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The Most Famous

BUSINESSPEOPLE from Australia

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This page contains a list of the greatest Australian Businesspeople. The pantheon dataset contains 601 Businesspeople, 3 of which were born in Australia. This makes Australia the birth place of the 33rd most number of Businesspeople behind Thailand and Saudi Arabia.

Top 3

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Australian Businesspeople of all time. This list of famous Australian Businesspeople is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

Photo of Rupert Murdoch

1. Rupert Murdoch (1931 - )

With an HPI of 65.97, Rupert Murdoch is the most famous Australian Businessperson.  His biography has been translated into 72 different languages on wikipedia.

Keith Rupert Murdoch ( MUR-dok; born 11 March 1931) is an Australian-born American business magnate, investor, and media proprietor. Through his company News Corp, he is the owner of hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets around the world, including in the UK (The Sun and The Times), in Australia (The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, and The Australian), in the US (The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post), book publisher HarperCollins, and the television broadcasting channels Sky News Australia and Fox News (through the Fox Corporation). He was also the owner of Sky (until 2018), 21st Century Fox (until 2019), and the now-defunct News of the World. With a net worth of US$21.7 billion as of 2 March 2022, Murdoch is the 31st richest person in the United States and the 71st richest in the world according to Forbes magazine.After his father Keith Murdoch died in 1952, Murdoch took over the running of The News, a small Adelaide newspaper owned by his father. In the 1950s and 1960s, Murdoch acquired a number of newspapers in Australia and New Zealand before expanding into the United Kingdom in 1969, taking over the News of the World, followed closely by The Sun. In 1974, Murdoch moved to New York City, to expand into the US market; however, he retained interests in Australia and the UK. In 1981, Murdoch bought The Times, his first British broadsheet, and, in 1985, became a naturalized US citizen, giving up his Australian citizenship, to satisfy the legal requirement for US television network ownership. In 1986, keen to adopt newer electronic publishing technologies, Murdoch consolidated his UK printing operations in London, causing bitter industrial disputes. His holding company News Corporation acquired Twentieth Century Fox (1985), HarperCollins (1989), and The Wall Street Journal (2007). Murdoch formed the British broadcaster BSkyB in 1990 and, during the 1990s, expanded into Asian networks and South American television. By 2000, Murdoch's News Corporation owned more than 800 companies in more than 50 countries, with a net worth of more than $5 billion.In July 2011, Murdoch faced allegations that his companies, including the News of the World, owned by News Corporation, had been regularly hacking the phones of celebrities, royalty, and public citizens. Murdoch faced police and government investigations into bribery and corruption by the British government and FBI investigations in the US. On 21 July 2012, Murdoch resigned as a director of News International. In September 2023, Murdoch announced he would be stepping down as chairman of Fox Corp. and News Corp. Many of Murdoch's papers and television channels have been accused of biased and misleading coverage to support his business interests and political allies, and some have linked his influence with major political developments in the UK, US, and Australia.

Photo of Paul Stoddart

2. Paul Stoddart (1955 - )

With an HPI of 42.53, Paul Stoddart is the 2nd most famous Australian Businessperson.  Her biography has been translated into 15 different languages.

Paul Gerard Stoddart (born 26 May 1955) is an Australian businessman, airline owner and former Minardi Formula One team boss.

Photo of Gina Rinehart

3. Gina Rinehart (1954 - )

With an HPI of 40.95, Gina Rinehart is the 3rd most famous Australian Businessperson.  Her biography has been translated into 22 different languages.

Georgina Hope Rinehart (née Hancock, born 9 February 1954) is an Australian billionaire mining magnate and heiress. Rinehart is the Executive Chairwoman of Hancock Prospecting, a privately owned mineral exploration and extraction company founded by her father, Lang Hancock. Rinehart was born in Perth, Western Australia, and spent her early years in the Pilbara region. She boarded at St Hilda's Anglican School for Girls and then briefly studied at the University of Sydney, dropping out to work with her father at Hancock Prospecting. She was Lang Hancock's only child, and when he died in 1992 she succeeded him as executive chairwoman. She turned a company with severe financial difficulties into the largest private company in Australia and one of the largest mining houses in the world.When Rinehart took over Hancock Prospecting, its total wealth was estimated at A$75 million, which did not account for group liabilities and contingent liabilities of around A$100 million. She oversaw an expansion of the company over the following decade, and due to the iron ore boom of the early 2000s became a nominal billionaire in 2006. In the 2010s, Rinehart began to expand her holdings into areas outside the mining industry. She made sizeable investments in Ten Network Holdings and Fairfax Media (although she sold her interest in the latter in 2015), and also expanded into agriculture, buying several cattle stations, divesting them within a decade.Rinehart is Australia's richest person. Her wealth reached around A$29 billion in 2012, at which point she overtook Christy Walton as the world's richest woman and was included on the Forbes list of The World's 100 Most Powerful Women. Rinehart's net worth dropped significantly over the following few years due to a slowdown in the Australian mining sector. Forbes estimated her net worth in 2019 at US$14.8 billion as published in the list of Australia's 50 richest people. However, her wealth was rebuilt again during 2020 due to increased demand for Australian iron ore, so that by May 2023, her net worth as published in the 2023 Financial Review Rich List was estimated in excess of A$37 billion; while in March 2021, The Australian Business Review stated her wealth equalled A$36.28 billion. As of September 2020 Forbes considered Rinehart one of the world's ten richest women. Rinehart was Australia's wealthiest person from 2011 to 2015, according to both Forbes and The Australian Financial Review; and again every year since 2020, according to The Australian Business Review and The Australian Financial Review.

Pantheon has 3 people classified as businesspeople born between 1931 and 1955. Of these 3, 3 (100.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living businesspeople include Rupert Murdoch, Paul Stoddart, and Gina Rinehart.

Living Businesspeople

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