 square meters of vineyards. Murdoch bought the property in 2013, after seeing an advertisement in The Wall Street Journal.
For the ceremony, the bride wore a fitted white dress cut below the knee by Emilia Wickstead, a designer from New Zealand, but based in London, who has also dressed actresses such as Michelle Dockery, as well as royals like Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle, while Murdoch wore an elegant black suit with a white shirt, a pale yellow tie and, at his feet, comfortable sneakers. This is the fifth marriage of the businessman, who at 92 years old decided to retire as president of News Corp and Fox in September 2023 to hand over the reins to his son, and the third marriage of the molecular biologist, who is also already retired. .
As reported by the British media Daily Mail, the wedding included among its guests Wendi Deng, Murdoch’s ex-wife; Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots; Robert Thompson, CEO of News Corp; or the actor Elya Baskin.
Murdoch met Zhukova through his third wife, Wendi Deng, according to the Daily Mail in August 2023, when he broke the news of the relationship after obtaining images of the couple sailing in the Mediterranean. Zhukova is a twice-divorced molecular biologist and diabetes specialist. She has lived in the United States for more than three decades after leaving Russia in 1991 with her daughter. Before retiring she worked in the medical research unit at the University of California,” the British tabloid described her then. She specializes in the study of diabetes and has worked at the University of California and the University of Los Angeles. The New York Times She also added that, having come to the United States from Moscow toward the end of the Soviet Union, Zhukova’s ex-husband, Alexander Zhukov, became a billionaire energy investor (he now resides in London as a British citizen).
The announcement of this relationship surprised the media, not so much because of the age of the couple, but because Murdoch had been engaged to another woman a few months before appearing sailing with Zhukova last summer. The mogul had become engaged to Ann Lesley Smith, a retired dental hygienist, in the spring of 2023. “We are both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together,” the fiancé said in March of that year, when making the news public. . However, the businessman abruptly broke that commitment two weeks after his announcement. Murdoch did not like Smith’s evangelical ideas, according to anonymous sources close to him cited at the time by Vanity Fair.
With this, Murdoch has been married five times. The last, with the model Jerry Hall, whom he divorced in 2022, and with whom he was married for six years. Before this marriage, he was married to Wendi Deng, a businesswoman and investor, from 1999 to 2014. And before her, he divorced his second wife, Anna, a former newspaper reporter, in 1999, after more than three decades together and whom he married the same year he separated from his first wife, Patricia Booker, an Australian model whom he divorced in 1967 after being married for 11 years.
Zhukova has a daughter, Dasha Zhukova, who works as a philanthropist and businesswoman. Murdoch’s lineage is a little more extensive, as he has six children from three of his four previous wives. The first-born, Lachlan Murdoch, has followed in his father’s footsteps and for a few months has been the new president of his companies – although Rupert continues to have an active role in the company. In fact, the Murdoch family is the real saga that inspired the successful HBO series Succession. Rupert Murdoch is considered the 76th richest person in the world and is ranked 35th among the 400 richest people in the United States in the lists prepared by the magazine. Forbeswith a fortune of 17.2 billion dollars (about 15.7 billion euros).
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