Worst Billionaire?
October 22, 2007 by The Lazy Aussie
Guest Post from My Ning. It’s a little hard to tell whether My Ning is nominating this piece for worst person, worst newspaper, worst journalist or worst private school, but what the hey, let’s tick all of them. The fact that he has included a shot of the billionaire’s bonce showing it at it’s worst is good enough for me. My Ning says…
During the past few months, The West Australian has been reminding us of what a fantastic success Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest was when he went to the private WA boys private school Hale back in the late 1970s.
Forrest, of course, is the Cottesloe-based billionaire and great grand nephew of pioneering WA premier Sir John Forrest, who has made a fortune from spruiking minerals stocks.
In some recent articles in The West, most notably in an extended cover piece by chief reporter Mark Drummond, the paper has gone to some lengths to tell us how Forrest – during his two years at Hale (1978 and 1979) – was a school prefect, a house captain, a member of the first XV rugby team, an interschool athlete and swimmer and, finally, a member of the school’s debating team.
Forrest, the Drummond article said, went to Hale after spending some years at Christ Church Grammar School, which he left, apparently, because he had a penchant for standing up to bullies.
What the piece didn’t mention, however, was the fact Forrest repeated year 11 at Hale after a disastrous one at CCGS.
If anything, this all proves two things: (1) groveling celebrity articles about the rich and famous always seem to omit crucial details, and; (2) it is important to choose the right private school for your kiddies.
Posted in worst journalist, worst newspaper, worst people, worst school design | Tagged andrew forrest, mark drummond, the west australian, worst journalist, worst person, worst school design | 14 Comments
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Yes and the story to be told is how close Murrin Murrin cam to bankruptcy , saved only by the lucky increase in the nickel price ( connected to China’s appetite for steel). At one stage they were chucking process engineers at it like nobody’s business. Still to my knowledge has not achieved its hoped for rate of efficiency. this means that when the mining boom ends it will be in trouble.
Yes, Forrest jumped off just before the crap hit if I remember rightly.
The crap had well and truly hit the fan when Forrest was pushed out of Anaconda by (amonst others) Anglo American…there’s a rumour now that he will sell his FMG stock to pay his looming ASIC fine. If the company doesn’t manage to meet its ambitious first year production target of 45 million tonnes of iron ore, this could prove to be a quite convenient way out for the Twig….
…there’s a rumour now that he will sell his FMG stock to pay his looming ASIC fine.
Funny thing that, I was chatting to a bloke just last week who said exactly the same thing…
Couldn’t he pay the fine out of his small change tray?
What date/month/ year, was Andrew Forrest born and where?
1961 was the year xiang. Don’t know the rest.
Does anyone know the D.O.B. and place of birth details of Andrew Forrest that can help. I am writing a thesis and need to include..
Mark Drummond must be busily typing and massaging a certain part of his anatomy upon hearing this news. :-)
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/06/2182395.htm?section=justin
Twiggy’s big face graced the cover of last week’s Fin Review Magazine under the headline
“the Good, the Bad and the Ugly – WA’s boom has created huge wealth, producing brash new billionaires, but will success go to its head”
one assumes that the AFR is also making a joke about his big fat face
the article also contains a wonderful photo of Luke Saraceni leaning on his Ferrari outside his McMansion – he’d be my choice for teh worst of a bad bunch
Worst journalist and worst newspaper certainly comes to mind in regards to the post. The West Australian makes me feel like a moron and subsequently I’ve moved on to the Australian which is an outstanding newspaper. CCGS should be in “worst school”, if there was such a category…
I’m sure the Twiggster would agree with CCGS being the worst school – goodness knows the hung up know-it-all Anglican dickheads who taught there circa the mid-late 1970s had no time to nuture (or even bother looking at) the talents of what became Australia’s richest man (at least on paper). Fuck did those clowns have some insight…..still, it was probably a better place to go to than Hale (where the let’s-repeat-year-11 Twiggy thrived), as Richard Court’s name would have appeared on a few honour boards. Hearing that name, to quote Gogol, makes every vein in one’s body shudder with revulsion.
does anyone know how Twig acquired his options and shares… like right at the beginning?
At the beginning of the FMG saga?
I’m sure it’s buried in a prospectus somewhere issued under Allied Mining and Processing (ASX:AMS), or whatever the company was that he forged into ‘The New Force In Iron Ore’.
From memory, Allied was in parlous state and Twiggy, having seen the China train coming, and all this iron ore just sitting on the surface of the Pilbara, offered to help pick the company up by the bootstraps in return for a nice, healthy controlling share.
If you have the money (and it doesn’t take a lot), and the vision, its easy to shuffle funds and options and ownership and make money by doing nothing, while getting other people to pay for you to do it.
The hardest part is to sell your vision thing.