The Australian mining mogul inherited her business as a widow with four children and has been amassing a fortune ever since
The visage of a geeky-looking Bill Gates is as familiar to us as our own faces. We've heard about the vast sums of money Microsoft has brought him, and we all have a vague idea of what we would buy had we his wealth (net worth $56bn).
He may not be as recognisable, but we've also heard of telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim (net worth $74bn), the man who has pipped Gates to the title of world's richest person for the past two years. But now consider this tantalising prospect – a fortune to eclipse them all. The pretender to the throne of the super-rich club is Australian mining mogul Gina Rinehart.
The 57-year-old has been amassing her billion-dollar fortune for the past couple of decades. Her father, Langley Hancock, discovered the world's largest iron-ore deposit in 1952 in western Australia and, upon his death in 1992, Rinehart, then a 38-year-old widow with four children, inherited the business, Hancock Prospecting.
Since then, as executive chairman of the HPPL group of companies, she has been racing up the billionaire charts.
In 2006 Australian magazine Business Review Weekly named her the country's first female billionaire and eighth richest person in the country; a year later, she had climbed four places.
This year, Forbes magazine named her Australia's richest person. And although her estimated net worth stands at a paltry A$10bn or so, Citigroup estimates that she is on course to overtake both Slim and Gates within the next few years, largely because she has no shareholders and owns her businesses outright.
With plans to develop more iron ore and coal mines plus canny investments in media – she sits on the board of a television company and has a stake in one of Australia's largest media companies – the sky's the limit.
