Niki Lauda Wife: Meet His Two Wives, Love Story, and Family Life

Quick Bio

Detail	Info
Full Name	Birgit Wetzinger (later Birgit Lauda)
Date of Birth	March 4, 1979
Birthplace & Nationality	Vienna, Austria
Main Profession	Former flight attendant; art gallery owner; philanthropist
Biggest Achievement	Donated a kidney to Niki Lauda in 2005, saving his life — after just eight months of dating
Key Fact 1	Married Niki Lauda on August 25, 2008; widowed May 20, 2019
Key Fact 2	Mother of twins Max and Mia Lauda, born September 2009
Key Fact 3	Founder of the B.LA – Birgit Lauda Art Foundation and owner of a contemporary art gallery in Vienna

Why She Still Matters

Most people who end up in the orbit of a legend get remembered only in footnotes. Birgit Wetzinger is different. She didn’t just marry one of the most famous men in motorsport history — she gave him years of his life he wouldn’t have had without her. And she did it before they were even married. Before she was even sure where the relationship was going.

That act — donating a kidney after eight months of dating — is the kind of thing that makes you stop and think for a moment. Not because it’s romantic in a Hollywood sense, but because it’s genuinely, uncomplicatedly brave. She was in her mid-twenties. He was in his mid-fifties. He told her no. She came back and said she’d do it anyway. And in the end, she was right to.

Beyond that single astonishing story, Birgit Wetzinger’s life is one of someone building identity on her own terms — from flight attendant to widow to art world figure — while navigating the very complicated terrain of being the second wife of a man who the whole world had already decided belonged to history.

Growing Up in Vienna

The fact that Birgit was born in Vienna on March 4, 1979, gives you an idea of the background of her life. Vienna is not a city that produces flashy people. It’s a city of coffee houses and concert halls, of architecture that takes itself seriously, of a culture that values craft and restraint. It’s a place where what you do matters more than how loudly you announce it.

Her family background is private. No verified public information exists about her parents or siblings in reliable sources. What’s known is that she grew up in Vienna, pursued a path in aviation after her education, and eventually found herself working as a flight attendant in the early 2000s for an airline run by a man whose name she probably already knew from the news and from history books.

Niki Lauda’s airline, Flyniki — also sometimes called Lauda’s budget carrier — was the vehicle that put Birgit Wetzinger and the three-time Formula One world champion in the same space. She was working as cabin crew. He was, as usual, everywhere in the operation at once. Niki Lauda didn’t just put his name on things and collect a cheque — he was genuinely present in his businesses in a way that surprised people who expected a retired racing driver to be more decorative than functional.

They met. They started dating. She was thirty years younger than him, which was the first thing anyone who heard about it noticed, and probably the last thing that mattered to either of them.

The Year Everything Changed

It was 2005. Birgit and Niki had been together for about eight months — barely enough time to know someone’s coffee order, let alone make a life-altering medical decision on their behalf. But that’s when Niki’s kidneys started failing.

The background: Lauda had received a kidney from his brother some years earlier, and that transplant had eventually stopped working. By 2005 he was facing dialysis and a deteriorating situation. He asked his son Lukas — from his first marriage to Marlene Knaus — to be tested as a potential donor. The match wasn’t compatible. The search continued.

And then Birgit said: test me.

Niki’s response, by his own account, was immediate and firm. No. Absolutely not. They’d known each other eight months. He was already in poor health. He was not going to let this young woman put herself through major surgery for someone she’d barely had time to know. He said no clearly, and then he said it again, and then he spent three months saying it in various combinations.

Birgit kept coming back. She wasn’t dramatic about it. She wasn’t issuing ultimatums or making speeches. “I want to do this, I want to be tested, and your refusal doesn’t actually change anything about whether I want to help you,” she said simply. Eventually — after roughly three months of Niki saying no and Birgit not accepting that as the final answer — they went to the hospital together.

She was a match.

The surgery happened in Vienna in September 2005. It worked. Niki Lauda, the man who had already survived a fireball at the Nürburgring in 1976, who had pulled himself back from burns that should have killed him, who had come back to racing six weeks later with his face still healing and won two more world championships after that — had now survived another chapter. This time because a twenty-six-year-old woman he’d been seeing for less than a year decided his life was worth the risk of hers.

In an interview years later, Niki was completely clear about something: he did not marry Birgit because of the kidney. He married her because she was the right person to marry. Those are his words. It matters because it would have been easy — and deeply reductive — to frame the whole relationship as gratitude dressed up as love. Niki rejected that framing outright. The kidney was part of the story. It wasn’t the story.

