James and the Giant Breach

Fighting the shadow of his late father, once Australia’s richest man, casino mogul James Packer is facing his third financial crisis. Even more public has been the meltdown of his planned third marriage, to Mariah Carey

- William D. Cohan

He’s the biggest fish there by a mile. He’s like royalty,” says a longtime friend of Australian billionaire James Packer. But when you cut through all the bravado that comes with being the only son of the late Kerry Packer, Australia’s larger than-life media mogul and once the richest man in his country, it’s hard not to feel a little bit sorry for James.

Last year turned out to be another very rough time for him. “His self esteem is the net present value of his assets,” another friend once observed.

As 2016 ended, Packer was spending a lot of time holed up at Ellerstina, his spectacular polo ranch outside of Buenos Aires, licking his wounds, far from the Hollywood limelight he has recently sought so assiduously. (He is one of the three partners, along with director and man-about-town Brett Ratner and Steven Mnuchin—Donald Trump’s pick to be the new Treasury secretary—in RatPac-Dune Entertainment, the film-financing entity behind such hits as Mad Max: Fury Road and American Sniper.) As he fights to salvage his reputation and his love life, and tries to weather a bout of intense and unpredictable risk to his business empire, James has gone silent with the press. In past moments of crisis, according to Packer’s longtime friend, he could barely function, ate poorly, put on weight, and sought to sell whatever assets he had in order to stay afloat. “He [became] catatonic,” says this friend. “You wouldn’t recognize him as a human being.”