Tech guru Mike Cannon-Brookes buys $15.2m bachelor pad
The 585sq m apartment, which won the 2023 Master Builders Association Best Renovation award, was bought by the Cannon-Brookes family company directed by chief executive Casey Taylor and financial officer Faris Cosic.
MORE: Trump's newest project sets wild new record
It was sold by Dr Jonathan Seeff and his wife, Rachelle, who had paid $5.555m for the four-bedroom apartment that occupies the top floor of the former head office of Moran Health Care.
The building at the corner of Stanley and Palmer streets was initially redeveloped by developer duo Theo Onisforou and James Packer in the late 1990s into 18 apartments.
Cannon-Brookes, who split from wife Annie in mid-2023, enjoys a wealth of $29bn.
MORE: Trick rich are using to get $200m+ mansions
It adds to Cannon-Brookes' vast property empire worth in excess of $350m, that includes properties in Pittwater and Newport on Sydney's northern beaches, a number of homes in the southern highlands and Point Piper's Fairwater, the long-time home of media barons the Fairfaxes and at one-time Australia's most expensive house when it traded hands – to Cannon-Brookes – for $100m in 2018.
Several of those properties have been at the heart of break-up proceedings between Cannon-Brookes and his ex-wife Annie, following the couple's separation in mid-2023 after 13 years together.
The tech guru is also the owner of a $120m 'house-like' private jet, despite his climate change leanings.
MORE: Chilling reason home builds abandoned
Meanwhile, a Surry Hills warehouse conversion, formerly the Labor Club premises, has been sold for $12.4m by Dr Andrew Goy. He had been seeking a buyer for the Bourke St property since last August, originally hoping for $14m
Stephen Collins was commissioned to convert the 370sq m space into a four-bedroom, five-bathroom abode after its $2.8m purchase in 2008.
+ Additional reporting James MacSmith
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sky News AU
14 hours ago
- Sky News AU
Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar defends AI companies stealing intellectual property in trainwreck ABC interview
Co-founder of Atlassian Scott Farquhar has come under fire in a tense interview on the ABC's 7.30 program, where he was repeatedly pressed on whether AI companies should be allowed to use copyrighted material without compensating creators. Farquhar appeared on the programme to promote the economic potential of artificial intelligence ahead of next week's productivity roundtable. But the conversation with presenter Sarah Ferguson quickly turned to the growing anger among Australian artists, who argue their work is being exploited by tech giants. ABC 730 presenter Sarah Ferguson. Picture: ABC Former CEO of Atlassian Scott Farquhar. Picture: ABC Defending calls for AI companies to receive exemptions under Australia's copyright laws, Farquhar tried to argue there was a reasonable fair use exemption. 'Copyright exists to basically give artists who create something a right to almost all the uses of it, and we have a thing called fair use. AI is a broad and transformative technology,' he told the ABC. Currently, Australia lacks explicit provisions for 'fair use' in the context of AI, making the practice of scraping content for training language models legally murky. Farquhar argued this uncertainty is harming investment. 'All AI usage of mining or searching or going across data is probably illegal under Australian law. And I think that hurts a lot of investment.' Farquhar was then confronted with a hypothetical scenario involving his own intellectual property - with Ms Ferguson asking how we would feel if someone had copied the core of Atlassian to build a rival product without paying him. 'If it had been transformative, yes,' Farquhar said. 'If someone had used my intellectual property to compete with me, then I think that is an issue. If they'd used all the intellectual property of all the software on the world to help people write software better in the future, that is a fair use.' The exchange raised eyebrows, particularly given his admission that artists like Midnight Oil should not necessarily be able to block the use of their work by AI companies. When challenged that creators were not being paid, Farquhar replied that the "ABC doesn't pay people when they quote an article.' When pressed further on whether the benefits of AI outweigh the rights of individual Australian creators, Farquhar pointed back to the idea of 'fair use'. 'Like, I think there are benefits to that. We have to work out what is fair use for these AI models,' he said.