The Pizzeria Proposal and the Ensuing Wedding

Three years after the surgery, in 2008, Niki Lauda — the man who had previously declared he would never marry again — proposed to Birgit Wetzinger in a pizzeria in Ibiza. Not a Michelin-starred restaurant. Not a dramatic public gesture. A pizzeria. If you know anything about Niki Lauda’s personality — famously blunt, allergic to performance, deeply anti-pretentious — this is actually very on-brand.

They got married on August 25, 2008. Niki was fifty-nine. Birgit was twenty-nine. In September of the following year, their twins arrived — a son named Max and a daughter named Mia. Niki Lauda, at the age of sixty, became a father again. He had two grown sons from his first marriage, and now he had two infants.

By all available accounts, he loved it. Niki Lauda was not, in most domains of his life, a particularly soft or sentimental man. He was direct and pragmatic to a degree that sometimes came across as cold. But fatherhood — especially the second round of it, apparently — seemed to genuinely delight him.

The Art Gallery and Finding Her Own Ground

Birgit didn’t spend her years as Niki’s wife simply being Niki’s wife. In 2017, she opened an art gallery in Vienna — a contemporary art space that focused on international artists and represented her own genuine interest in visual culture, not just a celebrity side project with her name above the door.

Alongside the gallery, she established the B.LA — Birgit Lauda Art Foundation, a charitable initiative that redirected gallery proceeds toward social causes. The foundation represented something worth paying attention to: a person using their resources to build something with their own name on it, not their husband’s.

Birgit’s Instagram presence, to the extent she has one, is largely filled with gallery content — openings, artworks, events. Not family photos. Not red carpet appearances. An actual professional identity, separate from the biographical footnote that the rest of the world kept trying to reduce her to.

Losing Niki

On May 20, 2019, Niki Lauda died in Zurich, Switzerland. He was seventy years old. His health had been declining — he’d had a lung transplant in August 2018, and the recovery was brutal. He had also, over the years since the 2005 kidney transplant, faced further health complications. The body that had survived the 1976 crash and the fire and the burns and the surgeries had, finally, run out of reserves.

Birgit was widowed at forty years old, with twins who were nine years old, and an estate that was about to become considerably more complicated than anyone had publicly anticipated.

The Hard Part: The Legal Battle

About a year after Niki’s death, Birgit filed legal proceedings against the Lauda Private Foundation — the structure Niki had established back in 1997 to manage and distribute his wealth across his family and future generations.

The foundation was already providing Birgit with roughly €20,000 per month, plus maintenance on two properties (a villa in Vienna and one in Ibiza), three cars, school fees for Max and Mia, vacation costs, and household staff salaries. By any ordinary measure, this was substantial financial support.

Birgit’s position was that it wasn’t enough — specifically, that she was being denied her legal mandatory share of the inheritance under Austrian law, and that the foundation’s structure was shortchanging her and her twins relative to what she was entitled to. The combined value of her two lawsuits was approximately €30 million.

The foundation’s response was sharp. A representative described the proceedings as a “posthumous insult” to Niki’s memory and stated publicly that Lauda had specifically stipulated that Max and Mia should receive more from the foundation than any other family members. They also pointed out that the foundation had already distributed more than €30 million to the family in total — with roughly half going to Birgit and her children.

The rest of the Lauda family — Niki’s sons from his first marriage and others — sided with the foundation.

In May 2023, a Vienna court ruled in Birgit’s favor on one critical point: she was not “unworthy of inheritance,” as the foundation had alleged (they had accused her of hiding artwork that belonged to Niki’s estate). That was her first legal win.

Then in May 2024, the Higher Regional Court of Vienna issued its ruling: Birgit Wetzinger was entitled to approximately 16% of Niki’s estate. Given Niki’s estimated fortune, that percentage represented a substantial sum — though the exact final figures continued to be contested in courts as late as November 2025.

One of her two lawsuits had been dismissed and was on appeal. The other, for €22 million, remained pending. The legal dispute has dragged on for years and shows no sign of quick resolution.

The Money Side, Simply Put

Niki Lauda’s estate was estimated at somewhere in the range of several hundred million euros — some reports placed his total wealth at approximately €500 million, though precise figures vary. Birgit inherited a portion of this directly through his will, including access to the Ibiza property valued at approximately €6 million, the Vienna villa, and the ongoing foundation payments.

