Tomorrow billionaire Rupert Murdoch turns 93. Not only is he in top physical shape, but his heart is beating strong for his latest love, Russian Elena Zhukova, a 66-year-old retired scientist. The couple plans to marry in June. This would be the media mogul’s fifth wedding and his sixth engagement, as in April last year he called off wedding plans with Ann Lesley Smith, a then 66-year-old wealthy Californian widow.
According to The New York Times, the nine-year-old and his future wife began dating in the summer of 2023 and wedding invitations have already been sent out. The ceremony will take place at Murdoch’s California vineyard and estate, Moraga, both the Times and ABC News reported. Another important detail was provided by the Daily Mail: the couple met through the businessman’s third wife, Wendi Deng, who was apparently a friend of Zhukova.
The Russian scientist has also been married twice, most recently to Alexander Zhukov, a billionaire energy investor who now resides in London as a British citizen. Elena has lived in the United States for more than 30 years. She is an eminence in the world of biology, although she is now retired. His specialty is diabetes and his name resonates in UCLA’s medical research unit. She left her native Russia in 1991 with her daughter, Dasha Zhukova, a philanthropist and entrepreneur, who divorced Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich in 2017.
Given the Murdoch family fortune, which Forbes estimates at $17.5 billion, his love life has been making headlines for years. He has been married four times and has had six children from these marriages. His first wife, Patricia Booker, was a young Australian model whom he married when he was only 25 years old. The marriage, from which his first daughter, Prudence, was born, lasted from 1956 to 1957. Later, in 1967, came the wedding with journalist Anna Torv, whose relationship ended in 1999. With she had three children: Elizabeth, Lachlan and James. He later married media executive Wendi Deng, with whom he had two daughters, Chloe and Grace, and whom he divorced in 2013.
In 2016 he met his fourth wife, ex-model Jerry Hall, Mick Jagger’s ex, and in March 2016 they got married in London. In the summer of 2022, the billionaire entrepreneur left her through an email. The ex-supermodel was “disheartened” and “devastated”. Close friends suggested that their children were the cause of the breakup.
In September 2023, Rupert Murdoch stepped down from his duties and remained as chairman emeritus of Fox Corp and News Corp, and his eldest son, Lachlan Murdoch, became the new chairman of the company. The multinational News Corp controls some of the most influential media in the world, such as The Times in England, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal in the United States, the channels Fox News and Sky News Australia and the publishing house Harper Collins, among others
