In times of hardship, great financial stress, poverty, and distress, where ordinary people have to work three jobs just to earn enough money to be broke, pls spare a thought for your local mining magnate – for they are doing it tough right now.
Though she’d held on to her much beloved mantle for the past five years, Gina Rinehart is no longer Australia’s Richest Person. Commence grieving.
Forbes released their updated list of Australia’s billionaires, with Rinehart losing the top spot after a disastrous financial year.
A US$3.2billion loss of wealth has been largely chalked up to the plummeting price of iron ore, coupled with a legal ruling that impacted her stake in Hancock Prospecting.
The loss represents the largest drop in fortune of anyone on the list.
Replacing Rinehart as Australia’s new richest person is the ultra-reclusive media mogul Blair Parry-Okeden, whose net worth sits at $US8.8billion, compared to Rinehart’s measly sum of US$8.5billion. SOB.
Parry-Okeden is a Hawaiian-born media owner, who inherited a 25% stake in Cox Enterprises – America’s third-largest cable TV company – in 2007. She has been living in Australia (the home country of her ex-husband) for decades, and only recently became an Australian citizen.
Elsewhere on the list, property megalith Harry Triguboff continues to be a physical manifestation of the fact that you’ll never own a house, with soaring Sydney rent and demand for apartments pushing his net worth up a cool extra US1.3billion, up to a total of US$6.9billion.
Meanwhile, Mariah Carey‘s boo James Packer dropped two spots in the top ten, down to number 6 on the list, and the Atlassian duo of Mike Cannon-Smith and Scott Farquhar saw their worth shoot up a staggering 62% to around US1.78billion each, thanks to a successful float of the company on the US stock market.
But it’s Rinehart who takes the biggest hit, falling off her perch, and straight onto hard times.
And it could not have come at a worse time, as she was hoping to have a gold-plated shark tank bar installed next to her pool. But now she’ll have to wait a couple of months before she can afford it.
Photo: Matt King/Getty Images.
Source: Forbes.
