Rupert Murdoch: Encyclopedia II - Rupert Murdoch - Personal life

Rupert Murdoch - Personal life

Murdoch has been married three times. His first marriage in 1956 was to Patricia Booker, with whom he had one child, Prudence Murdoch. They were divorced in 1967. Very little is known about their marriage, and Murdoch himself has never spoken about it publicly.

In the same year, he married an employee, Anna Torv. The timing (and Murdoch's subsequent behaviour) suggests that he had begun the relationship with Torv well before his marriage to Patricia ended.

Torv and Murdoch had three children: Elisabeth Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch and James Murdoch. Anna and Rupert divorced acrimoniously in 1998. Anna Murdoch received a settlement of some reported US$1.7 billion in assets. After the divorce Murdoch married Wendi Deng, a former Vice-President of Star TV, in June 1999. Murdoch has since had two children with Wendi: Grace (born 2001) and Chloe (born 2003).

Murdoch's eldest son Lachlan, formerly the deputy chief operating officer at the News Corporation and the publisher of the New York Post, was Murdoch's heir apparent prior to resigning from his executive posts at the global media company at the end of July 2005. Lachlan's surprise departure left James, the chief executive of the satellite television service British Sky Broadcasting since November 2003, as the only Murdoch child still directly involved with the company's operations, though Lachlan has agreed to remain on the News Corporation's board.

There is reported to be tension between Murdoch and his oldest children over the terms of a trust holding the family's 28.5 percent stake in News Corporation, estimated in 2005 to be worth about $6.1 billion. Under the trust, his children by Wendi Deng share in the proceeds of the stock but have no voting privileges or control of the stock. Voting rights in the stock are divided 50/50 between Murdoch on the one side and his children of his first two marriages. This was agreed to by Anna Murdoch in lieu of a large cash settlement at the time of their divorce. Murdoch's voting privileges are not transferrable but will expire upon his death and the stock will then be controlled solely by his children from the prior marriages, although their half-siblings will continue to derive their share of income from it.

It is Murdoch's stated desire to have his children by Wendi Deng given a measure of control over the stock proportional to their financial interest in it. However it does not appear that he has any strong legal grounds to contest the present arrangement, and both ex-wife Anna and their three children are said to be strongly resistant to any such change. [1]

Rupert Murdoch was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000 and treated with apparent success.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Personal life", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki