Via Chanticleer:
Atlassian co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar are enjoying an $8 billion year.
That is how much the pair’s combined stake in the Nasdaq-listed company has surged since the start of 2018, as the stock cruised to yet another record high on Tuesday night after the announcement of their latest deal. .
On January 1, the pair’s stock was worth $8.8 billion. But after a 95 per cent surge in the value of Atlassian’s shares – including a 2 per cent pop overnight – their stake is worth a combined $17.2 billion. Atlassian is worth $29.9 billion.
Good for them. However I’m not sure why an Australian publication is celebrating it. Atlassian is Nasdaq-listed and pays no Australian tax and although its operations are here they depend upon the importation of cheap foreign labour to function. Or so says Mike Cannon-Brookes, previously from Domainfax:
What are some of the bad decisions you think we’re making as a country?
Immigration. I just feel very bad about the whole situation, personally.
Do you support a “Big Australia”?
I do. That’s where it gets politicised [Laughs]. Do we have the natural resources for a bigger population? Yes. Do we have a successful history of growing a bigger pie for everybody in Australia by immigration? Yes. Has it always been easy? No. It’s always been hard! It just feels like we’ve gotten more successful as a nation, so we’ve tried to sort of shut the door a bit more. In a weird way, it becomes racial. It’s not an economic or philosophical argument. The challenge there, too, is it requires forward planning. I was just in China for a few weeks, and again there are a lot of good things about China, and a lot of not so good things about China. It’s a complicated place, but one of the things that’s amazing is their ability to do long-term planning and stick to it…
Is it hypocritical for you and Scott to be weighing in on all these policy issues when Atlassian doesn’t pay company tax in Australia?
It’s pretty simple. It’s the job of any citizen to say when they understand things aren’t going the way they think that they should. We certainly have some viewpoints on things like immigration and energy that I believe aren’t going in the right direction as a democracy, in our country. And I’m happy to say and share my views when I think that, and debate other people who think differently…
And Scott Farquar:
Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar has warned the government’s proposed changes to modernise the visa system could stunt the growth of local tech companies, and are already causing harm, ahead of the expected release of the official report next week.
And that economic model delivers this for Australians:
In other words, Atlassian uses Australia as a special economic zone in which mass immigration of cheap foreign labour is arbitraged into massive margins and capital gains in the US while the local externalities of crush-loaded infrastructure are paid for by a public purse to which Atlassian adds nothing.
Yay.
