John Hancock reflects on the estranged relationship with mother Gina Rinehart
Gina Rinehart’s son unloads about the bitter battles within Australia’s richest family, the ‘non-existent’ relationship with his mother and how some of her investments are ‘toilet flushes’.
John Hancock is in a contemplative mood. It’s the eve of his daughter Georgia’s 18th birthday and he’s anxious that the party at the local polo club goes off without a hitch. “It’s one of those moments in life, when your first child reaches 18. You pause for reflection,” he says.
Himself an eldest child – to Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart – Hancock has just returned with his wife, Gemma, from the family’s skiing bolthole in Canada’s Whistler, an annual ritual to escape the “dull, dreary, grey days” of an English winter.
Now Hancock is back in the historic countryside town of Windsor where he’s lived for the past two decades.
Family relations remain complicated. He spent the previous day having a long lunch with his younger sister, Bianca, in London and remains in contact with all his siblings, spread across the globe.
But a bitter courtroom stoush with his mother over the family fortune shows no sign of thawing.
The 71-year-old Gina Rinehart was absent from Hancock’s own wedding a decade earlier, held in the Pilbara’s Hancock Gorge, a favourite spot of his grandfather, Lang Hancock, who created the family dynasty.
John Hancock, who will turn 50 next January, bristles slightly when I ask if his mother might attend his daughter’s birthday.
His children have no contact with his mother. The continuing courtroom brawl – an unseemly tug of war that’s been running for more than a decade – dictates a weary resignation over his family ties.
“It’s non-existent,” he says of the intergenerational relationship. “It’s sad, but it was a preventable situation. Many families have troubles, and outsiders probably think they know how each can be solved. But trust me, dealing with my mother is not easy. She has unlimited power and holds all the cards. It’s up to the courts now.”
On paper at least, Hancock’s stake in the family trust is worth $3.61bn. A string of homes, that prodigious skiing habit and a share of a “beautiful, classic” yacht in Sydney with fellow rich listers he won’t name, suggests being John Hancock isn’t a bad gig.
But the weight of making an estranged life work in Australia’s richest family clearly still rankles.
“The dividends I receive from Hancock Prospecting annually don’t even cover my lawyers’ bills, let alone my yacht,” Hancock quips.
The week in which we speak, across the Atlantic, Rinehart was among the crowd at US President Donald Trump’s Washington inauguration, along with five chief executives from her private Hancock Prospecting empire.
John Hancock has been sizing up their strategy from afar, having built up his own mining fund with more than $100m under management at its peak. Several commodities which have delivered his own fund good returns – chiefly lithium and copper – are also favoured by his mother.
Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting empire has been in breakneck expansion mode. Among its targets are a fight for control of critical and battery minerals, including stakes in lithium producers Liontown Resources and Azure Minerals, along with gas interests as part of a play to diversify from the business’s mainstay iron ore earnings.
The 2025 edition of The List – Australia’s Richest 250 is published on Friday in The Australian and online at richest250.com.au
But that might be where the similarities end. Hancock is largely dismissive of his mother’s track record, describing a string of investments as “toilet flushes”.
The way he sees it, stacks of iron ore windfalls have been somewhat randomly deployed in the hope of striking paydirt, sometimes paying over the odds to carve a way into new commodities.
Granted, many in the industry – including Hancock himself – recognise that China has an outsized influence on pricing for commodities such as lithium, with long-term fundamentals that remain attractive.
But hefty bets by Rinehart, such as a $380m splash on potash in the UK and a foiled $646m Canadian coal play, paint a mixed investment picture. Documents filed in the US in February show Rinehart’s share portfolio also includes media company stocks, and small holdings in Tesla and Trump Media & Technology Group.
Building on and growing Lang Hancock’s iron ore legacy has generated staggering levels of wealth for his daughter, Gina Rinehart, but building a second minerals empire may yet prove elusive.
“I think it’s very interesting that projects my grandfather discovered or applied for – such as [the huge iron ore mine] Roy Hill – have gone very well,” John Hancock says. “The jury is out on some of my mother’s recent acquisitions.”
I ask on what subjects he does agree with his mother. He laughs. Both are believers in uranium and nuclear power. I prod a little further, and Hancock suggests the pair may have bonded over the yellow metal when he was a young boy.
“I remember, in year five there was a school speech competition, and my mother recommended I choose nuclear power as the topic,” he says. “I had a book from Dr Edward Teller (aka ‘the father of the hydrogen bomb’) and one that looked at the advantages of nuclear power over coal. Those concepts have stuck with me, and SMRs (small modular reactors) make a lot of sense today.”
Rinehart has been pushing both sides of Australian federal politics to pursue nuclear energy as part of a net-zero future rather than just wind and solar, saying she was worried about upsetting farmers with “bird-killing wind generators” and massive stretches of solar panels. Hancock is closely watching a swathe of big tech companies which are pivoting to SMRs to power their data centres.
Much of his early schooling in the language of mines came from his grandfather, rather than his mother. He recalls as a child having to read a lot of Lang’s political speeches – “some of them we don’t need to get into,” he says, presumably referencing racist comments made about Australia’s Indigenous population.
