I’ve wanted to dig into Packer's life for a long time now, because one thing I’ve come to know from over 35 years of reading business stories is that when it comes to big characters with the most drama - the media tycoons always win hands down. And so it is with Packer. We’re talking getting into an actual brawl with heavies hired by Rupert Murdoch, transforming televised sport, having his name dragged into rumours about drug trafficking and even murder, winning and losing tens of millions in casinos in London and Las Vegas. Packer was without doubt one of the larger-than-life figures ever in business, and it’s a cracking story, enjoy.

Kerry Packer was born on December 17th, 1937 in Sydney.
His father, Sir Frank Packer, a former boxer and gold miner, had built one of the most powerful media empires in Australia called ACP (Australian Consolidated Press) - newspapers, TV and radio stations and magazines. Frank was tough, ruthless.
Kerry was the second son. And Clyde, his older brother, was the designated heir. Frank was hard on his sons. At age five, Kerry was sent to boarding school that was only a few hundred metres from the family mansion and apparently saw his mother just 6 times while he was at that school.
Clyde was seen as the clever one - whereas Kerry, who had undiagnosed dyslexia, was called "Boofhead" and "Dummy" by both of his parents. And according to people who knew the family, this type of abuse continued throughout his childhood.
In 1956, at nineteen, he entered the family business, loading newspapers onto trucks, on standard union rates. He got no special treatment, kept his head down, but both he and Clyde briefly became very public figures in 1960 with what became known as the Anglican Press brawl - what a story.

By 1960, Rupert Murdoch — thirty-two years old — had bought the Sydney Daily Mirror.
Frank Packer and the Fairfax family owned the two big newspapers in Sydney, and they formed an unlikely alliance when Murdoch entered the scene.
They devised a "pincer movement" to crush Murdoch: they would launch a series of local suburban newspapers, starving Murdoch’s paper of local ad revenue before he could get a foothold. But to do this they needed a smaller printing press - without getting too technical - the printing presses they used for their large newspapers just weren’t suited for printing smaller newspapers that might need only 5,000–10,000 copies.
The Anglican Press was a mid-sized printing facility perfectly suited for their needs, so when it fell into receivership, Frank Packer offered to buy it. But the owner despised Frank Packer - he didn’t like his politics and saw him as a bully, and so refused to sell.
Packer then went to the receiver and got some sort of verbal agreement to take ownership.
On the evening of June 7th, Clyde and Kerry, along with their lawyer and several Packer employees, broke into the Anglican Press building, barricaded the windows, cut the phone lines, and changed the locks.
When the owner of the Anglican Press found out, he didn’t call the police - instead he went to see Rupert Murdoch and they then hired Frank Browne — a hardened professional enforcer — along with a gang of bruisers armed with monkey wrenches and mallets. At around one in the morning, Browne's mob broke down the front door of the press.
What followed was an almighty brawl inside the building. Kerry squared up against Browne. And Browne, an experienced street fighter, knocked Kerry unconscious. Clyde got broken ribs. The whole Packer group fled in a single car after the tyres of their other vehicles were slashed.
And what’s even more, Murdoch sent a journalist and photographer to record all of this, so the following morning his Daily Mirror ran with the headline "Knight's Sons in City Brawl" because, side note, Frank Packer had been knighted a year earlier. There was a large photograph of Clyde tussling with someone and inside, a picture of Kerry with a swollen eye. Of course this was tabloid gold - not only had Murdoch prevented his main rivals from gaining control of the strategic press, but the coverage had boosted circulation and on top of all of this Sir Frank Packer was publicly humiliated.

Life moved on. Kerry moved into various executive roles within the television production department.
In 1963, he married Roslyn Weedon and by all accounts they remained happily married up until Packer's death.
Then came the succession crisis.

