Life-sized statue of Atlasssian founder Mike-Cannon Brookes unveiled at birthday
The billionaire founders of Australian-run software company Atlassian have celebrated 20 years of the business with Roman emperor-style busts of their faces.
Life-size statues of co-CEOs Mike-Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar loomed large at the company’s 20th birthday celebration held in Sydney in June, the same month Mr Cannon-Brookes announced his plan to ‘decarbonise’ Australia.
An image published by the Australian Financial Review‘s Rear Window column on Wednesday shows a statue of a chiselled Cannon-Brookes, shirtless and wearing a baseball cap, looming over a birthday cake.
Meanwhile, co-founder Mr Farquhar is wrapped in a toga with a colourful party hat perched on his head to mark the special occasion.
Mr Cannon-Brookes and Mr Farquhar founded Atlassian in 2002 and are believed to live next door to each other in mansions in one of Sydney’s most exclusive suburbs, Point Piper.
Mr Cannon-Brookes is number four on The Australian’s Richest 250, with an estimated personal wealth of $26.2billion after cofounding the multinational company behind project management tools such as Trello and Jira.
Meanwhile, Mr Farquhar is number five on the rich list, with an estimated net worth of more than $25.99billion.
The busts, which were first pictured in the Australian Financial Review, show a chiselled Mr Cannon Brookes in a baseball cap (left) and Scott Farquhar in a party hat and toga (right)
The co-founders of Australian-run software company Atlassian have celebrated 20 years in style with Roman emperor-style busts (pictured, Mike Cannon-Brookes with wife Annie)
Atlassian cofounder Scott Farquhar has an estimated networth of $25.99 billion (pictured Kim and Scott Farquhar attend the GQ Men of the Year Awards in 2017)
The company’s 20-year anniversary in June came at the same time Mr Cannon-Brookes called for the accelerated closure of coal-fired power plants across Australia and declared the country only had itself to blame for its recent energy crisis.
‘At some point we have to admit we have made this problem ourselves,’ he told a business summit about the same time. ‘We got into this with 10-plus years of inaction (on climate change).’
Cannon-Brookes disrupted the planned demerger of Australia’s biggest energy company and polluter, AGL, earlier this year. He argued a plan to split the company in two would be bad of shareholders, customers and staff and could slow the closure of coal-fired power plans in Australia.
Cannon-Brookes’ intervention eventually led to the AGL leadership team standing aside.
Cannon-Brookes said what happens with the company in the future would be the ‘largest decarbonisation project in the world’.
‘It’s horribly shameful and we’re going to fix it,’ Mr Cannon-Brookes said.
‘We need to rebuild the board with a much more ambitious, forward-thinking, progressive board, for shareholders, for the environment and for workers,’ he said.
In June, Mr Cannon-Brookes called for the accelerated closure of coal-fired power plants across Australia (pictured, a coal-fired power station in Biloela, Queensland in 2021)
Mr Cannon-Brookes (left) and Mr Farquhar (right) founded Atlassian in 2002 and are believed to live next to each other in Point Piper mansions in Sydney’s eastern suburbs
At the time, the businessman was coy about whether he would become a director of AGL itself.
Mr Cannon-Brookes recently forecast a dire future for rising power bills as electricity companies cautioned customers of imminent rising costs due to the war with Ukraine.
‘I estimate, unfortunately, that your power prices are going to go up quite significantly this year,’ he said to Seven News, placing the blame on the cost of coal and gas, which Australia heavily relies on.
‘The cost of coal and gas has gone up, and 65 per cent to 70 per cent of our grid is generated by coal and gas,’ he said.
