While you were busy falling down the rabbit hole last month of what exactly was going on in the British royal family, you may have missed some other tabloid news about someone almost as rich but arguably more powerful than King Charles III: Rupert Murdoch is getting married again.
Sorry, ladies! The world’s most eligible 93-year-old bachelor — at least among the Succession set — is officially tying the knot to Elena Zhukova, as was first reported in a March 7 New York Times story that featured the incredulous headline, “Yep, He Did It Again.” A Murdoch spokesperson confirmed the news to me but declined to add anything. This is Murdoch’s sixth engagement. We had questions: about the upcoming nuptials, the bride-to-be, Murdoch’s many exes, and his apparent proclivity for marriage. Here’s what we found.
But didn’t he just recently get engaged?
Well, if your definition of “recent” is less than a year ago, then yes, he was recently engaged. That was to Ann Lesley Smith, 67, a former police chaplain, dental hygienist, and conservative radio host. According to Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair, at the time they met, Smith was dating the manager of Murdoch’s ranch in Carmel, California, and Murdoch was still married to model and actor Jerry Hall. Less than a year after divorcing Hall, Murdoch proposed to Smith on St. Patrick’s Day in New York City. “I dreaded falling in love — but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I’m happy,” Murdoch told his very own New York Post.
But Murdoch’s happiness wasn’t to be. Just two weeks later, the couple called it quits.
Why did he call that engagement off?
Unclear, but per one source, Murdoch had grown uncomfortable with Smith’s outspoken Evangelical views.
How many times has he been married at this point?
Assuming he goes through with the marriage to Zhukova, this will be Murdoch’s fifth marriage. His list of former wives includes Patricia Booker, an Australian flight attendant and model whom Murdoch married in 1956. Together, they had a daughter, Prudence, before divorcing in 1967.
That same year, Murdoch married a young journalist at one of his Australian newspapers, Anna Torv. (Fun tidbit: she shares a name with her niece, the Australian actor Anna Torv who has starred in shows like Fringe, Mindhunter, and The Last of Us.) Over 32 years of marriage, they had three children — Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James — who would all grow up to work for their father in some fashion.
In 1999, just a few weeks after finalizing his second divorce (you’re probably sensing a pattern here), Murdoch married Wendi Deng, a Chinese-born television executive at one of News Corp.’s subsidiaries. The pair had two daughters — Grace and Chloe — before divorcing in 2013. That same year, he met Hall and began courting her before they married in 2016.
And how did he break up with Jerry Hall?
Via email! Gabriel Sherman, the Vanity Fair reporter, saw a copy of the missive that Murdoch sent Hall in June 2022, which read simply, “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.” Hall was said to be shocked.
What happened to Wendi Deng?
She’s still around and evidently now on okay terms with her ex, as she invites Murdoch to family events and, per the Daily Mail, even joined him and their daughters on a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean last summer.
But the couple’s divorce was a nasty one and reportedly came after Murdoch reportedly alleged Deng pushed him into a piano during a fight.
And their daughters?
Grace is a Yale undergrad and keeps an active presence on Instagram, where she has 22,000 followers and occasionally posts pictures of her dad. Younger sister Chloe is studying at Stanford and has a private Instagram account. Both will be doing internships at Goldman Sachs this summer.
Okay. So who is this new fiancée, Elena Zhukova?
Zhukova is a retired molecular biologist who came to the U.S. from Moscow in 1991 with her daughter two months before the Soviet Union collapsed. She told The New Yorker in 2010 that, prior to that move, her family had been part of “the usual, normal Moscow intelligentsia.”
Daughter Daria, who goes by Dasha, told the Financial Times in 2012 that Elena was “very affectionate” but also “quite a serious person, who is more interested in substance than aesthetics.”
And how old is Zhukova?
Sixty-seven — just slightly older than her soon-to-be stepdaughter Prudence (😬).
Is 26 years considered a big age gap for Murdoch?
Actually, no. He was 38 years older than Deng when they married. He and Hall were also 26 years apart.
So when and how does a billionaire media mogul meet a retired molecular biologist?
