It was a dark, wild and stormy night when wind shifted even pots in the garden 🪴
Australia’s 100 richest people under 40 revealed
The Young Rich List, now in its 20th year, shows shop owners are thriving in another patchy year for tech founders – and there’s a new young billionaire in town.
The fortunes of Australia’s wealthiest self-made people aged 40 and under have surged 25 per cent as the alternative energy, retail and property sectors boomed. However, the patchy recovery in technology means the $37.7 billion total wealth on 2023’s Young Rich List is still below 2021’s record $41.3 billion.
Leading the Young Rich List with a combined wealth of $13 billion are Melanie Perkins and husband Cliff Obrecht. The value of Canva, the graphic design firm they founded in 2012 and of which they own 30 per cent, has settled at $US25.5 billion ($40.35 billion) after a series of markdowns by its owners.
The Young Rich List features, from left, Canva’s Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, Airwallex’s Jack Zhang, Babyboo’s Argylica Conditsis, Geedup Co’s Jake Paco and Hismile’s Alex Tomic and Nik Mirkovic. Sam Bennett
That’s well below the $US40 billion set by a fundraising arm in September 2021, but it’s enough to give them a $10 billion lead on Ed Craven, the co-founder of online cryptocurrency casino stake.com, who’s third on the list with a $3.1 billion valuation.
Given 2022’s Young Rich List was finalised in September last year, just as the technology downturn was getting into swing, it’s little surprise that the number of fortunes based on selling software and hardware has slumped this year, from 41 to 31.
Among those whose wealth estimates have flatlined or fallen are Afterpay founder Nick Molnar (steady at $1.2 billion) and the three founders of social media consolidator Linktree, down 29 per cent apiece to $200 million. That company faces an uncertain future following two redundancy rounds and Instagram’s copying of its hero feature.
Yet some venture-backed tech start-up founders have thrived, notably the three list-qualifying founders of Airwallex, creators of a cross-border payments system for international businesses. Maintaining a $US5.5 billion valuation at its last fundraising in October last year, Jack Zhang and his colleagues have since benefited from an uptick in the Nasdaq and weakness in the Australian dollar. Those forces have caused their wealth estimates to rise 50 per cent and more.
Technology travails aside, the biggest story of this year’s list is the arrival of a new billionaire in the ostentatious form of Melbourne’s Adrian Portelli, leading 16 debutants.
Portelli flew below the radar until last year, when he made a Hail Mary bid for the winning house on Nine Network’s The Block. Some thought he was a dummy-bidding friend of the vendors, but then Portelli bought another contestant’s house for $4.25 million. He really broke cover this year, when he paid $39 million cash for a penthouse in east Melbourne’s Sapphire by the Gardens, and had a $3 million McLaren winched up 57 floors into his loungeroom.
The award for most outlandish Young Rich Lister house purchase, however, still goes to Craven, who splashed $88 million on a Toorak mansion last year. His Curacao-registered stake.com is raking in revenue ($4 billion in calendar 2022) while the sun shines (and until the law catches up). Many of its six million accounts and 600,000 regular players are in “grey” markets such as Brazil and Japan, which are yet to either ban or regulate gambling using cryptocurrency.
In September, it emerged that cryptocurrency worth $64 million was stolen by North Korean hackers from one of stake.com’s accounts. The company issued a statement saying no clients’ funds were taken.
While Portelli and Craven sell the chance of winning, those selling tangible goods have had their best Young Rich List in years. Young entrepreneurs who we classify as retailers – be they online, omnichannel or, as is the case with fourth-placed Sam Prince ($1.6 billion), purveyors of Mexican food via the Zambrero chain – have taken 26 of the 100 slots on this year’s Young Rich List, up from 19 last year.
The most notable new retailing arrivals are Daniel and Georgia Contos, the married couple behind White Fox Boutique. Commuters would not have missed White Fox’s ads, featuring models wearing its eye-catching gear, on the back of seemingly every bus. The real clue to the fast-fashion seller’s success has been in the real estate pages – over the past two years, the couple have paid $60 million for two houses in harbourside Vaucluse.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Sydney town, Babyboo co-founder siblings Argylica and William Conditsis, as well as Geedup Co. founder Jake Paco, have built clothes-designing empires out of Baulkham Hills and Parramatta respectively.
Other fashionistas making repeat appearances on the list include Culture Kings sellers Simon and Tah-nee Beard, and Monday Swimwear founder Natasha Oakley.
Evan Montero is another debutant catering to the instant gratification generation. DIY Blinds, which he co-founded, digitised the once-cumbersome process of getting custom-made blinds and cracked a $100 million valuation.
The boom in so-called “green energy” has created three Young Rich Listers this year. The richest is the least-known: Gregory Green, who grew up on a cane farm near Grafton, and drifted into investment banking. He invested early in renewable natural gas, becoming a partner at a firm called Mas Energy that cleared him over $100 million when it was sold to CIM Group last year.
Gregory Green makes his Young Rich List debut at No.50. James Jackman
Finally, few have gone broke investing in property in Australia, and this year the oldest asset class has produced five Young Rich Listers, up one on last year.
The average age of the Young Rich List has also gone slightly up – from 34.7 years last year to 35.3. So too has the number of women: from 15 to 16.
The November issue of AFR Magazine, including the Young Rich List, is out on Friday, October 27 inside The Australian Financial Review. Follow AFR Mag on Twitter and Instagram.
