Live Australia's realtime rich list: Gina Rinehart leads
Forbes Australia’s live Australias realtime rich list tracks every confirmed Australian billionaire in near real time, showing who is up, down or newly joining the three-comma club. Mining magnate Gina Rinehart tops the ranking at $25.6 billion, while Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes leads tech at $12.9 billion.
Key Takeaways
- Gina Rinehart is Australia’s richest person, with a Forbes-estimated net worth of $25.6 billion built on iron ore and later rare earths, gas and cattle.
- Public holdings on the live Australias realtime rich tracker update every five minutes when markets are open, with a 15-minute stock-price delay.
- Mike Cannon-Brookes is the richest tech billionaire at $12.9 billion; Scott Farquhar is close behind at $12.5 billion.
- Ed Craven, 30, is Australia’s youngest billionaire; Frank Lowy, 95, is the oldest.
- Elsewhere, Forbes real-time swings also reshape Japan’s top five, where SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son still leads despite recent drops.
Published on 28 September 2026 by Samuel Hussey, the Forbes Australia Real-Time Rich List is pitched as a minute-to-minute guide to every Australian billionaire Forbes has confirmed. It sits in the same family of wealth tools as Forbes’ global Real-Time Billionaires ranking and matters because fortunes tied to listed shares can move within a single trading session.
For readers following net worth and wealth stories, the live board answers the ranking question first—and keeps answering it as markets move.
Who tops Australia’s live realtime rich list right now?
Gina Rinehart, executive chairwoman of Hancock Prospecting, is Australia’s richest person at $25.6 billion. Forbes says she built that fortune on Western Australian iron ore deposits first explored by her father, Lang Hancock, and has since expanded into rare earths, gas and cattle.
On the tech side, Mike Cannon-Brookes leads at $12.9 billion after co-founding Atlassian with Scott Farquhar ($12.5 billion) soon after university. Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht follow at $7.6 billion each from Canva, with Cameron Adams at $3.8 billion.
How does the live Australias realtime rich ranking actually work?
Forbes updates the value of public holdings every five minutes while the relevant stock markets are open, applying a 15-minute delay to stock prices. Fortunes tied heavily to private companies are refreshed once a day.
Where available, major private companies are adjusted using an industry- or region-specific market index from FactSet Research Systems. Biggest-gainer and biggest-loser figures compare each billionaire’s fortune with the previous trading day’s market close.
Who are Australia’s youngest and oldest billionaires?
At 30, Ed Craven is Australia’s youngest billionaire. He co-founded Stake.com, the crypto-backed online casino that Forbes says generated $4.7 billion in gross revenue in 2024, even though it is unavailable in the US, UK and much of Europe.
Frank Lowy, 95, is Australia’s oldest billionaire. A Holocaust survivor, he opened his first Sydney shopping centre in 1959 and grew Westfield into one of the world’s largest mall businesses before selling it to Unibail-Rodamco in 2018 for $16 billion.
Why do real-time rich lists matter beyond Australia?
The same Forbes real-time method shows how quickly regional rankings can swing. Coverage of Japan’s five richest billionaires recently put SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son still ahead at about $75.9 billion, even after the group’s combined net worth fell by roughly $2 billion versus the prior update—mostly from share-price moves.
That global context underlines why Australia’s live board is more than a static annual list: it is a market-day snapshot that can change before the close.