The billionaire rightwing media mogul Rupert Murdoch has married for the fifth time, this time to the retired molecular biologist Elena Zhukova.
The 93-year-old married 67-year-old Zhukova on Sunday at his Moraga vineyard in California. Pictures released by the Sun, a Murdoch-owned British tabloid newspaper, showed the couple smiling next to each other as Murdoch wore a yellow tie while Zhukova wore a long-sleeve white dress.
Murdoch’s fifth wedding comes a little over a year after reports emerged last April of him dating Zhukova four months after he ended his two-week-long engagement to Ann Lesley Smith, a 67-year-old conservative radio host.
Murdoch met Zhukova through a large family gathering hosted by his third ex-wife, Wendi Deng, to whom he was married for 14 years before their divorce in 2013.
Her 42-year-old daughter, Dasha Zhukova, is a Russian-American art collector and philanthropist who was previously married to Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch and former owner of the Premier League football club Chelsea.
Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, the 67-year-old actress and model Jerry Hall, in 2022. Hall was apparently waiting to meet Murdoch at their Oxfordshire home when she received an email from him which allegedly said, “Jerry, sadly I’ve decided to call an end to our marriage … We have certainly had some good times, but I have much to do. My New York lawyer will be contacting yours immediately.”
Last September, following a seven-decade career of helming a media empire, Murdoch stepped down as chair of Fox and News Corp.
Murdoch’s publicly traded and New York-based company News Corp owns hundreds of local, national and international digital news outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and Sky News Australia, as well as the book publisher HarperCollins.
According to Forbes, Murdoch’s net worth is approximately $19.5bn.
