Richest Victorians: Billionaires Ed Craven, Anthony Pratt, Alan Wilson

Australia’s youngest billionaire is Melbourne’s 27-year-old crypto gambling magnate Edward Craven, who debuts on The List - Australia’s Richest 250 with an estimated $2.01bn fortune.

Australia’s youngest billionaire is Melbourne’s 27-year-old crypto gambling magnate Edward Craven, who debuts at 68 on The List - Australia’s Richest 250 with an estimated $2.01bn fortune.

Craven burst onto the business scene last year but has been quietly building one of the biggest online gambling entities in the world, Stake.com, for the best part of a decade with his American business partner Bijan Tehrani.

Profits from the business allowed Craven to pay about $120m for two mansions in Melbourne’s Toorak last year, including the so-called “ghost mansion” that has sat idle for several decades.

Don’t miss your copy of The List: Australia’s Richest 250, exclusively in The Australian on Friday, March 24 and online at rich250.com.au.

Stake is regulated in Curacao though the duo spend much of their time in Melbourne.

Stake claims to take $US400m in bets every day from customers around the world, though the industry it operates in is banned in countries such as Australia and the US.

Craven and Tehrani met via the online game RuneScape and then launched a dice gambling game before starting Stake.com in 2017.

Ed Craven, in Melbourne. Photo: Julian Kingma

Craven is one of 38 billionaires from Victoria this year on The List.

Another notable new name from Victoria on The List is the family behind one of Australia’s quiet success stories: Dandenong South manufacturer Penrite.

Headed by Toby Dymond, Penrite makes vehicle and industrial lubricants, coolants, gear oils and hydraulic fluids at its Melbourne base. It is also a big backer of the Supercars

racing series.

Dymond’s late father John and mother Margaret bought the business in 1979 from founder Les Mercoles, who started it from his parents’ home in St Kilda in 1926. Mercoles’ first batches of oils were made on the kitchen stove and delivered to service stations and factories in his father’s wheelbarrow.

Penrite made a $46m net profit from $254m revenue in 2022, according to

documents lodged with the corporate regulator.

Here are the wealthiest Victorians on this year’s edition of The List:

Anthony Pratt & family ($27.87bn)

Pratt owns Pratt Industries in the US and shares ownership of Visy in Australia with sisters Fiona Geminder and Heloise Pratt. Combined, the businesses have more than $10bn in annual revenue.

Visy Industries chairman Anthony Pratt in Central Park. Picture: Bryce Thomas

In Australia, Pratt is already working on spending $2bn on new clean energy plants and other initiatives such as increasing the recycled content of glass bottles. He inherited ownership of the family business when his late father Richard Pratt died in 2009.

Alan Wilson & family ($6.88bn)

The Wilson family has had a remarkable six-decade run in business with plumbing and bathroom supplies company Reece. Reece is now a global business with more than 9000 employees at 800 branches, and the Wilson family owns the majority of the stock of the ASX-listed company.

John Gandel ($5.46bn)

Much of the Gandel fortune is tied to Chadstone Shopping Centre, the biggest mall in the southern hemisphere, which Gandel bought from Myer Emporium 60 years ago for $37m. Gandel’s half-share is now worth more than $3bn and he owns a large shareholding in Vicinity Centres, which owns the other 50 per cent of Chadstone.

Lindsay Fox ($4.78bn)

Fox’s trucking and logistics business is one of the largest privately owned companies in Australia, making more than $130m in pre-tax profits last year from almost $3.5bn revenue.

Trucking magnate Lindsay Fox in his St Kilda road office. Picture: Aaron Francis

The business was started by Fox with a single truck in 1956 and has grown into a group with operations in 10 countries across Asia-Pacific and 24,000 employees.

Avi Silver & Eddie Hirsch ($4.18bn combined)

Hirsch and Silver’s United Petroleum empire has almost $5.5bn annual revenue from 500 petrol stations around the country, as well as the United Terminals fuel terminal and ethanol business. The duo started a group of service stations under the Astron brand in 1981 and then established United in 1993.

Mining magnate Gina Rinehart tops the The List this year with a fortune of more than $30bn.

The 2023 edition of The List – Australia’s Richest 250 is published on Friday in The Australian and online at richest250.com.au