Scott Farquhar
The tech billionaire Scott Farquhar, 37, has bought a Sydney waterfront mansion for an Australian record, 75 million Australian dollars (Dh204.5m), after the owner resisted selling the 1863-built home to developers.
The co-founder of the software company Atlassian, which floated in the United States in late 2015, snapped up the mansion, called Elaine, from John Brehmer Fairfax, whose family formerly owned The Sydney Morning Herald.
The estate, which stretches down to a harbour beach, had been in the Fairfax family since 1891, when it was bought for 2,100 pounds. It features horse stables, a tennis court and a ballroom.
The price topped the previous A$70 million in 2015 when James Packer sold his Sydney home to the Australian-Chinese billionaire businessman Chau Chak Wing.
The price tag set a record for residential property in Australia, the Australian Financial Review said.
Mr Farquhar and his business partner, Mike Cannon-Brookes, started Atlassian, which makes collaboration software, in 2002 after they finished their studies at the University of New South Wales. For financing in their early days, they used their credit cards.
Mr Farquhar’s net worth is US$2.6 billion, according to Forbes, and Mr Cannon-Brookes is at the same level.
Mark Cuban
Twitter shares were up by nearly 5 per cent on Tuesday after the American tech billionaire Mark Cuban said he had recently started buying the stock.
“I think they finally got their act together with artificial intelligence,” Mr Cuban said on CNBC on Monday.
Mr Cuban’s comment comes after Twitter reported better-than-expected user growth in Q1 and as the chief executive, Jack Dorsey, bought more than half a million Twitter shares for about $9.5m.
Twitter, which has faced stalled user growth in the past few quarters, on Monday also expanded its live broadcasting portfolio with 12 new offerings including a 24-hour Bloomberg News network.
The shares ended on Tuesday up 4 per cent, after rising by 6.4 per cent on Monday.
Mr Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and is worth $3.4bn, according to Forbes. After university his jobs included disco instructor and party promoter. He was fired from a job in Dallas with a software retailer so he started his own business in the field. He sold it to CompuServe for $6m in 1990. Then he and a college buddy started a webcasting business in 1995 and four years later unloaded it on Yahoo for $5.7bn in stock shortly before the tech bubble burst. Mr Cuban was wise enough to take his winnings and diversify.
Kjell Inge Roekke
The Norwegian investor Kjell Inge Roekke plans to make large donations from his $2bn wealth, starting with the construction and operation of a ship for research on ocean conditions and clean-up, he told the daily newspaper Aftenposten.
The ship, which is to operate in partnership with the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Norwegian unit, will have a crew of 30 and will offer space for up to 60 scientific staff.
“I’ll give back to society the lion’s share of what I’ve earned. This ship is a part of that,” said Mr Roekke, who started out as a fisherman and made his way to the top of the industry’s food chain.
Mr Roekke, who is dyslexic, owned a stake in the Wimbledon Football Club for a while. It was an unhappy era: fans rebelled as the owners moved the club outside of London to the town of Milton Keynes.
Mr Roekke has had better luck in the Norwegian top flight, where he is an investor in the club Molde FK. He helped pay for the club’s new stadium, which is nicknamed Rokkelokka, aka The Roekke Park.
Taizo Son
Singapore may have just added a new tech billionaire, but it had to lure him from Japan first.
Taizo Son, who built his fortune on the hit smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons, has moved to Singapore from Tokyo and plans to invest $100 million in South East Asia within five years. The younger brother of SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son said he had become frustrated by regulation in Japan as well as the country’s education system.
“I tried very hard by lobbying the Japanese government: ‘Why don’t we have a regulatory sandbox to bring some innovative ideas?’” Mr Son said. “The country’s too big and very slow to move. But here, even the government, regulators are innovation-minded.”
Singapore’s high rate of internet use and a reliance on online data-processing has helped propel the prime minister’s Smart Nation initiative since it was launched in 2014. Under Lee Hsien Loong’s programme, the government, agencies and companies are looking to use technology to change how things are done, from self-driving buses and traffic management to public transport fares that are charged automatically.
Mr Son founded gamemaker GungHo Online Entertainment and is now the chief executive of Mistletoe, a combination of early-stage venture firm, incubator and entrepreneur-in-residence programme. His brother Masayoshi is the chairman of SoftBank and is Japan’s second-richest man with a net worth of $12.9bn, according to Bloomberg. Taizo Son is at $1.2 billion.