Through Deng. Per the Guardian, the pair met last year at a large family gathering hosted by Murdoch’s third wife, who is good friends with Dasha.
So is Murdoch on good terms with his other exes?
That’s unclear but unlikely. In 2013, Wolff reported that Rupert and Anna, the wife he was married to the longest, had not really spoken since their 1999 divorce. “He behaved badly,” Anna said in 2001 of her ex’s affair with Deng. “However, for my children’s sake, I have said nothing … I’ve waited all this time for him to make it right again, but he never took the opportunity.”
You wouldn’t blame Hall — who, I can’t stress enough, was dumped by email — for not being close to Murdoch, either. When they divorced, the couple told the media they remained “good friends” but, per Vanity Fair, she once made a small effigy of Murdoch, tied dental floss around its neck, and burned it on a grill.
His first wife, Booker, died in 1998.
What exactly is a molecular biologist?
Molecular biologists study how molecules interact with one another in living organisms. Zhukova’s field of expertise was diabetes, and she worked as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston before that. I found one article she co-authored in 2005 on diabetes for the appropriately named journal Endocrinology in which Zhukova and her colleagues explored whether insulin released by the cells which produce gastrin (the hormone the stimulates gastric acid secretion) could be used for gene therapy that might relieve diabetic patients from daily insulin injections.
Per the Daily Mail, she retired from UCLA when she was 51 due to unspecified illness. “She was an accomplished scientist and also a very nice person, always helping people,” said her former colleague James Sinnett-Smith. “She was certainly respected among her peers.”
And how long have they been dating?
Since at least the summer of 2023, when the Daily Mail broke the news that the pair had been vacationing together in the Mediterranean aboard a luxury boat called the Christina O. (We’ll come back to this boat later.)
Has Zhukova been married before?
Yes, twice. She met her first husband, Alexander Zhukova, when they were students. Their daughter, Dasha, was born in 1981, and the couple divorced three years later.
Her second partner was George Gause, whom she met in the U.S. The Daily Mail reported last year that it wasn’t clear if they were ever married, but a 2012 profile of Dasha in the Financial Times said that both Alexander and Elena had remarried. Per the Mail, he died in 2019 after they had split up.
Were her exes rich?
At least Alexander was, but not when they were married. After their split, Alexander formed an energy-trading company that grew into a behemoth. Now a billionaire oligarch who was awarded British citizenship in 2001, he appeared in the Panama Papers scandal in 2016 because of his links to a complex web of offshore firms that helped him avoid paying British taxes for 13 years.
Does Elena have kids?
In addition to Dasha, Elena had a twin boy and girl, Yurii and Katya, with Gause in 1992.
What do they do?
Katya is a gallerist who is frequently photographed at parties and is married to the British Iranian artist Kour Pour. Yurii is a musician and film composer who last year organized a GoFundMe for a friend in Ukraine in “the aftermath of the ecological disaster caused by the Russian terrorist attack on the Kakhovka Dam.”
And their sister, Dasha?
Dasha is a different story. After her dad became rich, she was sent to private school and studied at UC Santa Barbara before moving to London to be closer to her father and to study naturopathy. There, she dated the tennis star Marat Safin, partied with members of the Royal Family, and launched a clothing line. In 2005, she met Roman Abramovich shortly after he sold his oil company for $13 billion, making him the richest man in Russia. Abramovich, the former Chelsea Football Club owner, was married and 14 years older than Dasha, but she was soon frequently by his side. Abramovich got divorced in 2007 and married Dasha in 2008. Together, they had two children, Aaron Alexander and Leah Lou, before divorcing in 2017.
During her marriage to Abramovich, Dasha became a powerhouse in the art world by purchasing major works with her husband to build a collection worth almost $1 billion. Together, they formed an arts foundation and started the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow as well as the New Holland Island cultural club in St. Petersburg. She also founded Garage Magazine, which was bought by Vice in 2016. And she sat on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Shed in New York City as well as the Los Angeles County Museum.
