The List: smile, shoes off, relax, you’re No 1, Anthony Pratt

‘Money can’t buy you happiness,’ says Australia’s richest man, Anthony Pratt, ‘but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.’

Visy executive chairman Anthony Pratt — No 1 in The List with a fortune of $13.14 billion — living the good life in one of the grand bedrooms of his Melbourne mansion Raheen. Picture: Nic Walker

Anthony Pratt likes to quote 1980s rocker David Lee Roth when asked what it is like to be named the richest person in the country.

“Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it,” Mr Pratt tells The Weekend Australian with a laugh.

The cardboard box and recycling magnate is No 1, with wealth of $13.14 billion, on the inaugural edition of The List — Australia’s Richest 250, published in a special 84-page magazine today.

The news comes after a big week for the Visy executive chairman and Pratt Industries owner who, though he is a supporter of US President Donald Trump, hosted a
$5000-a-head fundraising function for Bill Shorten at his Raheen mansion in Melbourne mid-week. A Liberal Party fundraiser was held two weeks earlier at Raheen.

Visy already dominates its market in Australia but it is the US where Pratt says “growth is forever” for Pratt Industries, which is stepping up the pace of the building of factories in rust-belt states in the midwest thanks to the Trump tax cuts.

Mr Pratt also reveals today details of the unlikely friendship he has with fellow billionaire Gina Rinehart, who places second on The List with wealth of $13.12bn from her huge mining and agriculture holdings.

There’s only $20 million between their wealth but the pair are close in many other ways.

They are both members of Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and regularly message each other when one achieves a notable business milestone, public recognition or pulls off a big deal.

“Every time he achieves something I try to have a drink with him, or coffee with him,” Mrs Rinehart says of Mr Pratt in an exclusive interview for The List. “We have had some great times together.”

The pair reveal that Mr Pratt likes to sing the Beatles song Oh! Darling from the seminal Abbey Road album to Mrs Rinehart and flew to Cambodia to support her Cambodian Children’s Fund earlier this year.

“I have found Gina to be a nice person, warm and kind,” Mr Pratt says. “We are great mates, and I admire (that) she thinks big in business.”

The inaugural edition of The List is the biggest study of individual wealth in Australia ever undertaken, featuring 250 mining and manufacturing moguls, technology gurus and investment experts.

There are 96 billionaires on the list and the entire 250 have a combined wealth of $318.33bn, for an average fortune of $1.27bn each.

Property is the biggest source of wealth, contributing 68 names, though other notable industries include investment (39), retail (20), financial services (18) and mining (17).

There are 14 people on The List who have made their fortune in technology, though that sector accounts for the two youngest billionaires, in Atlassian co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar.

The two 39-year-olds are worth $9.01bn, good enough for fourth and fifth positions on The List respectively.

The youngest list members are Tobi Pearce, 26, and Kayla Itsines, 27, the life and business partners behind the incredible success of the Sweat health and fitness app. The Adelaide couple, who are expectin­g their first child in May, have a combined fortune of $488m.

Ms Itsines is one of 27 women on The List, a group that ranges from Mrs Rinehart in second position to billionaires such as Judith Neilson, who owns the White Rabbit art gallery in Sydney, and Charlotte Vidor, the joint owner of the Toga hotel empire.

Poker machines manufac­uring pioneer Len Ainsworth and Melbourne property and con­temporary art identity Marc Besen are the eldest on The List, each aged 95.

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