'Media Tycoon' Who Married for the 5th Time at 93... This Time to a Scientist 26 Years Younger

Rupert Murdoch, the 93-year-old 'media tycoon,' held his fifth wedding with a partner 26 years his junior, whom he had announced his engagement to last March.

'Media tycoon' Rupert Murdoch (93) and retired scientist Elena Zhukova (67) got married in a vineyard in California, USA.
[Image source=AP Yonhap News]

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On the 2nd (local time), major foreign media including Fox News in the United States reported that Murdoch married retired scientist Elena Zhukova (67) the day before at his vineyard in California. He appeared wearing a black suit, white shirt, and beige tie. Zhukova wore a white dress and carried a lily of the valley bouquet. This is Murdoch's fifth marriage. He has been married four times before and has six children in total: two sons and four daughters.

The media reported that Murdoch met Zhukova at a reunion of his third ex-wife Wendy Deng's circle and that they became a couple last summer. Zhukova is known as a molecular biologist who researched diabetes at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and other institutions. Her ex-husband is billionaire energy investor Alexander Zhukov, and they emigrated together from Moscow to the United States during the late Soviet era. Their daughter, Dasha Zhukova, is a philanthropist and art patron who was married until 2017 to Roman Abramovich, the Russian tycoon and former owner of the English Premier League (EPL) club Chelsea.

In November last year, Murdoch handed over the chairman positions of the $25 billion (approximately 34.42 trillion KRW) 'media empire' he built, including News Corporation and Fox Corporation, to his eldest son Lachlan and stepped back from frontline roles. He currently holds the honorary chairman title. These companies are effectively controlled through a family company owned by Murdoch and his four children, so it is interpreted that Murdoch's fifth marriage is unlikely to affect News Corp and Fox.

Meanwhile, Murdoch's first wife was Patricia, a former flight attendant, whom he divorced in 1967. His second marriage was to Anna, a former newspaper reporter, with whom he maintained a marriage for over 30 years before eventually divorcing. In 1999, at age 68, Murdoch married 30-year-old Chinese-born Deng, which attracted worldwide attention, but they divorced in 2013. His fourth wife, Jerry Hall, a former model and ex-wife of Mick Jagger, the vocalist of the Rolling Stones, married in 2016, and they separated in June 2022 after six years of marriage. Murdoch later announced a fifth marriage in spring 2023 to retired dental technician Ann Lesley Smith but abruptly called off the engagement after about two weeks. At the time of the engagement announcement, Murdoch declared it would be his "last marriage," but it is reported that the engagement was canceled due to religious reasons and the fianc?e's burden.

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