ABC News
16 hours ago
- ABC News
Australian authors challenge Productivity Commission's proposed copyright law exemption for AI
Australian authors are furious over a recent Productivity Commission (PC) interim report that says AI could deliver a $116 billion boost to Australia's economy over the next 10 years. The centrepiece of the report was a proposal to implement a text and data mining (TDM) exception to the Copyright Act, which would permit tech companies to use copyrighted work to train AI. In July, former Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar made a similar suggestion in his address to the National Press Club, arguing that a TDM exception could "unlock billions of dollars of investment in Australia". However, the PC report, Harnessing data and digital technology, has attracted strong criticism from the writing industry. Lucy Hayward, CEO of the Australian Society of Authors (ASA), said the proposal gave "a free pass" to multinational tech companies, such as Google, Meta and OpenAI, to continue using unauthorised copyrighted material to train their AI models. "Why should we create a situation where billion-dollar tech companies can profit off authors' work, but not the creators who made the work? It's an entirely absurd proposition," Hayward told ABC Arts. While the government has yet to deliver a formal response to the interim report, Arts Minister Tony Burke stated that the unauthorised use of copyrighted material for commercial purposes constituted theft. "We have copyright laws," the minister said in a speech at the 2025 BookUp conference In Sydney. Tech companies have already used unauthorised copyrighted material to train AI platforms. In March, The Atlantic published a tool that made it possible to search the LibGen database, an online trove of pirated books and academic papers that Meta used to train its generative AI language model. It followed similar revelations in 2023 that a database of pirated material known as Books3 had been used to train Meta's AI model Llama, Bloomberg's BloombergGPT and EleutherAI's GPT-J. The work of countless Australian authors appeared in the pirated databases, including Charlotte Wood, Tim Winton, Helen Garner and Richard Flanagan. A TDM exception would allow this type of use of copyrighted material without compensating the author or seeking their consent. Commissioner Stephen King, one of the report's authors, told ABC RN Breakfast that "not everyone will be a winner". "There will be people who will lose their jobs because of this technology and those people need to be looked after." Danielle Clode, the author of non-fiction titles including Koala (2022) and Killers in Eden (2011), fears writers are among those set to lose the most under the proposal. She said the report demonstrated the Productivity Commission's lack of understanding about how the arts sector operated. "The economic framework they're working with is completely unsuitable for creative industries," she said. Copyright fees are a valuable source of income for authors, who are among the lowest-paid arts workers in Australia, earning just $18,200 on average each year. "In Australia, we have a very fair and well-regulated copyright system which gives clarity to everybody who uses it," said Clode, who is also a board member of the ASA and the Copyright Agency. Wenona Byrne, the inaugural director of Writing Australia, said any watering down of copyright laws was a concern for the sector. "We think the copyright law is fit for purpose. It has sustained the industry since 1968 and has accommodated a lot of technological change in that time," she said. "We already know that writers earn very little from their creative work … We believe it's fair for writers who have spent the time creating these works, and in some cases, that's decades, to earn an income from their use." Byrne believes there will always be a readership for Australian stories, but acknowledges writing is not a sustainable career for many authors who hold down multiple jobs to pay the bills. A TDM exception would reduce authors' ability to earn income from their work and expose them to further economic precarity, she warned. "It would also disincentivise them to create the work in the first place," she said. "We need a rich culture; we need our contemporary Australian society to be reflected in a variety of works for the page and the stage. Anything that comes to disincentivise that creation is a problem for society as a whole." Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT pose another, more existential, threat to authors. "If it's the case that you're able to train these large language models on Australian content, does it mean that it's possible to produce content drawing on all of that material that then replaces work by Australian authors and then they're no longer able to produce work that earns them money?" asked Alice Grundy, a visiting fellow at ANU and the managing editor at Australia Institute Press. Grundy believes the forecast $116 billion over 10 years is not worth the harm the proposal would cause the arts industry. "That's not that much money across the whole economy," she said. She also queries the benefit of a policy that delivers benefits offshore to multinational companies over Australian artists and authors. "At what point do you say productivity is not worth as much to us as maintaining our culture, as continuing to foster our writers, our artists, our other creators?" Grundy said. "At what point do … we say that work is less important to us than some extra dollars in the economy?" Kate Kruimink, whose novel Heartsease won the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Awards Premier's Prize for Fiction, found two of her three books in the LibGen database. She said the unauthorised use of her work had not hurt her economically — yet. She suspects that will change. "The end result … is going to be that there will be a glut of AI-generated