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When I tell people about our package on American oligarchy at Mother Jones, everyone wants to know about the yachts.
As I wrote in an essay for the magazine, these gleaming vessels have come to symbolize both the decadence and detachment of Russia’s ultra-wealthy and our own. And they are full of some absolutely ridiculous shit: submarines and helicopter hangars, sculptures of spouses preening off the bow, climbing walls, anti-paparazzi lasers, drone-detection systems, gold-leaf ceilings, IMAX theaters. The former owner of Tottenham Hotspur installed a padel court on the yacht where he used to conduct his business deals. (Are you familiar with padel? It’s sort of like pickleball for people who do insider trading.)
But there’s one yacht that I’ve come to think of as sort of the yacht of yachts. The Christina O is not the biggest superyacht in the world; at 325 feet, it is a full 265 feet shorter than the royal family of Abu Dhabi’s pleasure craft, Azzam. But the Christina O is unsurpassed in both its rich-guy history and rich-guy taste. It was built for Aristotle Onassis in the 1950s, played host to Jackie Kennedy, and served as Grace Kelly’s wedding venue when she married the Prince of Monaco. It also had a swimming pool that turned into a dance floor and bar stools made out of whale foreskins, so that Onassis could tell women that they were “sitting on the largest penis in the world.” The dance floor became a recurring feature in the industry; the seats, as far as I know, did not.
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It wasn’t just its life under Onassis, though, that gives the Christina O its mystique. The ship has has had an illustrious afterlife as a for-charter vessel, at the low price of $800,000-a-week. It was a filming location for The Crown, and for an Angelina Jolie movie about Maria Callas (one of Onassis’ lovers), and for the 2022 Academy-Award-nominee, Triangle of Sadness, which is about a group of wealthy tourists who end up submerged in sewage and attacked by pirates after arguing about capitalism. Heidi Klum got married on it. And in the summer of 2023, a year after finalizing his divorce with his fourth-wife Jerry Hall, it’s where Rupert Murdoch retreated for a Mediterranean cruise with two of his daughters; his third ex-wife Wendy Deng; and one of Deng’s good friends—a molecular biologist named Elena Zhukova.
As they soaked in the sun in Naples and Corfu, the Daily Mail reported that Murdoch and Zhukova were more than friends. “He’s got the energy of people half his age,” a source helpfully told Matt Drudge. “He just might be in love again.” On Friday the New York Times confirmed that the 92-going-on-46-year-old Murdoch and 66-year-old Zhukova are officially engaged. There’s just something about that ship!
Murdoch, you know by now—he is the conservative media mogul “who has done more damage to the United States,” former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull told Sean Kelly in Mother Jones earlier this year, than any other person alive. But Zhukova is an equally compelling figure in oligarch circles.
Born in the USSR, she emigrated to the US to work at Baylor College of Medicine and ended up researching diabetes at UCLA. She was married for a while to a Russian billionaire investor, Alexander Zhukov, and they had a daughter, Dasha Zhukova, but Alexander and Elena had divorced before Alexander made most of his money. Then in 2008, Dasha Zhukova also married a Russian billionaire investor—Roman Abramovich, an oligarch who made his first fortune when he scooped up a state-owned oil company at cents on the dollar and eventually built the world’s third-largest yacht, Eclipse. The couple got big into art collecting and curation, and even started a contemporary art museum in St. Petersburg. The younger Zhukova also struck up a friendship with Murdoch’s third-wife (at the time), and when Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced he was making Abramovich an “honorary citizen” of New York City in 2013, Deng was in attendance.
Murdoch divorced Deng and married Jerry Hall, and then Murdoch and Hall divorced too. Roman and Dasha divorced in 2018, and Dasha Zhukova ended up remarrying a year later to the Greek billionaire Stavros Niarchos III—who was, to bring this full circle, the grandson of Stravros Niarchos I, a famous yacht owner, and the person Onassis was trying to one-up when he decided to build a sprawling luxury yacht stuffed with whale foreskins.
That’s a lot to sift through, but that’s sort of the point: Once you start reading about rich people and their yachts, you realize that you can never stop reading about rich people and their yachts. You are always, on some level, reading about rich people and their yachts, even if it seems like you are reading about art or politics or soccer. It’s like discovering some hidden fabric of the universe that binds and connects everyone with an offshore bank account and three or more wives.
This is Murdoch’s second engagement in the last year. Last March, less than a year after he divorced Hall, he announced impending nuptials with Ann Lesley Smith, a Los Angeles dental hygienist who met Murdoch either—accounts vary—at the same southern California vineyard where he is about to marry Zhukova or at his ranch in Montana, where, The Guardian reported, “the former dental hygienist was said to have offered to check his cavities.”
Smith, who had been married three times, referred to their union as a “gift from God.” That engagement ended after two weeks.
