Not one to bite his tongue or slow his roll, Mineral Resources founder and boss Chris Ellison stands out among Australia’s corporate bigwigs.
The latest instalment in what Mr Ellison tells The West Australian has been the “biggest year of my career” is bringing the $3 billion Onslow iron ore project in the West Pilbara online earlier this week.
MinRes has moved at an unrelenting pace over the past 12 months — completely reshaping its lithium presence, pushing a major Perth Basin gas development forward, building Onslow, creating a transhipping division, and even getting the ball rolling on an in-house airline.
After dropping out of school aged 15 the Kiwi native says one decision got him on the path to running a sprawling $10 billion mining and infrastructure empire today.
“Simple, coming to WA,” Mr Ellison said.
“I travel around the world but I mean I’ve never found a place like WA, the opportunity that’s in WA.
At barely 20 years old he crossed the ditch to Sydney in 1977 with virtually the clothes on his back and a few friends., soon finding labouring work across the Pilbara and NT.
Not long after Mr Ellison got a crane license he started his first venture — a crane hire business in Karratha — and by his mid-20s had cashed out for a small fortune.
He ploughed that money back into a mining services business that was swallowed up by Monadelphous, but he had a big exposure to the acquirer and its subsequent collapse of left him teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.
Down to his last ten grand and some maxed out credit cards he started a pipeline contractor in 1992 that would eventually evolve into MinRes.
Mr Ellison has never looked back.
“I’ve been back to Dunedin on the odd occasion and I can’t handle the cold,” he laughed.
“It’s a quaint little town, I love it dearly but Perth is my home – I love it here.”
He maintained a relatively low profile for a number of years until being catapulted into the spotlight in 2009 when the record for Australia’s most expensive home was shattered.
Mr Ellison, then widely referred to in media articles as a mining executive with six children, paid $57.5 million for a Mosman Park mega mansion sold by billionaire iron ore heiress Angela Bennett.
At the time MinRes was worth less than a billion dollars and as the company rapidly grew so did his profile.
Mr Ellison credits many of his best ideas, which he says includes MinRes’ move into lithium and developing the Onslow project, to his time spent fishing.
“When I’m staring into the abyss that’s kinda the thought process that I have, every now and then I catch a fish too,” Mr Ellison said.
“It’s sort of my thinking time, I don’t get a lot of thinking time when I’m in the office, but yeah when I’m out in the water that tranquillity is a good place to be.”
But it’s not fishing he considers to be his biggest hobby.
Mr Ellison has become synonymous with MinRes but he is now pushing 70 and has more than enough money to wave goodbye to gainful employment, with a net worth estimated to be beyond $2 billion.
This has led some of the company’s shareholders to start thinking about what life without Chris at the helm would look like.
“I gave my board a ten-year commitment last year, so we do have succession planning in the business,” he said.
“But I don’t expect to go anywhere in the next ten years. This is my hobby.”