Billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of influential media group News Corp, has called off his engagement less than a month after announcing it publicly in the press, US magazine Vanity Fair reported on Tuesday.
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The 92-year-old tycoon from Australia, naturalized American in 1985, was to marry Ann Lesley Smith, a 66-year-old former San Francisco police chaplain. He told the New York Post, one of his tabloids, in March that he had proposed on St. Patrick’s Day.
But according to Vanity Fair, which cites Mr. Murdoch’s entourage, the engagement was suddenly called off: Mr. Murdoch would have ended up being uncomfortable with the evangelical beliefs of his future wife.
The wedding was supposed to take place at the end of the summer.
Rupert Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, American model Jerry Hall, in August 2022 after six years together.
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 the Times of London, and of 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.