If You Only Read One 10-page New Yorker Profile Of A Country’s Richest Woman Today…
Let it be this one about Australian mining billionaire Gina Rinehart.
Is she an heiress? Inarguably. And yet she has, by hard work and guile and historic luck, multiplied the value of the business she inherited several hundred times over. The “h”-word seems to be partly a gender thing. The male scions of Australian family fortunes, such as Lachlan Murdoch (the eldest son of Rupert), are not routinely described in the press as heirs. Rinehart is the only woman among the rough lot riding the mining boom at tycoon level, and none of the others probably have to read much in the papers about how they really should be able to afford a hairdresser or a personal trainer.
Oh but there is so, so much more.
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Previously on The Billfold
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Uh I call dudes heirs all the time, esPECIALLY murdoch heirs.
Ugh, Gina Reinhart really is The Worst.
@keaton But she does spend less time at the pub and more time at work than “all” Lower Socio-economic Australians.
Clearly she hasn’t met little student me who hasn’t set foot in a pub in years (literally) and has never smoked and has a job and is still on struggle street.
BRB, quitting my latté habit.
‘none of the others probably have to read much in the papers about how they really should be able to afford a hairdresser’
Don’t really understand this point. Firstly, the Murdochs (James particularly) look like they do spend a fair bit of time in the hairdressers. If they looked scruffy I think people would mention it in the same way. Secondly, at Rinehart’s level of not-brushing it’s clearly a deliberate choice. Which, you know, fair enough, but I hardly imagine she’s opening her newspaper and crying about having it pointed out to her.
(also, James Murdoch is routinely described as ‘Murdoch’s heir’, so that’s just rubbish).