James Thompson

800 staff, $1.3 billion in revenue last calendar year.

It's been profitable for six years.

And there's sort of talk that it might head towards the ASX at some stage.

Mm-hmm.

This business has helped Leslie arrive on the rich list with a fortune of $2.5 billion, which is pretty impressive, I reckon.

I think she's at number 67 on the list with $2.5 billion.

Now, not to be the old man saying when I was a boy, but when I was a young rich list editor-

Gosh, you know, the billionaires were rarer than they are now.

You know, to have $2.5 billion and only be number 67 on the list, it just shows how, you know, really this is going to be a list of entirely billionaires in a very short space of time, isn't it?

Yeah, no, great call.

And in a world where, you know, as I've said before, we've got a 17-year-old son at home and he's wondering what he should do with his life.

In a way, the ritualist says, just go and have a crack at something.

There's lots of different ways to make it in this world and lots of different industries are still represented on that list.

So, it's still the greatest annual project in Australian journalism and

The team led by Hannah Tattersall and Yolanda Redrup, who's currently on maternity leave, they can be very proud of the great job they've done, and Matthew Drummond, who runs the AFR magazine too.

Now, Anthony, I've spent a little bit of time on Qantas jets this week, so I wanted to ask you about this story about something called Project Sunrise, which is not the name of a cocktail that you get in the Qantas lounge, but it's the name given to Qantas' grand plan to fly direct from Sydney to London and New York.

Now, this has been a big plan for, I'm not going to say as long as I can remember, but for at least the last five years.

And it's been always just about to arrive, but this week it suffered yet another setback.

Yeah.

Yeah.