Anthony Pratt’s out of the box and into social media

Illustration: Peter Nicholson.

US-based family patriarch Anthony Pratt has been in Oz in recent days, venturing far and wide to the likes of Shepparton in Victoria’s north to press the flesh with box clients.

While here the billionaire has been unleashing his greatest hits on social media, which he appears to have only discovered in December.

As well as being exposed to a who’s who of Pratt’s life, followers are being treated to tune after tune from the late Richard Pratt’s eldest son entertaining box buyers at customer functions.

We see Pratt conducting the Atlanta Philharmonic and sharing a duet with Burt Bacharach in a variation of his classic What the World Needs Now is Love …. “What the world needs now is a Visy box”.

Then there is Pratt’s work with Paul Anka, the genius who wrote Frank Sinatra’sMy Way … “and here’s the crux, folks save big bucks, packaging yoooooooooour way”.

Each year Pratt, who has two young children, and his right hand man Ross Fitzgerald journey to Davos to share big ideas with big thinkers, with shots from this year featuring the likes of Rupert Murdoch’s niece Penny Fowler, who is the cupid responsible for settling up her uncle and his now fiance, Texan model Jerry Hall.

There are happy snaps with Charles and Camilla, Prince Philip, Chelsea Clinton (is that a beer can in Pratt’s hand?), Bill Clinton, Pratt’s mate Mike Bloomberg, Rudi Giuliani, Tony Blair, George Bush, Ted Turner, Al Gore and David Cameron.

Then there are the Hollywood types: Brad Pitt, Jay Leno, Chevy Chase, Glenn Close, Kevin Spacey, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bono.

Blowing your trumpet

Self-assured Rio boss Sam Walsh has again proven the doubters wrong.

In 2014, the miner told the media that his time in the top job would one day “be a Harvard case study, because it really is an amazing turnaround.”

And now it has happened.

The prestigious publication’s March 2016 edition is online and contains a detailed 2000-word account of how Sam got the big miner back on track.

Not the type to sit around and wait for anyone to knock on his door, the prophetic Walsh penned the piece himself via a speech that he had previously given and which has been recast for the review.

Coy Crown

The $120 million-odd that James Packer will bank via his Crown Resorts interim dividend cheque should go a long way to paying the bill for his impending third-time-round nuptials to pop diva Mariah Carey.

Or he could tip the cash towards a buyback of the half of Crown he doesn’t already own, with the 5 per cent decline in the stock yesterday also stripping another $200 million-odd off what he’d have to stump up for any privatisation.

But no one wanted to talk about that elephant in the room at Crown yesterday, on release of what boss Rowen Craigie described as the “varied” result.

In fact, there was much that Craigie, who’s paid $3m a year, couldn’t talk about at the release of the casino’s profit.

He could tell us that Crown Sydney would be delayed by a further six months to 2021, that there was no light on the short-term horizon for rolling the dice in Macau, and that there’d been no planning lodged for Crown’s Queensbridge Hotel Tower.

But he couldn’t tell us about his battle with the tax office over the tax deductibility of interest relating to the debt for the disastrous Cannery deal in the US, unfolding talks towards a privatisation of Crown by his biggest shareholder, or about the pay that Packer has demanded in return for his duties at the group.

Craigie said agreement on the Packer pay packet “was close” — it’s only been six months after all — but he struggled to actually say what his former chair was now doing. “(Packer) remains very hands on and is in constant communication ... there are projects that James is particularly focused on, but as a major shareholder he spends much time monitoring his investment,” Craigie said.

Hard sell

What a difference 10 weeks can make. In December ,after its share sale, Brian Shanahan and Adam McWhinney’s Temple & Webster online retailer was worth $116 million. Yesterday their brainchild was valued at $22 million, with $94 million vaporised over what should be a busy sales period.

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