It came to a head in early 1972, when Clyde booked union leader Bob Hawke for an on-air interview on their main current affairs show. Now, Bob Hawke was a rising Labor figure - he later went on to become Prime Minister and, ironically, one of Kerry Packer's main allies — but Frank opposed Hawke and his politics, so he issued a direct veto. Hawke was not to appear on the network. Full stop.
Clyde, who by this stage was in his late 30s, had been treated, in his own words, "like a stupid, disobedient little boy" and he’d had enough. He resigned, and left for America and never reconciled with his father.

Now Clyde reinvented himself as a publisher and film producer - small scale but still successful.
Now Kerry and Clyde didn’t publicly fall out but only spoke a handful of times over the rest of their lives - and Kerry had felt that Clyde abandoned him to deal with both their father and the business on his own, which was a big burden.

By this stage, the newspapers were losing money so in June 1972, after 36 years of ownership, Sir Frank agreed to sell both the Daily Telegraph and its sister paper The Sunday Telegraph to Rupert Murdoch for $15 million AUD. Witnesses described him as crying, devastated.
But this is where Kerry started to come into his own - that August 1972 he launched Cleo, aimed at younger women, and it was an immediate success.

Sir Frank died in 1974, aged sixty-seven.
Kerry was thirty-seven. He took full control over the business - which comprised two television stations, five radio stations, nine newspapers, and a hugely profitable magazine division. Now many people in Sydney's business community genuinely doubted he could manage it.
But they were soon proven wrong because Packer had fantastic instincts.

Now what Packer understood — much earlier than most Australian television executives — was that sport wasn't just content you slotted into a schedule. Done properly, it could be the event. American networks had already started doing this. Packer, a huge sports fan, saw the same opportunity in Australia.

Starting with golf in 1975, he bought the rights to the Australian Open and spent millions upgrading the course so it would look impressive on screen. The audience followed. The ad revenue followed. Proof of concept for something much bigger: cricket.

Now I should say, like many people outside the Commonwealth, I know almost nothing about cricket. But it’s a huge sport in countries like Australia, England, India and the West Indies.
And back then it was still operating the same way it had for a hundred years. Conservative administrators, players on pocket money, five-day matches. Packer believed it was a sleeping giant. So in 1976 he offered one and a half million dollars for the television rights. ABC — the public broadcaster — had offered two hundred and ten thousand. The cricket board turned Packer down - they had a long relationship with ABC and also they didn't like Packer. Which probably wasn't surprising given one of his negotiating lines was: "Come gentlemen, there's a little bit of the whore in all of us — name your price."

Packer’s response was ruthless. He secretly recruited thirty-five of the best cricketers in the world and launched World Series Cricket. The establishment tried to ban those players from the official game. Packer took them to the High Court in London. And won.

Then he rebuilt the sport around television. Coloured clothing, day-night matches under floodlights, microphones on the pitch, one-day formats. The purists were horrified. The war lasted just two years because the cricket board ran out of money. They came to the table, and Packer walked away with a ten-year contract to run cricket's entire commercial operation. The broadcasts generated tens of millions in advertising revenue for Channel Nine, and while it marked the end of World Series Cricket, all of Packer’s initiatives or improvements that he made to the sport were kept. And for Packer this sealed his reputation not just for his super aggressive tactics but also for his vision, his business acumen - this is still widely regarded as one of the most successful moves in the history of corporate sports.

So we’re in the early 1980s and Packer found himself caught up in one of the most explosive legal investigations in Australian history. It started as an inquiry into corruption inside the Dockers Union. But once investigators started digging, they found complex tax schemes and offshore structures connected to some of Australia's wealthiest businessmen.

Then leaked documents started circulating describing a mysterious figure known only as "The Goanna" — allegedly linked to tax evasion, money laundering, drug trafficking, even murder. And because Packer was both enormously wealthy and famously private, speculation quickly landed on him.

Packer was furious. He went on the offensive — releasing an eight-thousand-word public statement declaring: "I am the Goanna," and calling the allegations "grotesque, ludicrous, and malicious." And he was proved right - by 1987 he was formally cleared. No charges were ever proven.

But the episode reinforced something he already believed: being a public company meant exposure he didn't want.

