Gina Rinehart, the Australian mining magnate who by 2012 had become the world's richest woman with a fortune estimated at over twenty billion dollars, represented an unusual figure in the global conversation about wealth, inheritance, and the politics of resource extraction.

Her wealth derived primarily from the iron ore deposits her father Lang Hancock discovered and developed in Western Australia's Pilbara region. Rinehart had inherited his Hancock Prospecting company and transformed it, through aggressive expansion, deal-making, and a willingness to take on massive debt to develop major new projects, into an enterprise of staggering scale. The Roy Hill iron ore project, which she championed when others said the numbers wouldn't work, became one of the world's great mining developments.

In Australia, Rinehart was a polarizing figure. Her supporters credited her with entrepreneurial boldness and with generating enormous wealth and employment in a sector critical to Australia's economic relationship with China. Her critics pointed to her advocacy for lower wages and reduced worker protections — she had publicly suggested that Australians should be willing to work for wages competitive with those in Africa if they wanted mining investment — and to her use of her considerable fortune to fund political campaigns and media investments that advanced a deregulatory agenda.

She was also engaged in a prolonged and bitter family dispute with her children over the terms of a trust established by her father, a legal battle that drew extended public attention to the complications of dynastic wealth.

The designation "world's richest woman" carried different weights in different readings: achievement, inheritance, the accidents of geology, and the political economy of resource nationalism all intertwined in a story that defied simple categorization.