“In some ways,” the New York Timeswrote of Dasha last year in a story about her social standing in the art world following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which she has condemned), “Ms. Zhukova is what Anna Delvey, the now famous con artist, wanted to be: an ambitious businesswoman and maven of the art world, with family money and social influence that runs as deep as her pockets.”
After she separated from Abramovich, Dasha began seeing Stavros Niarchos III, a Greek shipping heir and the ex of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. They were married in January 2020 in a $6.5 million wedding at a ski resort in Switzerland (every word of that sentence oozed wealth). Deng was among the guests. With her new husband, Dasha had a baby boy, Philip Stavros Niarchos, in March 2021.
Elena seems to enjoy being a grandmother to Dasha’s kids; an Instagram account that appears to belong to her has the username @grammasinthebuilding, which is a riff on an account that belongs to Dasha, @mammasinthebuilding.
Do billionaires just date from a very small pool or something?
Evidently they roll in a different world than us normies. Didn’t you watch Succession?
Speaking of Succession, what’s Dasha’s connection to the show?
Dasha is very good friends with Derek Blasberg, a socialite, writer, and fashion-industry figure who served as a creative advisor to the Succession producers on the culture of the Über-rich. I like to think someone like him was responsible for that biting line from Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) in the final season about a woman’s “ludicrously capacious” Burberry bag.
Murdoch has said he didn’t watch the show, but it clearly bugged him. One of the reported conditions of Hall’s divorce settlement was that she not give story ideas to the Succession writers, per Vanity Fair, which also reported Lachlan had told his father that James had been leaking stories to the writers.
Will Derek be at the Murdoch-Zhukova wedding?
I emailed him to see if he wanted to speak for this story and he politely declined. Fair enough.
How much is Dasha worth?
As the daughter of one oil magnate, the ex-wife of another, and the wife of an heir to a shipping fortune, a lot. Among the assets she received in her divorce was property in New York City worth almost $100 million. Thanks to a trust deed change made just before Russia invaded Ukraine, she’s also entitled to 51 percent of distributions from the trust, which holds the almost $1 billion art collection.
And what’s her connection to this megayacht where Rupert wooed Elena last year?
The Greek shipping magnate and grandfather for whom Dasha’s new husband Stavros was named was bitter rivals with the boat’s early owner, Aristotle Onassis. In order to one-up Stavros Niarchos I, Onassis bought the Canadian World War II frigate and transformed it into the Christina O, a luxury 17-bedroom yacht that now can cost as much as $800,000 per week to charter (along with 38 crew members).
The Christina O is to the ultrawealthy what Madame Web is to the supporting players in Madame Web: “her web connects them all.” It’s where Grace Kelly had her wedding reception, Heidi Klum got married, and Onassis wooed Jackie Kennedy. It’s also been a filming location for The Crown and the movie Triangle of Sadness, which is a satire of … the ultrawealthy.
Is Elena religious?
She’s Jewish, but we don’t know how religious she is. Dasha, who is also Jewish, once said her father Alexander is “very Christian” but didn’t use that modifier when talking about her mom. Make of that what you will.
Is Rupert religious?
He’s a Christian, but he said in 1992 that he’s not “intensely religious.” Still, he’s evidently religious enough that Ann, the woman to whom he was engaged last year, said that both of them thought their relationship was a “gift from God.” (But remember she was reportedly too religious for Murdoch. He is the Goldilocks of religion; it’s gotta be just right.)
But what kind of Christian? In 1998, he received a papal knighthood from the Catholic Church, of which second wife Anna was a member, for his philanthropy. Although he attended Catholic churches frequently with Anna, he never formally converted and remains a Presbyterian, according to the Catholic Herald magazine, which you would imagine is a good authority on all things Catholic.
What do we know about Elena’s politics?
Not much. There aren’t any records of her donating to a political party, but that’s not the case for daughter Dasha. Back in 2015, she gave almost $70,000 in support of Hillary Clinton’s failed candidacy.
In any case, it sounds like it wouldn’t matter too much if Elena wasn’t a conservative. Per Vanity Fair, Jerry Hall’s liberal politics didn’t cause friction in their relationship save for a few disagreements about abortion.
Are Rupert and Elena living together now?