creative works on the market. "There are always going to be people who care about the human connection and who don't want the AI-created work, especially if it's being created and trained unethically. But at the same time, I think it's going to be so much harder to survive as a creative worker." Kruimink also questions the Productivity Commission's understanding of the concept of productivity. "It's not about the productivity of creative workers," she said. Geelong writer Rhett Davis, who recently published his second novel, Arborescence, said he would be reluctant to allow his work to be used to train AI when the outcome was a tool that could simulate his writing. "It seems like a strange kind of deal for me, regardless of how much they pay." He believes compensation for authors should be a basic requirement for the use of their work. "It shouldn't just be taken for free," he said. "If you're going to use something, there needs to be an agreement to pay for it. It's a pretty basic copyright principle. That is how we continue to make a living as artists." He is not alone in his view. According to a 2025 study by Macquarie University, 79 per cent of authors would refuse permission for their work to be used to train AI. Kruimink is another author who, given the choice, would "opt out" from allowing her work to train generative AI, a technology she considers "unethical". She believes generative AI undermines the meaning of creative work. "What is creative work for? It's a deeply human endeavour, and to me it's based on the principle of human exchange. The meaning of the work — my writing, for example — is not only in its consumption, it's also in its creation. If you try to cut that exchange in half, I think you remove the soul of what it is." ASA CEO Lucy Hayward pushed back against claims that copyright was a barrier to investment and innovation. "That's absolutely not the case. We know that tech and AI are booming in Australia," she said. "We're in the top five global destinations for data centres; we're a world leader in quantum computing, Amazon has just invested $20 billion in data centre infrastructure in Australia, so it's not the case that Australian copyright law, which is robust and protects creators, is hindering any kind of innovation and investment." Hayward believes the PC report overlooks the economic opportunities licensing arrangements could offer. "Instead of considering ways to legitimise this theft, why aren't we exploring ways to protect [authors'] rights and ensure that generative AI brings an opportunity to Australian creators and is not simply extracting the value of their content?" Local creatives — who contribute to the $60 billion arts industry — should not be cut out of the picture, she argues. "How can we ensure that Australian authors and illustrators who are producing Australian content for Australian audiences can enjoy the financial benefits of the AI boom when their work is vital to the development of this technology? "Do we really want to give away their intellectual property to multinational tech giants for free so they can continue to enrich themselves and continue extracting value from the Australian economy? "Or do we want to find a sensible kind of middle ground where we have generative AI tools — they're not going away; there's going to be adoption of AI tools in the workplace — but authors can be reasonably compensated for their vital contribution to the development of the tools?" Kimberlee Weatherall, a law professor at the University of Sydney and co-director of the Centre for AI, Trust and Governance, told RN Breakfast that AI developers in Australia were constrained by an uncertain regulatory environment. "If you want to do it legitimately and responsibly, there are very real challenges trying to identify who to license from," she said. "It may be simply impossible to identify all the copyright owners and get licences from them all; there's no central system for doing so, and if you want to develop AI here in Australia, even if you want to do it purely for research purposes, it's not entirely clear you could do that legitimately under copyright law." It was a situation in which "everyone loses", she said. "In an ideal world, we would try to do something very different; we would try to find a way to compromise between these different interests so that you could have local AI development responsibly with some kind of way to recognise the interests of creators." The ASA is calling for the government to reject the PC's proposal and instead implement a licensing system to compensate copyright holders for the use of their work. The organisation also wants to see the introduction of new legislation to regulate the use of AI. Writing Australia's Wenona Byrne said authors should be included in any consultation about AI regulation. "We'd like to see the tech companies working with Australian creatives — that's fundamental," she said. "We know that the work of Australian writers is of very high value and using it without their consent or remuneration is akin to theft of their copyright material. "We want to look at different ways that generative AI can compensate original creators for their work, whether that's through licensing models or royalty schemes that would see the fair and equitable treatment of the creators." The issue of AI — including the proposed TDM exemption — will be on the agenda at the first Writing Australia council meeting, scheduled for late August. "The writing industry is a $2 billion industry in Australia; it's one that we are rightly proud of, and anything that would diminish the potential for that industry to thrive is something [we] would be very concerned about."
AU Financial Review
2 days ago
- AU Financial Review
Damn dams be damned: Mike Cannon-Brookes digs, and keeps digging
The Atlassian founder's planned wildlife dam at Kangaloon in the NSW Southern Highlands has become more of a money pit.
