Rupert Murdoch is an Australian businessman who is most well-known for being the chairman and CEO of News Corp (up until just last year when it became 21st Century Fox. Murdoch is still chairman and CEO) and for his incredible amount of wealth. As of today, Rupert Murdoch, who is 83 years old, has a net worth of $14.6 billion. However, while those are some of the more well-known parts of his life, there some other details about Murdoch that people may not already know. Here are five things you didn’t know about Rupert Murdoch.
He had the most expensive divorce ever.
Rupert Murdoch’s marriage to his second wife, Anna, ended in 1999, and the divorce between the two of them reportedly cost Murdoch quite the bit of money, so much in fact, that it is allegedly the most expensive divorce of all-time. Anna reportedly walked away from the divorce with $1.7 billion ($110 million of which was supposedly in cash) and got remarried six months later to a financier named William Mann. The couple live together in the Hamptons.
He has six different children to three different women.
Murdoch has been married three different times (his most recent marriage to Wendi Deng just ended last year), and he has had children with each of his three wives. He and his first wife Patricia had a daughter named Prudence in 1958. After his first marriage ended, Murdoch and his second wife, Anna, had three children: Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James. Finally, Murdoch had two daughters with his third and last wife, Wendi. His two youngest children, Grace and Chole, were born in 2001 and 2003, respectively.
His own newspaper declared him dead.
The infamous digital-vigilante group, Anonymous, hacked into the website of the News Corp-owned newspaper, The Sun, and created a fake headline that stated that Murdoch had “ingested a large quantity of palladium before stumbling into his famous topiary garden,” dying from an overdose. This headline was created the day before Murdoch, his son James, and Rebekah Brooks, former CEO of News International, were set to stand trial for a phone-hacking scandal.
He’s appeared on The Simpsons as himself on two separate occasions
While the animated comedy typically uses the billionaire CEO as a punchline for many of the show’s jokes, Murdoch had a good enough sense of humor to guest on the program as his animated self not just once but twice. The first line that Murdoch said on The Simpsons was “I’m Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire tyrant, and this is my skybox,” and the two episodes that he appeared in were “Sunday, Cruddy Sunday” and “Judge Me Tender.”
He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame this year.
Alongside the likes of Jay Leno and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Rupert Murdoch was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame earlier this year in March for his help in revolutionizing the way television is today. He was honored for launching the FOX Broadcasting Company and for providing the platform for groundbreaking, legendary television programs, such as The Simpsons (which, as stated above, Murdoch himself guested on) and The X-Files.
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