Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2012. The $28.464 billion fortune, the comparison with Christy Walton, the eighth place in the Forbes ranking, Rinehart’s age (58) and the $1 million an hour pace all date from that moment. Her fortune later fell from that peak, and the forecast that it could top $100 billion did not materialise.
According to Business Review Weekly (BRW), Australian magnate Gina Rinehart would now be the richest woman in the world, with a fortune of $28.464 billion. That would put her ahead of the current holder of the title, Christy Walton (Walmart), and place her eighth in the Forbes ranking of the world’s 10 richest people.
And that’s not all. If Rinehart’s business keeps booming, she could even push Carlos Slim out of the top spot as the world’s richest man, since her fortune could plausibly be valued at more than $100 billion before long.
Rinehart owns a mining company, Hancock Prospecting, whose business has grown at an astronomical rate thanks to demand for minerals, the correction and rise in the prices of some of them, and the strong results of the deposits it invested in. CNBC reported that Gina Rinehart, 58, has been earning $1 million an hour since last year. If commodity prices keep rising and her new projects pay off, it wouldn’t take her long to triple her fortune.
Of course, the crown comes with its problems. Rinehart is already facing lawsuits of all kinds, including one from her own children, who want to take charge of the “family business” and remove their mother from the position she took over when her father, Lang Hancock, died. Some landowners have also sued Hancock Prospecting.
Asked about the lawsuit brought by her children, Gina replied, in essence, that none of them has the capacity, ability, ethics, experience, judgment or work responsibility to run a company of this calibre.
Put those words next to the lawsuit and you could reach only one conclusion: there’s nothing quite like family love once business and money get mixed in.
Featured image: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade website – www.dfat.gov.au, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