And Packer was so good at making the most of opportunities — because in 1982, while the commission was still running, the investigation had a huge negative impact on the share price, so Packer went to take it private at just $220 million. Most analysts put the actual value at $400 to $500 million. He was using the scandal to buy back his own company at roughly half price.

Shareholders were furious. But the Packer family controlled about seventy percent of the stock, and with some sharp legal manoeuvres — he got it done.

Once private, that was it. No disclosures, no shareholder meetings, no scrutiny.

Now by the mid-1980s, new media laws scrapped the limit on how many TV stations one person could own. Suddenly you could build a national network, and that triggered a bidding war.

One of the most aggressive buyers was Alan Bond — a flamboyant West Australian tycoon, national hero after Australia won the America's Cup in 1983, borrowing enormous sums everywhere. He wanted Packer's Nine Network. Best ratings, best programming, most valuable ad slots in Australia.

Packer could see the market was overheating. So he quoted Bond one billion and fifty million — double what analysts thought it was worth. Bond agreed immediately. Eight hundred million cash, the rest in preference shares.

The deal closed months before the global stock market crash of October 1987. Packer walked away with eight hundred million in cash while competitors drowned in debt.

By 1990 Bond's empire had collapsed. He couldn't service his debts, including two hundred million owed to Packer, so Packer converted those shares into a controlling stake. And because Bond had added a Brisbane station, Packer ended up with more than he'd originally sold.

Sold for a billion. Bought it back for a quarter of that. His line became legendary: "You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime and I've had mine."

Then, in October that same year, at the age of 53 while playing polo in Sydney, Packer had a massive heart attack - for context, his health was never great, being a lifelong smoker obviously didn’t help. He was clinically dead for somewhere between six and eight minutes. Ambulance officers revived him with a portable defibrillator. And as always with Packer, there’s a good quote: when asked what his experience was like, he said: "Son, I have been to the other side, and let me tell you, there's nothing there." He subsequently funded the rollout of defibrillators across the entire state ambulance fleet. They called them Packerwhackers.

He was back in the boardroom within months. And almost immediately his attention turned to Fairfax — the newspaper empire that had been his father’s great rival.

But by the start of the 1990s the company had collapsed into receivership.

For Packer, this was too good an opportunity to walk away from.

But there was a problem. Australia’s cross-media ownership laws prevented anyone who owned a major television network from owning more than fifteen percent of a newspaper group. So Packer came up with a workaround.

He assembled a consortium called Tourang.

He’d own 14.99 percent — just under the legal cap. Canadian media tycoon Conrad Black would take roughly twenty percent. An American private equity firm would take another fifteen percent. And the remaining shares would be floated on the stock market.

It looked promising but what followed turned into one of the most dramatic collapses of Packer’s career.

And the man who helped scupper it came from inside Packer’s own circle.

For more than two decades Trevor Kennedy had been one of the most trusted lieutenants in the Packer organisation. He had worked closely with both Frank and Kerry and he became Packer’s lead man and the public face of this consortium.

But the other partners in the consortium — i.e. Black and the US private equity firm — started to sideline him, override his decisions, and when Packer didn’t back him, combined with the fact that there was an awful lot of political heat building up as a result of this deal, Kennedy resigned.

You see politicians, journalists and regulators all wanted to know the same thing — whether Kerry Packer intended to control the editorial direction of the Fairfax newspapers - because legally, of course, he couldn’t.

In interviews Packer repeatedly said he would simply be a passive investor.

And then on November 4th, 1991, Packer appeared before a House of Representatives inquiry examining the takeover. And when MPs pressed him on whether he would interfere with the Sydney Morning Herald, he issued a famous challenge.

“You are either going to have to believe me, or call me a liar.”

But unbeknownst to Packer, at almost the exact same time that he laid down that ultimatum, his former key employee Trevor Kennedy sent detailed notes of his meetings with Packer to the head of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal.