Unclear, but we do know they spent weeks together last year onboard the Christina O.
Do we know anything about the engagement ring?
Sadly, we do not. Murdoch’s representatives wouldn’t tell me anything. But it’s safe to assume Murdoch picked it out himself, as he did for Smith, his last fiancée. She was photographed wearing an 11-carat Asscher-cut diamond solitaire that appeared to be the size of a toaster and was reportedly worth upwards of $2.5 million. It’s not clear if she kept it.
Have Murdoch’s wives’ rings been getting bigger each time he gets engaged?
No! Hall’s ring was said to be a 35-carat emerald-cut diamond with two smaller stones set in platinum worth about $3 million, so technically Smith’s was a bargain.
So when are Rupert and Elena getting married?
Sometime in June.
Where does a wedding like this take place?
At Murdoch’s vineyard-estate, which sits in the Santa Monica Mountains above the glitzy Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air.
Rupert Murdoch owns a vineyard?
Yes, it’s called Moraga and is Murdoch’s home on the West Coast. It’s also the only vineyard within the L.A. city limits. He bought the estate, which features an 11-bedroom 1920s Mediterranean-style home, in 2013 for a reported $29.5 million after seeing an ad in the Mansion section of The Wall Street Journal (which he owns). The property used to be owned by Victor Fleming, the director of The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind. The vineyard is reportedly Murdoch’s passion project, and it’s where he and Hall isolated during the pandemic lockdown. Hall studied viticulture, and the Daily Mail says she was hoping to inherit it. Instead, Murdoch’s going to marry his next wife there.
How long did Jerry Hall have to study viticulture?
Five hundred hours! Per Vanity Fair, she studied online through UC Davis and told friends Murdoch asked her to do it so he could write off $3 million in expenses as long as she worked 500 hours per year on winemaking.
Can you buy the wine?
Per the Moraga website, they have 6.9 planted acres of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petite Verdot, Cabernet Franc, and Sauvignon Blanc. A bottle of 1998 red — said to feature notes of blueberry, blackcurrant, and cocoa — sells for $390.
But some bad news: Climate change, which Murdoch has called “alarmist nonsense,” is affecting production, according to a former Moraga winemaker.
How big is that place?
Fourteen acres.
Who might be on the wedding guest list?
It’s not known who is on the guest list, but the Times reports that invites have already been sent out, so if you haven’t received one, it’s safe to say you didn’t make the cut.
When Murdoch and Hall married in London in 2016, they hosted a breakfast reception for around 100 guests. All of Murdoch’s kids attended that wedding, as did the actors Michael Caine and Richard E. Grant, the playwright Tom Stoppard, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Rebekah Brooks, the newspaper editor who was caught up in the phone-hacking scandal but is now chief executive of Murdoch’s News UK (we can safely assume she sat on the groom’s side of the church).
The Murdoch-Deng wedding happened in New York Harbor on a yacht he owned. The 82 guests there included financier Michael Milken and the late Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. All his kids attended that wedding, too.
Did they invite Donald Trump?
I asked the Trump campaign, but they didn’t respond. In his book on Murdoch last year, Michael Wolff said Murdoch, whose New York Post endorsed Trump in 2016, had become a “frothing-at-the-mouth” anti-Trumper who often daydreamed about the former president dying.
Or Vladimir Putin?
Given Dasha and Yurii’s statements about the war in Ukraine and the international arrest warrant out for Putin, I’d say no.
How much does a wedding like this typically cost?
The sky’s the limit. While we don’t know what Murdoch’s last weddings cost, David Tutera, a Los Angeles wedding planner for the billionaire set, told me there typically isn’t a budget when he works with such clients. Spending is left to Tutera’s discretion. At a recent wedding Tutera did for a billionaire, the final cost ended up being about $150,000 per guest.
Tutera said clients are typically after something that has never been done before, which can cost a lot. “People with an enormous amount of money can get anything they want, but when they hire us, I look for things they can’t find and I find something that’s actually new for them,” he said.
