Welcome to the age of rock-star chief executives

Just like the advent of celebrity chefs and the Kardashians, Australian CEOs have morphed into rock star-like celebrities, with big salaries, huge houses and media profiles to match.

Sol Trujillo sacked himself in 2009. Picture: Bloomberg

There was a time, not too long ago, when the CEOs of major Australian companies were rarely heard and, even more, rarely seen. Their one job was to make money for shareholders.

No more.

Just like the advent of celebrity chefs and the Kardashians, Australian CEOs have morphed into rock star-like celebrities, with multimillion-dollar salaries, huge showy houses, and a media profile to match.

Not only are they tasked with making money for investors (and themselves, of course) but they are also expected to have a point of view on social and political issues, as the Voice referendum so clearly illustrated.

The downside is that they are also expected to be accountable to media-savvy regulators, ministers and other MPs.

The result? You end up with former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce – the CEO we loved to hate.

Or, more recently, with Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, the Optus CEO (for now), who had to endure consistent public scrutiny over the past week over the telco’s management of an outage that saw millions of customers cut off from even triple-0 call access.

Beyond the media and customer outrage, Bayer Rosmarin also had to front up to a parliamentary committee where she was grilled and occasionally ridiculed by a handful of skilled senators, some in search of a headline.

Tough times.

Former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce. Picture: Bloomberg

Mind you, Joyce and Bayer Rosmarin are not alone – and certainly not the first rock-star CEOs to behave badly. In fact, we have in Australia a long history of highly controversial or colourful CEOs.

Who can forget Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap? An American who spent time in Australia as CEO to Kerry Packer’s publishing empire in the 1990s, Dunlap spent much of his career jumping from one company to the next, making them more “efficient”, which is corporate speak for cutting jobs.

During his tenure at Scott Paper in the US he made the company hugely profitable (at first, anyway), by taking a chainsaw to the workforce, cutting a whopping 35 per cent of employees – or 11,000 workers.

In Australia, he set about slashing staff and closing operations at Packer’s ANI and Consolidated Press before joining the billionaire in an ill-fated takeover bid for Westpac.

The ugly spat led former Westpac CEO David Morgan to later describe Dunlap, who died in 2019, as “probably the vainest person I’ve ever met”.

Then there was George Trumbull, another American, who was hired to “overhaul” one of Australia’s oldest and most respected institutions, AMP.

Soon after his arrival in 1998, Trumbull was photographed in his office wearing traditional native American headdress, which everyone thought was hilarious at the time.

The good times – and the positive media – did not last long.

In February 1999, he infamously got on the bad side of then prime minister John Howard at a dinner party at The Lodge when he threatened to take the company offshore if treasurer Peter Costello changed tax laws in a way that Trumbull thought would hurt multinationals.

A newspaper report at the time described the American as “bombastic”.

After a tumultuous two years, which included a poorly timed decision to expand AMP globally, Trumbull was finally shown the door in 2000, along with a $13.2m payout. Shareholders were not impressed.

Some years later, another American (there is a trend here, right?), arrived to take over Telstra.

Sol Trujillo, who had previously been CEO of various US telcos, was given the enviable task by the board to bring what was described as a “lumbering” half-privatised monolith into the modern era of telecommunications.

Al Dunlap, the former CEO of Kerry Packer’s publishing company.

Instead, he spent much of his time fighting the federal government over regulatory issues, a campaign that hit a wall when Telstra was rejected from the National Broadband Network tender after the company was found to have submitted an incomplete bid.

In February 2009, Trujillo sacked himself, agreeing to leave the company as if he had been fired. On the way out, he collected a tidy $3m bonus payment, adding to the $30m in cash he had earned for four years’ work at the telco.

Nice work if you can get it.

More recently, there is Geoff Bainbridge, who resigned in February last year after a leaked video allegedly showed him involved in drug use during a
sex act.

Bainbridge, who was then the CEO of listed whiskey distillery Lark, initially claimed the video was part of an extortion attempt that had been filmed in a foreign country and predated his appointment to the alcohol company.

It did not take long for reporters to confirm that the curtains and furnishings in the background of the video looked suspiciously like the ones Bainbridge had installed in his Melbourne home.

He resigned soon after.

At least there was no payout, as far as we know.

Luis M Garcia is a journalist and former political adviser, who recently retired as CEO of Cannings Strategic Communications.