Understanding his grandfather’s grand vision for the Pilbara was, however, an idea he could get behind. “One day as a kid in Lang’s office, he had a secretary make a few dozen copies of his planned Pilbara downhill railway map. He explained this would save money using gravity to train the ore to port, and I should learn the route by tracing it over and over. It was a lesson in big-picture thinking, and he would imprint those sorts of ideas on me from a young age.”
Following the money, Hancock spent time in Japan and China, as the latter emerged at the turn of the century with an insatiable appetite for Australia’s riches of iron ore stocks.
Encountering some problems working with his mother, Hancock looked elsewhere in Perth and turned up at the home of then fledgling mining entrepreneur Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest.
It was there, in 2000, that Hancock claims some credit for informing Forrest about the fortune that could be made selling resources to Beijing.
His pitch was for Forrest to work for Hancock Prospecting, but the present-day billionaire rejected the approach and instead offered Hancock a role as head of marketing with his Fortescue Metals Group in a move that would have made him “employee number three” behind Forrest and founding director Graeme Rowley.
His mother rejected the offer, but Hancock credits the experience with giving him the confidence to back his own bets when it comes to mining.
The most spectacular payday has come through Vulcan Energy, which is trying to extract lithium from reservoirs of brine deposits in Germany’s Upper Rhine Valley to ultimately supply European electric vehicle makers.
Since Hancock bought in during 2020, the stock has delivered huge returns. It also attracted a hefty investment from his mother, marking her first foray into lithium before splurging on an array of local West Australian investments.
Hancock says he is a fan of Vulcan’s direct lithium extraction (DLE) technique, which taps geothermal heat to extract lithium from brine. “Unlike my mother, I’ve not been personally interested in hard rock lithium mining,” he says.
Rio Tinto’s recent $US2.5bn ($3.93bn) bet on the Rincon lithium mine in Argentina, taps the same DLE technology. In Hancock’s mind, this only adds to the business case for the battery-making ingredient.
“The operating expenses and the environmental damage hard rock lithium mining can create is not somewhere I want to go when DLE is in the bottom quartile of costs,” he says. “Vulcan has proven the process against various naysayers and now we are seeing companies like ExxonMobil with acreage to the north of Vulcan. But we were the first mover.”
The ASX-listed stock is also shielded to some extent from the steep price drop for lithium in the past 18 months, caused by slowing Chinese demand. Take-or-pay contracts have been struck above current spot prices, and Hancock remains a believer in the long-term growth story for the commodity and the appetite of buyers to have supply sources outside of China.
Copper, another metal critical to the electrification trend, is at the heart of Hancock’s investment in White Cliff Minerals as it looks to develop a mine in northern Canada above the Arctic Circle.
Hancock has taken a role as a strategic adviser, confident the mine can deliver on its promise.
“I’m looking for those opportunities that you can get in on the ground floor of a potential tier one asset in a good jurisdiction, and in a commodity that I like the demand picture for. You draw those little circles on a page, and it starts getting very small indeed.”
Even then, exceptions can be made.
Veteran mining executive Phil Mitchell handled iron ore negotiations for Rio Tinto with Hancock Prospecting on the Hope Downs joint venture, a deal which has handed the Rinehart family massive riches over several decades. Mitchell now chairs Aura Energy, which is developing the Tiris uranium project in Mauritania.
“Normally I wouldn’t touch Africa, but this is a relatively simple project and Mauritania has had a stable mining industry for decades,” says Hancock, who holds an almost 5 per cent stake in the mining junior. “And it fits in with my view of long-term demand for uranium.”
Not all investments have gone to plan. Electric battery hopeful Magnis Energy has been a controversial bust – a “toilet flush”, in Hancock’s parlance.
And as a “side hustle”, he remains an active options trader in ASX stocks, often staying up long into the UK night to play the markets. He notes with a laugh that one recent play, to short Commonwealth Bank stock, has yet to bear fruit.
“The numbers are so small, I might be putting 10 grand here and there. It’s more just to keep my mind active, I guess, a hobby of sorts.”
The billionaire continues to advise New York-based fund manager Lind Partners, which has invested in a stack of ASX minnows. Hancock provides advice on mining juniors and prospective projects. He describes attracting foreign capital to Australian shores as a “source of pride”.
It’s also another source of income, with the returns made as an investor in their managed funds. “Lind continues to do well, with plans for the next fund later this year. I’m proud of what Lind has achieved in the Australian market. It is a source of funding from junior companies to help them achieve the next stepping stone. Quite a few have gone on to smash the ball out of the park, such as Latin Resources.”
Hancock sounds restless at the other end of the line. He explains it’s his turn to have a shower before he and Gemma head out for final birthday preparations for his daughter.
The week after, he is due back in Western Australia where he will catch up with the buzz on St Georges Terrace.
“It’s the first time in a decade I’ve been back to Australia without having a court case on. I was in Perth only a week, but hopefully everything gets sorted and we can return to Australia. Until then, my family is doing great in the northern hemisphere. I like to think Lang’s vision for a bright future is still possible for the Hancock family.”