These events require Tutera to be the point person for a bunch of things not seen at a typical wedding, like finding a chef from a Michelin-starred restaurant, coordinating private jet arrivals, or finding space for bodyguards. He also acts as a therapist of sorts to some of his billionaire clients with big personalities. One even asked him to let her sister know she no longer wanted her as the maid of honor.
What about the dress?
Murdoch’s last two brides wore rather demure dresses. Hall wore an ice-blue silk Vivienne Westwood gown, while Deng wore a cream-colored dress of silk and lace by Richard Tyler.
As for a budget, wedding stylist and writer Julie Sabatino told me that for a wedding like this, the entry-level price point for a gown is $12,000 — and that’s for off the rack. A custom designer gown starts at $35,000 and goes up to half a million. Throw in a reception outfit or after-party dress for at least another $5,000.
“Jewelry is more of a wide range since many of our clients have pieces in their family that they choose to wear,” Sabatino said. “If not, and we are purchasing real pieces, it can get quite expensive.”
Weddings for the ultrawealthy also typically feature a team of dressers (for at least $2,500) who will attend in order to make sure there are no problems with the gown. “We always say it’s a fashion insurance policy,” Sabatino said.
And what would the groom be wearing?
For his wedding to Deng, Murdoch wore what the Guardian described as an “ill-fitting, two-button suit which served to accentuate the age difference with his bride.” Ouch. When he and Hall married, he wore a dark blue suit and green tie that complemented her dress.
But he is perhaps getting more daring in his fashion. In 2022, when he attended the wedding of granddaughter Charlotte Freud, daughter of Elizabeth, he dressed “like Tom Wolfe in a white suit, red suede shoes, and red tie,” per Vanity Fair.
Sabatino, the wedding stylist, said that for her wealthiest clients she’ll often procure original items from shoemakers, tie-makers, or vintage-cufflink dealers (which apparently exist). “Last week we sourced new shoelaces for tuxedo shoes because the client didn’t like the ones that came with the shoe,” she said. “And we are happy to do it, because every detail down to the laces is important, and we want them to love it.”
Who might perform at the ceremony?
Well, it’s safe to bet it won’t be Mick Jagger (he reportedly helped Hall, his ex, disable security cameras that had been sending footage back to Fox headquarters from the British estate she got in the divorce).
But Tutera, the wedding planner, told me it’s very common for celebrities to perform at such events. (Just this month, Rihanna performed at a wedding in India for a reported $6.3 million.) “It’s actually kind of easy,” Tutera said. “I think people think you can’t get a celebrity, but we go directly to the agencies.” One of his clients wanted Jon Bon Jovi to perform on acoustic guitar for $2 million, but decided it might bring down the mood.
Murdoch’s tastes are a little bit more classical, though. At his request, then-13-year-old Welsh singer Charlotte Church performed the funeral song “Pie Jesu” at Murdoch’s wedding to Deng. Church later said she waived her $127,000 performance fee because she was advised it would ensure good publicity from the Murdoch press, but his papers soon began attacking her anyway. In 2012, she was paid almost a million dollars as part of a settlement in the phone-hacking scandal.
So why would a 93-year-old want to get married for a fifth time?
Well, for one, we know he’s a romantic! The first time he met Hall for a lunch, he arranged to have her hotel room filled with flowers and chocolates. Friends of Murdoch also told the Daily Beast last year that he prefers to get married after dating someone for only a few months because of his religious views.
But Jonathan Mahler, one of the New York Times Magazine reporters who in 2019 wrote a 20,000-word investigation into Murdoch that became a CNN documentary, speculated to me that Murdoch’s desire to get married at such an old age is “in keeping with the theme for a guy who doesn’t want to stop, doesn’t want to give up his business, doesn’t want to stop working, doesn’t want to retire, doesn’t want to disappear from the public stage.”
“It’s like the king who won’t leave the throne,” Mahler said. “It’s just like, Why not marry another queen?”
What do Murdoch’s kids think of all their stepmothers?
They’re not said to be big fans. In his New York Times Magazine report, Mahler and co-author Jim Rutenberg reported that Lachlan and James had dined at a Manhattan restaurant in 1999 with their father to try to talk him out of marrying Deng. The dislike for her by both sons reportedly grew stronger in the years that followed amid claims (which Deng denied) that she’d been a Chinese spy and treated Murdoch terribly by calling him “old” and “stupid.”
