Software billionaire and high-profile climate change activist Mike Cannon-Brookes, the founder of Australian company Atlassian, is separating from his wife, Annie.
Cannon-Brookes married the American fashion designer Annie Todd in January 2010 and the pair have four children together.
A source close to the family told Guardian Australia on Saturday: “They’re both focussed on their children as their number one priority right now. They ask that their privacy is respected.”
Cannon-Brookes founded Atlassian with his university friend Scott Farquhar and, according to Forbes, is worth about $25bn.
In 2021 it was reported Cannon-Brookes and his wife had pledged to spend $1.5bn of their personal fortune by 2030 on projects to tackle the climate crisis.
In 2018, on a company blog about “impostor syndrome”, Cannon-Brookes wrote of meeting Todd at an airport in 2008.
“Ten years ago, while waiting for my flight from Sydney to San Francisco, a beautiful woman from waaaaaaay out of my league came up to me,” Cannon-Brookes wrote.
“It turned out she thought I was someone else (so in this case, I actually was an imposter!), but I desperately wanted to keep the conversation going.
“Taking a page from the ‘fake it ’till you make it’ playbook, I parleyed a case of mistaken identity into a decent first impression and a phone number.
“Today, that woman is my wife and we have four amazing children. Still, I wake up most mornings and think she’s going to say ‘Who are you, and who gave you that side of the bed? Get out!’ But she doesn’t.
“I consider myself lucky, and stretch myself to be a better partner than I otherwise might be. And I think she feels the same way.”
News of the split was first aired by Nine newspapers on Saturday and comes just over a week after Australia’s wealthiest couple, Andrew and Nicola Forrest, announced their split after more than three decades of marriage.
Cannon-Brookes’ investment arm, Grok Ventures, holds a 10% stake in Australia’s biggest corporate greenhouse gas emitter, AGL.
Last year Cannon-Brookes attempted to buy AGL outright, with a plan to rapidly decarbonise the power generator.
Through his climate solutions consultancy Boundless, Cannon-Brookes donated $1.18m to Climate 200 – a group that backed independent candidates in the 2022 federal election.
In a historic moment, six of those candidates won seats on a platform of strong and rapid action to cut Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions and to act on the climate crisis.
In May Cannon-Brookes won a financial grapple with Forrest for control of Sun Cable, a $30bn development promising to transmit solar-generated electricity from the Northern Territory to Singapore.
Earlier this year Atlassian published a guide – called Don’t F&*! The Planet – for other companies to help them make genuine efforts to quickly decarbonise their operations.
