Billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of influential media group News Corp., is engaged for the fifth time at age 92, one of his tabloids, the New York Post.
The Australian-born tycoon, who became a US citizen in 1985, will marry Ann Lesley Smith, a 66-year-old former San Francisco police chaplain.
According to The New York Post, the couple met at one of Murdoch’s California vineyards last September, a month after the billionaire’s latest divorce was finalized.
After a few months together, Murdoch proposed to her on St. Patrick’s Day. “I was very nervous. He was afraid of falling in love, but he knew that this would be the last. It would be better. I’m happy”he declared to his tabloid.
For Smith, a widow of 14 years, “approaching 70 means being in the last half” of the life. “I waited for the right moment. My friends are happy for me.”he told the Post.
The wedding will take place at the end of the boreal summer, according to the newspaper.
The tycoon divorced his fourth wife, the American model Jerry Hall, in August 2022 after six years together. Hall was dating Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger, with whom he has four children.
Murdoch, whose family fortune is estimated by Forbes at more than $17 billion, owns hundreds of media outlets, particularly in the United States with companies that control the influential Fox News channel, The Wall Street Journal business daily, and the tabloid New Yorker The New York Post.
He also owns, in the UK, The Sun and The Times of London, and newspapers in Australia.
The billionaire was first married from 1956 to 1967 to Patricia Booker, an Australian flight attendant, then for more than 30 years, until 1999, to a British journalist, Anna Torv, who was left with more than $1 billion after their divorce, according to the press of the time.
Murdoch’s third marriage to Wendi Deng, a Yale University graduate businesswoman of Chinese origin, began in 1999 and ended in 2013 amid media reports that she was romantically involved with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has denied it
Rupert Murdoch had six children: Prudence, with Booker; Elisabeth, Lachlan and James, with Torv; and Grace and Chloe, with Deng.
Source: AFP
Source: Gestion
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