What James Packer will do with his $3bn

James Packer will get more than $3bn from the takeover of Crown Resorts. Picture: William WEST / AFP)

The ghost at the $9bn Crown casino feast was the elusive, increasingly enigmatic, James Packer.

Extraordinarily, the statement from Crown made absolutely no reference to the one person on which the whole deal pivots.

Packer votes his 36 per cent in favour and it’s a done deal. He votes against and it’s a dead deal.

He will vote ’yes’. It’s been blindingly obvious for well over a year that he wants ‘out’.

Because, to put it bluntly, there was no way back for him to come back ‘in’ – and in any event, he had long since lost any interest in building the great global gaming empire he once dreamed of.

Never a punter like his late father Kerry, James still got lucky that he had what was still a premium global asset to sell, and the world’s biggest investor Blackstone still had to find assets to buy for the trillions – yes, trillions with a T not billions – of (real, US) dollars that it had to invest.

To Blackstone, the $9bn is not much more than the chump(s) change that gets churned through the Crown pokies – or indeed, even the more substantive sums from the mostly baccarat-playing high rollers from the ‘Middle Kingdom’ that Blackstone sincerely trusts will return.

James Packer will get more than $3bn from the takeover of Crown Resorts. Picture: Scott Barbour/Getty Images)

I wrote two months ago that it was a ‘done Blackstone deal’; that incoming new chairman Ziggy Switkowski’s only job was to negotiate himself out of a job, persuading Blackstone to ‘bid against itself’.

There was no way that casino competitor Star Entertainment could go toe-to-toe with its paper against Blackstone cash. Switkowski had to ‘persuade’ Blackstone to up its $12.50 offer.

I wrote then that Blackstone would add maybe 20c, maybe 30-40c if the world looked like it was past Covid.

Switkowski got 60c; well done Ziggy.

Blackstone is the perfect owner for Crown, especially after the Packer years and the turmoil of the past decade.

It’s already, quietly, done most of the work to get the necessary approvals from the various state regulatory bodies and the Federal Government.

Indeed, they’ll all embrace it with open arms.

While there will be a Blackstone ‘entity’ that controls Crown and its two-going-on-three casinos, it’ll be a million miles away from the sort of ‘proprietor’ Packer was, before it all turned to custard.

In practical effect, Crown will be owned and controlled by a wide range of assorted global institutional investors, who will have zero interest in managing the casinos, acting as ‘proprietors’.

They will want Blackstone to run it all like a utility, generating a secure predictable return each year, and which is exactly what Blackstone will do.

So, Packer gets a cheque for $3bn, and change: what does he do with it?

I can tell you things he won’t do with it.

He won’t come looking for any media assets to buy. He had zero interest in mainstream media twenty years ago; and he has even less interest now, and in any event there is considerably less (mainstream) media to be interested in.

That’s not to imply he will shift his focus to social or any other alternative media; in big picture terms those boats sailed while Packer was embarked on the dream that turned out to be a fantasy.

Packer won’t seek to go back into gambling.

That, has also sailed. His focus will be some area of tech, or tech more broadly as a general primary investment focus.

Tech is the present and the future; it is also rewards the same skill set that took him so successfully into gaming, apart that is for the ‘custard years’: his grasp of the power of percentages.

But I think, unless and until he gets his you-know-what together, as an investor and not again as a proprietor.