The Murdoch children were said to have genuinely liked Hall when she married their father, but things took a turn. Per the Daily Mail, Hall felt the Murdoch kids turned on her because she’d been enforcing isolation requirements during the pandemic in order to protect her husband.
How is his health?
Well, at his granddaughter’s 2022 wedding where he wore the white suit, he nearly collapsed. It came a day after he’d left a hospital where he’d spent a week fighting COVID-19, per Vanity Fair. The magazine also reported Murdoch had endured two bouts of pneumonia, atrial fibrillation, a torn Achilles tendon, and arrhythmia. He also broke his back in 2018 after a fall on his son’s yacht. “He kept almost dying,” a source told Sherman.
How much is Murdoch worth now?
About $19.6 billion, per Forbes, which places him as the 95th-richest person on the planet. Compared to the top spot holder Bernard Arnault ($239.9 billion), Murdoch’s practically a pauper.
Do we know anything about his will?
No, beyond what we’ve learned about the Murdoch Family Trust, the legal vehicle through which he controls News Corp and Fox Corp, and which was born out of his 1999 divorce from his second wife, Anna.
For years, that split was reported to have cost the media magnate $1.7 billion in assets, but in 2014 Murdoch biographers Michael Wolff and Neil Chenoweth reported it more likely involved just a $100 million cash transfer. In exchange for not pushing for more, Anna demanded that Rupert set up a trust for their three children and Prudence to ensure they would inherit the companies upon his death. Rupert has four shares, and each of those four children have one, meaning he cannot be outvoted. But when he dies, his shares will dissolve and the children will need to decide what happens next (cue the Succession theme song). There is intense speculation about the rivalries among the children, with right-wing Lachlan and more liberal James having competing visions for the future.
The only change that’s been made to the trust came as a result of Murdoch’s marriage to Deng, who wanted her two daughters to be added and receive an equal share. In order to do so, Murdoch had to ask his four adult children from his earlier marriages to amend the trust to include Grace and Chloe in exchange for as much as $150 million each.
But the four children held out on one key thing: voting rights. The two young girls were added only as beneficiaries and won’t have a say on the future of the companies once Murdoch dies.
I’m assuming Zhukova will need to sign a prenup?
You can bet on that. Murdoch’s marriages to Deng and Hall both had prenuptial agreements, which are common among this class. “I would be shocked if ultrawealthy individuals did not have a prenup,” Robert S. Cohen, a senior partner at Cohen Clair Lans Greifer & Simpson who represented Murdoch in his split from Hall, told me.
How do you structure a prenup for Rupert Murdoch?
With great difficulty. Cohen told me that among the very wealthy, prenups are made more complicated because they own so many properties in so many places that they have more jurisdictional choice about where to bring proceedings. This means the agreements have to be vetted in each state or country that might end up with jurisdiction. Cohen said one recent prenup he worked on required vetting from multiple U.S. states as well as countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe.
Another unique element for the likely prenup: a confidentiality clause. “With the very wealthy, you always have a publicity problem, which you don’t have with a normal millionaire,” said William D. Zabel, a founding partner of Schulte Roth & Zabel and an attorney who represented Deng in her divorce.
Per Cohen, these nondisclosure terms are necessary among many of his clients, especially those in finance, because a messy public divorce can impact business. As such, there’s also likely to be an arbitration clause, which helps keep disputes out of the public domain.
Sometimes these prenups include unusual provisions. Zabel said he worked on one that stipulated the husband could file for divorce if the wife put on a certain amount of weight. Another, he said, had a clause that said if the wife insisted on having sex more than once a week, the husband could file for divorce.
What has the Murdoch press said about all this, if anything?
They’re not saying much. Neither The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, nor the New York Post (which broke the news of his last engagement) have written about the Zhukova engagement.
Why did you just write almost 5,000 words about Rupert Murdoch?
I don’t know.
By David Mack , 2024-04-09 14:00:29
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