Doug Goodwille from Kayne Anderson speaks to Drew Meredith from The Inside Network on market thinkers.
While a surging gold price is on hold as the world adjusts to a Trump presidency, all the factors that saw its price rise more than 50 per during his first term in office – trade disputes, fiscal deficits and geopolitical tensions – are almost certainly guaranteed the second time around.
BNPL out, crypto join miners in rich list ranks
This year’s Financial Review Rich List was once led by the mining magnates, Gina Rinehart and Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest together with Atlassian tech duo Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar.
The Pratts and Canva duo Melanie Perkins & Cliff Obrecht continued their dominance despite falling venture capital valuations. The list isn’t all that different from last year. According to the AFR, this year’s Total Rich List wealth flew past half a trillion dollars ($554.90bn) boosted heavily by a booming iron ore price, manufacturing, property and tech, which dropped a few spots after taking a heavy beating from the recent share market rout.
Of the top 200 richest, 137 are billionaires, that includes the youngest ever rich-lister, 25-year-old Robert Ferguson who built a cryptocurrency and gaming platform with his brother James.
The average wealth among the rich list went up to $2.77bn from $2.34bn with a qualifying cut-off mark set at $629m up from $590m. Most billionaires that made it onto the list come from New South Wales (79) followed by Victoria (60) and Queensland (19).
Booming iron ore prices helped prop up Rinehart’s $34.02bn fortune up from $31.06bn last year, and Forrest saw his fortune skyrocket to $30.72bn from $22.73bn. He moved up eight spots to take out second position.
According to the AFR, “Canva founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams collectively lost billions as a 17 per cent slide in the Nasdaq punished valuations, even for tech companies that are privately held. Perkins and Obrecht, who are married, occupy the eighth place with a combined wealth of $13.8 billion. That’s less than the $16.5 billion they achieved when the Young Rich List was published in October but still almost double the wealth, they held on the 2021 Rich List.”
Last year’s tech titans that helped lead the Buy Now Pay Later sector, Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen, were paid $2.7 billion in Block equity when they sold their company, Afterpay, earlier this year. AFR estimates that about $1 billion was slashed from their total wealth as a result of the tech rout, bringing their total wealth to $1.52bn. CEO of Zip Co, Larry Diamond, who made close to $600 million from his BNPL startup, saw his fortune cut to $70 million over the past year after shares tumbled by 80 percent.
The biggest feature of this year’s AFR Rich List James and Robbie Ferguson and the launch of their company Immutable. It’s Immutable X platform that houses the backbone infrastructure for other companies to launch and trade non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It allows NFT businesses to scale without incurring huge costs. According to the AFR, $US200 million Series C fundraising in March valued Immutable at $3.5 billion, making it Australia’s third most valuable privately held tech company.