After moving to the wealthy enclave of Sentosa, he expects to receive his permanent residency within three months.
The Japanese system is “extremely terrible” at creating entrepreneurs, Mr Son said. He intends to open a school in Singapore after recently opening a school near Tokyo that encourages children to learn without teachers.
Vincent Bollore
Vincent Bollore, the French billionaire who helped build Paris’s auto-sharing network, is backing off on ambitions for his electric cars to compete with models from Volkswagen or Renault.
“With individual cars, it’s going to be complicated,” Mr Bollore said in late April. “We are competitive on services, on safety, but not on prices when it comes to mass production.”
Instead, Mr Bollore is focusing his battery business, Blue Solutions, on buses, services and stationary storage rather than autos for individuals. Its lithium metal polymer batteries have proved impractical for private cars because they consume electricity even when the vehicles aren’t running.
Four years after Blue Solutions began trading on the stock market, investors have become increasingly sceptical about its technology. In March, Mr Bollore offered to buy back the stock, which had lost more than three-quarters of its value since July 2014. Investors will be able to sell their shares this year and in three years, at €17 apiece. Blue Solutions is 90 per cent-owned by the billionaire’s holding company, Bollore SA.
“When we started we were almost alone,” Mr Bollore told reporters this month. “Now, everyone makes electric cars and we aren’t competitive compared to immense brands.”
Mr Bollore’s net worth is estimated at $5.4bn.
The Recordati family
The drugmaker Recordati has created the newest family of Italian pharmaceutical billionaires.
The company’s shares had surged by 53.3 per cent in the past year as of last week, giving Andrea Recordati, the chief executive, his siblings, Alberto and Cristina, and their sister-in-law, Hillary Merkus, each a net worth of $1.1 billion, according to Bloomberg calculations. The family controls 51.3 per cent of Recordati through a holding company.
The business, started by the siblings’ grandfather in 1926, has been the focus of takeover talk, fuelling the gains. The Recordatis are the latest family of billionaires to emerge from an Italian drug company, the nation’s best performing industry for the past six years.
The Recordatis join Luigi Rovati, the founder of Rottapharm Madaus, and Alberto and Paolo Chiesi, the septuagenarian brothers behind Parma-based Chiesi Farmaceutici, who were identified as billionaires in November 2014 after Rovati sold the company to Sweden’s Meda for €2.3bn (Dh9.3bn). Mauro Ajani was identified as a billionaire four months earlier after his Cosmo Pharmaceuticals rose almost 300 per cent in two years.
Giovanni Recordati founded the business out of a family apothecary dating back to the 19th century. Three of Recordati’s current products date back to the family apothecary, including an anti-spasm intestinal drug created in 1927, a laxative and collagenic from 1930 and Tefamin, a heart tonic, diuretic and blood-pressure-reducing agent devised in 1935. The company focuses its research and development on treatments for rare diseases.
Arrigo died in 1999, bequeathing the business to his four children and putting management in the hands of his son Giovanni, who died last year, leaving his share to his wife, Ms Merkus. The Facebook page in Ms Merkus’s name was last updated in 2014. All her posts from that year concern what level she had reached in the video game Pet Rescue Saga.
Bill Ackman
Bill Ackman said he will “probably stay away from pharmaceutical companies” after losses at Valeant Pharmaceuticals International cost his hedge fund $4bn.
“What I learnt is that it can be very expensive,” said Mr Ackman, the activist investor and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management.
Mr Ackman was one of Valeant’s biggest supporters throughout the Canadian company’s heyday and among its biggest defenders when things turned sour. He sold out of his stake in March after losing billions of dollars.
“In the case of Valeant, we worked closely with the management team on the acquisition of Allergan and in 2014 it was a very successful transaction. We made the mistake of making passive investment in the company,” he said. Pershing Square cost Valeant about 30 per cent of the value of its assets, Mr Ackman said.
His net worth is at $1.4bn.
Mr Ackman is listing the Pershing Square Holdings fund in London to reduce its discount to net asset value. The parent company launched a share buy-back of the fund on Tuesday.
Pershing Square is also working on two large investments, he said, declining to identify the targets.
* Agencies and The National
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