And five. Billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of influential media group News Corp, has gotten engaged again, aged 92, one of his tabloids, the New York Post. The Australian-born tycoon, naturalized American in 1985, will marry Ann Lesley Smith, a 66-year-old former San Francisco police chaplain. According to Post, the lovebirds met last September, on one of the Californian vineyards of Rupert Murdoch, a month after the formalization of his last divorce to date. After a few months together, he made his marriage proposal on Saint Patrick’s Day.
“I was very stressed. I dreaded falling in love – but I knew it would be my last time. It would be better, ”he told his tabloid. For Ann Lesley Smith, widowed for fourteen years, “approaching 70 means being in the last half” of her life. “I waited for the right moment, my friends are happy for me,” she told the Post. The wedding will take place at the end of the summer, understands the New York Post. Rupert Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, American model Jerry Hall, in August 2022 after six years together.
A fortune estimated at more than 17 billion dollars
The tycoon, whose family fortune is estimated by Forbes at more than $17 billion, owns hundreds of media outlets, notably in the United States with companies that control the influential Fox News channel, the business daily The Wall Street Journal and the right-listed New York tabloid, New York Post. He is also the boss, in the United Kingdom, of the Sun and Times of London, and newspapers in Australia.
The billionaire was first married from 1956 to 1967 to Patricia Booker, an Australian air hostess, then for more than 30 years, until 1999, to a British journalist, Anna Mann, who had touched more than one billion after their divorce, according to the press at the time. He married, a few days later, a businesswoman of Chinese origin, a graduate of Yale University, Wendi Deng, until their divorce in New York in 2013. Rupert Murdoch had six children in all.