In a year when Donald Trump had more impact on your investment performance than AI or the record-breaking gold price, corporate reporting never felt more like numerology or tarot card reading.
Which is why it is best to dispense with balance sheets and weighted cost of capital calculations and focus on what really set the agenda in the business world this year.
Climate change sceptic Gina Rinehart making billions by investing in green metals, and enjoying one hell of a Trump bump when he showered money on the sector, probably wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card this year.
Neither was James Hardie boss Aaron Erter proving the building products maker is now asbestos-free by successfully torching the company with a disastrous acquisition and equally disastrous response to his Aussie investors who sacked his chairwoman last month. He’s okay and still one of the ASX’s highest-paid CEOs.
But the big spotlight was on AI which sucked up all the oxygen, and cash, and still failed to deliver anything of practical value – which might be why we all still have jobs.
Telstra boss Vicki Brady, fresh from a Silicon Valley trip, was among those assuring the market that the AI gurus had sorted out those pesky hallucinations. She probably had a report from Deloitte to back up her confident assurance.
But as the Commonwealth Bank demonstrated – with the reversal of its plans to sack call centre workers and let AI handle the work – tangible corporate benefits are also hallucinatory at this stage.
Coldplay
The only question was whether our bizarrely behaving billionaires trumped the interdepartmental ardour of the executive suite.
Astronomer chief executive Andy Byron lost his job in July after being caught in a clinch with his chief people officer on a stadium “kiss cam” at a Coldplay concert.
The Coldplay tickets provided a much quicker and cheaper form of justice than the tens of millions of dollars spent by Rebel Sport owner Super Retail before its chief executive Anthony Heraghty was sacked over his relationship with former HR boss Jane Kelly.
He was ejected with immediate effect – and lost millions in bonuses – after the board concluded “Heraghty’s prior disclosures were not satisfactory”. There’s another word for that.
But this affair is not over yet. The current chair, Judith Swales, was on the board as all of this played out, and is clearly backed into a corner over her role in the disastrous management of this fiasco which has left so many awkward questions unanswered.
This includes whether the current CEO Paul Bradshaw really did see Heraghty’s hand on Kelly’s thigh at a work event – as alleged in court documents – and why did an extensive investigation fail to find anything despite the many sordid allegations detailed in court documents.
Swales risks joining Heraghty on the corporate sidelines next year if the story unravels further and becomes too much for investors to stomach.
Dude where’s my car?
When Lachlan Murdoch gathered News Ltd’s most loyal troops to mingle at his Christmas drinks with the rich, powerful and famous, the only gossip more interesting than Labor’s no-show was who got to drive rather than walk up the driveway of his humble shack Le Manoir.
In pole position would be that P plate pizza delivery guy who shovelled 16 large pizzas through the back door.
He was closely followed by the inexplicably popular NSW Premier Chris Minns, and third on the podium is billionaire Kerry Stokes. The billionaire was too busy driving past the media pack to give his son Ryan a lift despite the latter’s exemplary stewardship of their $18 billion industrial powerhouse SGH (the company formerly known as Seven Group).
Ryan couldn’t even get his own driver to show up and was left exposed on the curb with the assembled media pack like a shonk caught on camera by Seven’s Spotlight or Today Tonight.
Seven now appears to be a dirty word to Stokes to the extent that the family has now discarded its control of the vastly diminished Seven West Media.
But let’s not lose sight of what 2025 was really about – billionaires (underlining F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that the very rich), “they are different from you and me”.
Billionaire bizzarro-in-chief Elon Musk got busy with the public service before falling out with Trump, but only after trashing Tesla’s brand with the left-leaning liberals who actually buy its cars.
But a bust-up with Trump, and extremist behaviour, could not break Tesla investors’ mass hallucination that a trillion-dollar pay packet for Musk will help bridge the vast gap between its valuation and tangible performance.
As Michael Burry of Big Short fame put it: “The Elon cult was all-in on electric cars until competition showed up, then all-in on autonomous driving until competition showed up, and now is all-in on robots – until competition shows up.”
Musk is still the world’s richest person, of course.
And people still wonder if we’re in a bubble despite a chip company called Nvidia soaring past $US5 trillion ($7.56 trillion) in value which would be justified if only we would just sacrifice all our intellectual property, the power grid, precious water supplies and our livelihoods to this great cause.
Billionaire bizzarros
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos obviously gave Musk a run for his money with a wedding that may define the age of billionaire indulgence.
Bezos’ fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, had her hens’ party in space with a Blue Origin flight and all-female crew that included singer Katy Perry.
Venice nearly sank under the weight of the subsequent wedding in June, and Bezos was forced to hold its final celebrations behind fortified walls following protests over the inequality and elitism the wedding so eloquently represented. Amazon’s unsavoury labour practices, and creative tax compliance may also have got a mention.
How could Aussie billionaires compete with this? We certainly gave it a try.
WiseTech co-founder Richard White demonstrated that nothing ensures survival better than being deemed irreplaceable to a $25 billion world-beating tech group.
WiseTech was worth more than $40 billion before an investigation by the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Financial Review revealed allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards women, including complaints by multiple women who alleged he traded business advice for sex, as well as bullying and intimidation.
It forced him to step down from the board and his CEO role last year.
But our White knight returned triumphant as executive chairman this year – triggering a boardroom exodus – despite a report that found he had misled the company’s board and that he had made “inaccurate and incomplete disclosures” about one of his relationships.
“I’m passionate about this company,” White told investors last month alongside his new board, freshly ordered from Temu.
Atlassian co-founder and eco warrior Mike Cannon-Brookes gave us lowly carbon emitters a lesson in how to have your cake and eat it too.
In March, Cannon-Brookes was forced to fess up that he had acquired a Bombardier Global 7500, the world’s largest purpose-built private jet.
“I’m not denying I have a deep internal conflict on this,” he said when AFR queries forced him to break cover.
But it’s okay, his jet emissions are carbon-free, apparently.
He helped externalise other “conflicts” by outsourcing his love of Formula 1 to Atlassian which took up sponsorship of the Williams Racing team.
It is a wonderfully symbiotic relationship where Atlassian apparently pays Cannon-Brookes millions to fly in his jet to company events, like the Formula 1 races it sponsors, where he entertains corporate clients.
Isn’t this what greenies call a circular economy?
But these Sydney-based billionaires got some competition from our Melbourne bankers. NAB boss Andrew Irvine got some special coaching and mentoring after major investors queried his leadership skills and drinking at company events, oh, and an exodus of senior executives in the year after Irvine was appointed.
But it was a pebble in a pond compared with the fun at ANZ which promises to spill into an eventful 2026. New broom Nunos Matos has not been having much fun cleaning up the mess left by his predecessor Shayne Elliott, what with the thousands of job cuts and massive fines to settle accusations of misconduct.
And now Elliott is suing the company to recover his multi-million dollar bonuses that were cut by the bank’s board saying he had a “clear, unambiguous” deal with them.
Succession finale
And we can only assume that Rupert Murdoch’s own Succession drama has drawn to a close after such a masterly finale this year.
Lachlan brought an expensive end to the decades-long battle against his siblings to control the media dynasty’s assets including Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and The Australian.
The fallout from “Project Harmony” has ensured the fractious siblings and dad won’t be gathered around the same Christmas tree next week.
The only question is which streaming giant will buy the rights to the dynastic clash from James Murdoch.
Stay tuned, folks.
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Colin Kruger is a senior business reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.