And within those notes, Packer had discussed how he intended to impose discipline on Fairfax journalists and ensure the newspapers stopped being hostile to his interests.

And when those notes were made public, with his credibility seriously undermined, Packer’s consortium collapsed, and Conrad Black eventually gained control of Fairfax. And Black is another guy I’m definitely going to do an episode on.

But I wouldn’t feel too bad for Packer - he had a thick skin and brushed it off, and by 1994 his media empire, which was now called PBL, had revenues of $2.4 billion.

And then in 1995 Packer found himself in another war with Rupert Murdoch. This time over rugby league.

So for a bit of context. Pay television had just arrived in Australia and everyone believed it was the future. Murdoch had launched Foxtel. Packer was backing a rival service called Optus Vision. And for pay TV to work, you needed what the industry calls must-have content — programming people would actually pay a subscription for.

In Australia, especially in Sydney and Brisbane, that meant rugby league. And the problem for Murdoch was that Packer already controlled the free-to-air rights through the Nine Network, which meant Murdoch was effectively locked out.

So just like Packer had done with cricket, Murdoch decided he would create his own competition.

Over the Easter weekend in 1995, News Corporation executives began quietly travelling across Australia, meeting players and officials in private hotel rooms and signing them to a breakaway competition called the Super League. Players were offered contracts many times what they'd previously earned. Some who had been on sixty thousand dollars a year were suddenly handed deals worth six hundred thousand.

When Packer found out, he went into full war mode. The Nine Network set up what insiders called a war room. Packer started calling players directly and in some cases simply told them to name their price if they stayed loyal to the existing competition.

So now you had two separate rugby league competitions running at the same time. Fans were confused. Clubs were divided. Both sides were losing enormous sums of money. By the end it was estimated Packer and Murdoch had spent more than five hundred million dollars fighting each other.

Eventually both sides realised the war was destroying the very sport they were trying to control. So in 1998 they settled. The two competitions merged to form the National Rugby League. Murdoch got the pay-TV rights for Foxtel. Packer kept free-to-air broadcasts for Channel Nine.

Now some people argue that the whole affair ended up being such a waste of time and money and that they could have reached a deal at the very start if they had just agreed to meet for lunch and hammer it out. I’m not so sure.

They had a lot of mutual respect for each other - Murdoch often remarked that Packer was the only person who could "scare" him in a deal, once noting that Packer's "instinct for the jugular" made him the most formidable opponent he ever faced on his home turf. And at this time in the mid-90s, while Murdoch was number 1 in the print business, Packer was the top dog in the Australian TV sector and I don’t think he would have been open to any discussions before the rugby league thing kicked off that would have allowed Murdoch to get his foot in the door of the TV market.

While all of this was going on, Packer was looking to monetise his favourite and definitely most expensive pastime: gambling.

You see for years, Packer had been probably one of the biggest casino gamblers in the world. A former executive put it simply: "He gambles when he's bored and he gambles often because he's often bored."

And his gambling sessions have become legendary. He’d usually play blackjack, multiple hands at the same time, between $100,000 and $250,000 a hand - at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1992 he walked away with nine million dollars. In 1995, playing six simultaneous hands at $250,000 each, he took twenty million dollars out of the MGM Grand over a few days.

In 1997, again at the MGM Grand, he won somewhere between $20–$40 million - and the legend goes that he tipped the waitress who was serving him that night $1 million, because in his own words: “She brought me luck.”

And this big tipping wasn’t a once-off - he’d ask the card dealers if they had a mortgage and then tip them the exact amount of the mortgage - and he did this dozens of times.

But the story I love the most is when Packer was playing his usual high-stakes blackjack table in Las Vegas and a loud Texan oil tycoon — some versions say it was a rancher — was being obnoxious, and eventually he turned to Packer and bragged:

"Listen, pal, you've got no idea who you're dealing with. I'm a big player. I'm worth $100 million!"

Packer, who at this stage was worth $5 billion, didn't even look up from his cards. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a gold coin, and said:

"I'll flip you for it."

