Rupert Murdoch, 92, to be wed for fifth time

The former News Corp chairman is set to marry his girlfriend Elena Zhukova, 67, in a summer ceremony

Rupert Murdoch will embark on his fifth marriage later this year aged 92, after proposing to his girlfriend Elena Zhukova.
The media mogul will marry Ms Zhukova, a 67-year-old retired molecular biologist, in an early summer ceremony a year after they first met.
Mr Murdoch has been married four times and engaged on six occasions. Last year, he broke off his engagement to his previous fiancée, Ann Lesley Smith, just two weeks after he proposed.
He met Ms Zhukova last summer through his third wife, Wendy Deng, and quickly decided he intended to marry her, a spokesman told the New York Times on Thursday.
Wedding invitations for a ceremony on Moraga, Mr Murdoch’s California vineyard and estate, have already been sent out.
The ceremony will be Mr Murdoch’s fifth, after a series of tumultuous relationships that have frequently graced the pages of tabloid newspapers that rival his own.
The magnate, who owns The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times, married his first wife Patricia Booker in 1956 but the pair divorced 11 years later. They share one daughter.
He then married Scottish novelist Anna Murdoch Mann, and the couple had three children before separating in 1999.
Less than three weeks later, he married Wendy Deng, a television producer who was working on the Murdoch-owned Star TV in Hong Kong.
They remained together until 2013, when Mr Murdoch filed for divorce, arguing that their relationship had been irretrievably broken for six months. The post-divorce settlement reportedly cost him £1.1 billion.
Three years later, he married ex-model Jerry Hall, who had been separated from her first husband Mick Jagger since 1999. They too divorced in 2022 – a decision he notified her about via email.
“Jerry, sadly I’ve decided to call an end to our marriage,” he said.
“We have certainly had some good times, but I have much to do … My New York lawyer will be contacting yours immediately.”
Love seemed on the cars once again for Mr Murdoch last year, when he proposed to Ms Smith, another former model. He broke off the engagement after two weeks, reportedly becoming concerned about her evangelical Christian views.
Shortly after the end of their relationship, Mr Murdoch was introduced to Ms Zhukova, a former molecular researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
She is originally from Moscow and was previously married to Alexander Zhukov, a Russian-born British billionaire energy investor. The couple have three children.
Mr Murdoch’s latest engagement comes five months after he stepped down as chairman of his media empire, News Corp, which owns hundreds of local and national outlets across the world.
They include Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the publishing house HarperCollins.
While he continues to take an “active role” in his business interests, the day-to-day chairman role is now performed by his son, Lachlan.