The Murdoch family has been in the spotlight after media magnate Rupert Murdoch decided he wanted to re-write his family trust. Login or signup to continue reading Married five times with six children , the 93-year-old media baron has been in the news more than he would probably like. His multi-billion dollar family is also said to have inspired HBO's popular television program Succession, which is filled with backstabbing, turbulence and ruthless rivalry.
It all seems to have come to a head last November, when Murdoch decided Lachlan was to be his successor, breaking the trust established in 1999 that would give his four older children, Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James, equal shares in his fortune upon his death. The family, which has an estimated net worth of $29.3 billion, has been in court in Nevada behind closed doors as the aggrieved siblings fight their father's decision.
Who are the Murdoch children and how have they shaped his life? Murdoch, who started his career at his father's Adelaide newspaper, was 25 years of age when he married Patricia Booker, a flight attendant and department store model from Melbourne, in 1956. In 1958, they had a daughter Prudence and the couple divorced in 1967. Ms Booker died in 2000.
Prudence MacLeod, 66, lives in Sydney with her second husband Alasdair MacLeod and has three children. She is a philanthropist and co-founder of the Macdoch Foundation, an organisation focused on mitigating climate change. The Australian Financial Review estimates Prudence to have a net worth of more than $3 billion.
After divorcing Ms Booker in 1967, Murdoch married Anna Torv, a Scottish newspaper journalist. The pair met during an interview when Ms Torv was 18 years of age and working for Sydney's Daily Mirror newspaper. Their daughter Elisabeth was born in Sydney in 1968 before the couple moved to the UK where Murdoch took over the Sunday News of The World .
Their eldest son Lachlan was born in London 1971 followed by their youngest son James in 1972. The family soon moved to New York where Murdoch started the Star , a weekly tabloid. After 32 years of marriage, the couple separated in 1998 and Anna Murdoch stepped away from being on the main board of directors at News Corp.
They divorced in 1999. Their eldest daughter Elisabeth Murdoch, 56, lives in London with her third husband Keith Tyson and has four children. Alongside her brothers, she has worked her way in the family business and even sold her own production company to her father in 2011.
She is now the executive chair of her own global TV and film production company called Sister Pictures. It is estimated Elisabeth has a net worth of $2 billion. The second eldest child of the couple, Lachlan Murdoch, 53, was announced as the successor to his father in 2023 and lives in Sydney with his wife Sarah and three children.
He is the executive chairman of Nova Entertainment, chairman of News Corp and executive chairman and chief executive of Fox Corporation . He also founded a private investment company Illyria Pty which invested in radio stations in 2005 when he took a short hiatus after being deputy chief operating officer at News Corp. The Australian Financial Review reports his wealth to be $3.
75 billion. Their youngest child James Murdoch, 51, lives in New York with his wife Kathryn and three children. Over the years, James had been involved within the family business, however in 2018, he left Sky as chairman and in 2019 his tenure as CEO ended at 21 st Century Fox.
In 2020 he resigned as a director at News Corp. In a statement, James said at the time, "my resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company's news outlets and certain other strategic decisions". James' net worth is not clear, however Celebrity Net Worth reports it to be $2.
9 billion. Just weeks after the divorce of Anna Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch was finalised in 1999, Murdoch, who was 68, married Wendi Deng in New York. She was 30 years old.
The pair had met two years earlier at a company party for Star TV in Hong Kong where Deng was an intern. Together the couple had two daughters in New York. Grace was born in 2001 and Chloe was born in 2003.
Both girls went to school in New York with Grace now studying at Yale University while Chloe is studying at Stanford University. After Murdoch and Deng's divorce in 2013, the businessman married his fourth wife former model Jerry Hall when he was 84-years-old. The couple divorced in 2022 and Murdoch then married Elena Zhukova, in June, 2024.
Journalist at The Border Mail.You can contact me at madilyn.mckinley@austcommunitymedia.
com.au. Journalist at The Border Mail.
You can contact me at [email protected].
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