Gina Rinehart made her fortune digging iron ore out of the ground in Western Australia. These days, she is looking up.
The 72-year-old mining magnate and her firm, Hancock Prospecting, bought a $1.37 billion stake in SpaceX during the second quarter, according to a Friday filing. That makes Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company her single largest US investment.
The purchase works out to 8 million shares. Rinehart confirmed in June that she was backing the company, calling it "a significant investment" tied to its June 12 IPO, though she did not reveal the size at the time.
Now the market knows the scale. Her stake in Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally known, sits at the top of a portfolio that is getting a lot more aggressive.
SpaceX is not the only thing she bought. Rinehart also poured several hundred million dollars into other US stocks, including about $260 million in S&P 500 exchange-traded funds by the end of the quarter.
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She also added to positions in defense and energy companies and doubled her holding in Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., the company founded by President Donald Trump.
All told, her US-traded securities hit $5.71 billion on June 30. That is a 72% jump from the prior quarter, a sign she is putting more money to work in American markets even as she keeps a low profile about it.
Hancock Prospecting has to report these holdings because their combined value tops $100 million. As of June 30, the firm held 42 securities, mostly in mining, energy, technology, and defense, along with the ETFs.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index puts Rinehart's net worth at $32.4 billion, a fortune she built on huge iron ore mines in Western Australia. But her recent moves go beyond business.
She has become more visible in Washington and at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Florida resort. Back home in Australia, she supports the right-wing One Nation party and once gave a private jet to party leader Pauline Hanson.
Her political leanings are no secret, and her investment in Trump Media fits a pattern of backing her convictions with cash. But the bigger story for everyday investors is simpler: a seasoned billionaire is betting big on space, defense, and American stocks.
You probably cannot buy 8 million shares of anything, and you do not need to. But Rinehart's playbook is worth understanding because it mirrors what most financial advisors tell regular people to do anyway.
She owns a diversified mix of sectors, leans on broad index funds for part of the portfolio, and takes a few concentrated bets on companies she believes in. The space industry, in particular, is still young, and her bet suggests she thinks the growth story is just getting started.
Whether she is right about any single stock is anyone's guess. But when one of the world's richest people moves this much money around, it is a reminder that even the biggest fortunes still come down to a few basic choices: what to own, how much to pay for it, and how long to hold on.
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