Society/Culture Australia's most dangerous women doubles fortune in one week

With the stroke of a pen, the wealth of Gina Rinehart jumped by about $10 billion, propelling Australia's richest person closer to the title of the world's richest woman.

Ms Rinehart's Hancock Prospecting last week agreed to sell 15 per cent of the Pilbara-based Roy Hill project to South Korean steel giant Posco.

The Posco investment values the stake in the project at more than $1.6 billion, in turn pushing Ms Rinehart's combined wealth up from $10.3 billion, as estimated last year, to nearly $20 billion, based on the increased value of her holding in the mine.

The boost to Ms Rinehart's fortunes has put her on course to overtake the world's richest woman, American Wal-Mart heiress Christy Walton, who, with her family, is worth $US24.5 billion.

Last year, US magazine Forbes ranked Ms Rinehart the 19th most powerful woman in the world with a fortune of $US9 billion.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/business/r...s-in-a-week-20120123-1qczm.html#ixzz1kFtnW2n7

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She's the richest Australian in history, and could well become the richest individual in the world, but have her billions made Gina Rinehart happy? Jane Cadzow talks to the mining magnate's friends, foes and political associates to reveal a complicated woman with a surprisingly unenviable life.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/the-iron-lady-20120116-1q1u6.html#ixzz1kFuInmG6

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Admiral Afterworld said:

If you believe the rumours she (as part owner) was influential in Ten hiring Andrew Bolt

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RisingPhoenix said:

At the risk of understating things, Gina Rinehart is an absolutely cretinous human being.

She comes off as a female version of Daniel Plainview from the third act of There Will Be Blood, psychotically consumed with greed, hated by her children, and utterly detached from human reality.

The Worst would have you believe she is Mother Theresa though naturally.

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skilts said:

Hardly surprising, given her closeness to her father. He was as mad as a March hare, and as cunning as a rat.

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skilts said:

Hardly surprising, given her closeness to her father. He was as mad as a March hare, and as cunning as a rat.

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RisingPhoenix said:

I think it was Langy who provided her with the fantasy about using nukes for open cut mining. To any rational, sane human being such an proposition would be laughable, but not to the Rhinehart/Hancock clan.

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Admiral Byng said:

I've heard similar things, but I thought it was about making a deep-water harbour instead of conventional dredging.

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Upton Sinclair said:

And for anyone who wants to take a bit of schadenfreude in her misery, you can't go past the aforementioned profile, which I am pleasantly surprised to find published online, unlike most of GW's stuff

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cancat said:

The article fails to demonstrate her supposed misery

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Despite this, she has a reputation for penny-pinching. One former employee tells of being instructed to phone suppliers of office equipment to haggle over even the smallest bills. Another says he got the impression that Rinehart personally scrutinised staff expenses claims. "She had a thing in the back of her mind that everybody, and I mean everybody, was out to do her down, to take a dollar off her," he says. "She trusted nobody and assumed the worst of everybody."

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Rinehart was Hancock's eager apprentice, travelling the globe with him as he trained her to take over the mining behemoth he predicted Hancock Prospecting would become. He called her his "right-hand man" and addressed her as "young fella". At the same time, he expected her to be a decorative addition to business meetings. "He used to pick at her about her dress and her style and her behaviour," remembers an old family friend. "He used to keep picking at her if she put on weight. He'd say, 'Where's my pretty girl?' " Much later, when father and daughter fell out over his marriage to Rose, Hancock taunted Rinehart about the kilos she had gained. In a vitriolic letter that surfaced during one of the court cases after his death, he said he wanted to remember her as the "neat, trim, capable and attractive young lady" she had been rather than "the slothful, vindictive and devious baby elephant that you have become".

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Newspapers reported in 1997 that Rinehart had reached a confidential out-of-court settlement with her former live-in security guard, Bob Thompson, who had filed a sexual harassment complaint against her. In a long article in Woman's Day, Thompson said Rinehart became infatuated with him and wanted to marry him, despite his being engaged to someone else. "I told her over and over I wasn't interested," he said, but "she wouldn't take no for an answer". Thompson made plain that in some ways he felt sorry for Rinehart: "She's just incredibly lonely and isolated."
Singleton tells me Rinehart has no interests besides mining. "There is no social life," he says. "It's just work."

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Gloria Schultz has no doubt that her friend's motives are pure: "She really believes that mining and the money it brings are important to Australia. She's very patriotic." Asked if she thinks Rinehart is happy, Schultz hesitates. "Most of the time," she says. But a lot has been sacrificed in the name of the father. "It hasn't been an easy ride for Gina Rinehart."

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Upton Sinclair said:

It's her personality I find ugly. I don't think it's fair to judge public figures by their looks, I mean did anyone ever talk about what a fugly **** Lang was? Of course not!

Sorry, I don't mean to rag on you, obviously we share the same sentiments but it's just something I have to point out. I hate how women in public life are continually objectified.

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RisingPhoenix said:

NSIS.

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RisingPhoenix said:

What a dish she is.

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dumb said:

but it's unclear to me what she is interested in outside of protecting her mining fortune.

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dumb said:

can she afford one night of passion with andrew bolt? if she stuck a roll of hundreds in her fissure, would you get and get them out?

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Upton Sinclair said:

Nothing by all accounts.

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Upton Sinclair said:

You clearly didn't read the whole thing

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cancat said:

.

As for your disgust of her personality - what are you basing this on?

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RisingPhoenix said:

Except Jam donuts and large double quarter pounder meals.

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Upton Sinclair said:

Her background, her upbringing, her taste for serial litigation and perversions of the legal system, the way that she managed to use her obscene wealth to depose of a Prime Minister, her proclivity to accumulating obscene amounts of wealth for the sheer sake of it, her attitudes towards black people, her bank-rolling of anti-science woo-mongering, her love for Andrew Bolt, her desire to muscle her way into the political narrative by buying up media companies, her arrogant and elitist assumption that she knows what is best for Australia despite living the life of a pampered princess for her whole existence...

Do you need me to go on?

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