The Texan didn't say another word for the rest of the night.

But of course there were also huge losses. In 1999, in Crockfords Casino in London, he lost £14 million over three days. In 2000, also in Crockfords, he lost £11 million. Then he went to the Bellagio in Las Vegas and lost $33 million in three days. So overall, despite the big wins, he was actually losing more than he was winning. Which is what you'd expect. The house always wins.

So Packer decided to own the house and in 1999, PBL bought Crown Casino in Melbourne and, using his media businesses to promote it, it quickly became a huge cash cow, with revenues of $680 million by 2004.

Now as we enter the late 90s, early 2000s, Packer's health is in decline - he was a lifelong smoker, he had heart issues and he also had a kidney transplant. So of course he needed to think about succession - he had two children, a daughter Gretel and a son James, and it was James who had always been groomed to take over.

And I watched a few interviews with James Packer as part of the research for this, and while he does say that he loved and respected his father, and you can see that he did, he also talks about Kerry Packer's violent moods, which James attributes to Kerry Packer's own father Frank, who seemed to be a pretty tough and unloving character as we heard at the start of this episode.

And working for Kerry Packer was a tough assignment - executives said that he ran his boardroom like a battlefield.

Meetings could be brutal. And James often got both barrels from his father. On more than one occasion Kerry reduced James to tears during those meetings.

I suppose in Kerry Packer's mind this is the way he was brought up and it led to great financial success, so rinse and repeat, but probably not the most enlightened way - different times I guess.

Anyway, one of James' first major business moves was One.Tel.

One.Tel was a youth-oriented telco that had launched in the mid-90s. In 1999 James Packer and Rupert Murdoch’s son Lachlan — both heirs to the two biggest media dynasties in Australia — decided it was the vehicle through which they'd prove their independence from their fathers. PBL and News Corp invested a combined $400 million into the business.

But by May 2001, One.Tel had collapsed into administration with losses of roughly a billion Australian dollars. Packer was furious and came out of semi-retirement to stabilise the company. James issued a public apology to PBL shareholders. It was a humiliation.

But while One.Tel was a black mark against James, he did have successes — especially in backing PBL’s early internet ventures like ninemsn, which became a major Australian online platform, and Seek, an online classifieds platform where PBL’s $33 million investment earned them over $400 million when Seek was later sold. So with Kerry Packer’s health continuing to deteriorate, James started taking on more responsibility across the company.

Kerry Packer died from kidney failure on December 26, 2005, at his home in Sydney. He was sixty-eight. His great rival Rupert Murdoch said the following: "He was the most successful businessman of our generation. He was a man who you could truly say was larger than life."

So what to make of Packer? On the business side, he had fantastic vision. When it came to shaking up sports broadcasting and other media, he had a real feel for what the public wanted before the public even knew what they wanted — reminds me of Steve Jobs' famous line: “A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

He was ruthless, opportunistic, aggressive - all of the attributes you need to win in business.

As a person - yes, he was a bully. Even those who loved him have said that and I don’t like bullies, but at the same time, when you hear about the way he was treated by his own parents, there’s some level of understanding that his upbringing must have really affected him. On the other hand, he was a genuinely kind man, and I’m just referring to his tipping - apparently he gave tens of millions away anonymously. For all his toughness he was a very empathetic person; whenever he came across a person in need he would always help out. He was very down to earth, grounded; most of his closest friends weren’t wealthy. So yeah, a complex character, which is why he makes for such a fascinating story.

And that brings us to listeners' emails and this one comes from Matt - and Matt had suggested Kerry Packer - which was already on my list but another suggestion I got from Matt is ASML, and this blew me away - because I’d never heard of this company yet it’s the most valuable company in Europe by a large margin with a market of over $500 billion and builds the specialised "printing presses" that use light to create the world’s most advanced microchips. Excellent suggestion - thanks so much Matt.

And remember if you have any comments, any corrections or any story you'd like me to cover, email us at: info@gbspod.com

All the best folks