Michael Cannon-Brookes is an Australian billionaire and co-founder of software company Atlassian. This year, his private investment firm Grok Ventures secured control of the Sun Cable solar project—one of the world’s biggest solar infrastructure projects—and plans to export its clean energy from Australia to Singapore via an undersea cable. As Cannon-Brookes previously told TIME: “Australia should be a complete renewable energy superpower.” Helping achieve that mission, last year Cannon-Brookes became the largest stakeholder in Australia’s biggest utility, AGL; with a current 10% stake in the country’s biggest polluter he is wielding his power to push the company to rapidly cut its emissions and transition to renewables. This includes successfully campaigning in 2022 for earlier closure dates of AGL’s two remaining coal-fired power stations by 2035.
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