Her own art gallery and foundation represent an independent income stream, though its scale isn’t publicly documented.

Her estimated personal net worth, separate from any inheritance settlements, is placed by various sources at around €3 million — a figure that would grow substantially if and when the inheritance litigation concludes in her favor.

The picture that emerges is of a woman who is comfortably wealthy but engaged in a genuinely contentious legal battle over what she believes she’s owed — and who has won at least one significant round of that battle.

What Life Looks Like Now

As of late 2026, Birgit Wetzinger — or Birgit Lauda, as she increasingly goes by — is in her mid-forties, raising teenagers in Vienna, running her art gallery, and still navigating the legal aftermath of her husband’s estate.

Some reports from 2024 suggested she may have been considering remarrying — a Swiss finance professional named Marcus Sieberer was mentioned in European outlets — though nothing confirmed has been publicly established.

She maintains a presence in Vienna’s art world. She appears at gallery events. She is not, from all available evidence, someone who has retreated into grief or been consumed by the legal battles. She built something — a gallery, a foundation, an identity — before Niki died, and she has continued building it after.

Max and Mia, the twins, are now in their mid-teens. Growing up as the children of a Formula One legend in Austria is its own particular kind of experience, and their mother has, by all appearances, tried to give them some version of a normal life in spite of it.

Final Words

Birgit Wetzinger’s story has multiple layers, and none of them are simple. There is the extraordinary act of generosity — donating an organ to a man she barely knew, and being right that it mattered. There is the marriage that followed: fourteen years of life with someone thirty years her senior, someone who belonged to history before she ever met him. There are the twins, the foundation, the gallery, and the legal battle. And there is the ongoing project of being a person in her own right rather than just the widow of someone legendary.

What makes her different isn’t any single dramatic moment. It’s the consistency. She was consistent at twenty-six when she kept showing up at the hospital despite being told no. She was consistent in building her art career rather than just inhabiting her husband’s world. She’s been consistent in fighting for what she believes she’s owed legally, however messy that fight has become.

Birgit Wetzinger walked into the orbit of one of the most famous men of the twentieth century and found her own gravity. That’s harder than it looks.

FAQs

1. Who is Birgit Wetzinger?

An Austrian woman born in 1979 who worked as a flight attendant for Niki Lauda’s airline, became his partner, donated a kidney to him in 2005, married him in 2008, had twins with him in 2009, and was widowed when he died in 2019.

2. How did she meet Niki Lauda?

In the early 2000s, she was employed by his airline, Flyniki, as a flight attendant. They began dating after crossing paths through her work there.

3. How old was she when she donated her kidney?

Twenty-six years old. Niki was fifty-five. They had been dating for eight months or so.

4. Did Niki want her to donate her kidney?

No. He refused her offer for approximately three months before agreeing to let her be tested. Once the tests confirmed she was a match, the surgery went ahead in September 2005.

5. Why did Niki say he married Birgit?

He was explicit that he married her because she was the right person for him — not out of gratitude for the kidney donation. He vigorously opposed that narrative.

6. When and where did they get married?

August 25, 2008. He proposed in a pizzeria in Ibiza. The location of the wedding has not been generally confirmed.

7. Do they have children?

Yes, the twins Mia and Max Lauda were born in September of 2009. Niki also had sons Lukas and Mathias from his first marriage to Marlene Knaus.

8. When did Niki Lauda die?

May 20, 2019, in Zurich, Switzerland, aged seventy. He had undergone a lung transplant in 2018 and his health declined steadily afterward.

9. What is the legal dispute about?

Birgit is suing the Lauda Private Foundation for what she argues is her legally entitled mandatory share of Niki’s estate — approximately €30 million across two lawsuits. The foundation argues she has already been well provided for and that the lawsuits damage Niki’s legacy.

10. Has she prevailed in any court cases?

Yes. In May 2023 a Vienna court ruled she was not “unworthy of inheritance.” In May 2024 the Higher Regional Court ruled she was entitled to approximately 16% of Niki’s estate. One of the two lawsuits has been dismissed (she appealed); the second remains pending.

11. What does Birgit do now?

She runs a contemporary art gallery in Vienna and founded the B.LA — Birgit Lauda Art Foundation, a charitable initiative associated with the gallery. She also raises her twins, now teenagers.

12. What is her estimated net worth?

Approximately €3 million independent of any inheritance settlements, which remain unresolved as of late 2026. The final inheritance figure, if she wins her remaining lawsuit, could significantly increase this.

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