City profiles

Drew Houston

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston “famously turned down Steve Jobs” when the late Apple boss offered to acquire his file-sharing company, say Steve Kovach and Kara Chin on Business Insider. “Jobs not so subtly implied that he’d have to put Dropbox out of business instead.” Houston, 35, is “probably feeling pretty good about rejecting the tech legend”: after successfully floating the company last week, “he’s now a billionaire a few times over”. Founded in 2007, Dropbox is the first of the so-called tech unicorns – companies valued over $1bn – to go public this year. Dropbox’s positive reception in the market (the stock popped by over 35%, valuing it at $11.03bn), in the week of the Facebook data scandal, will certainly hearten the unicorns set to follow suit.

James Packer

“The last two years have been a horror period” for the Australian billionaire James Packer, “both personally and professionally”, says Anne Davies in The Guardian. Now he has stepped down as director of his casino empire, Crown Resorts, citing “mental health reasons”. A colourful globetrotter whose late media mogul father, Kerry, was once Australia’s richest man, Packer, 50, has faced a host of problems relating to Crown – the largest listed casino operator outside China, in which he holds a 47% stake. The tycoon, who was once engaged to singer Mariah Carey, has also been embroiled in a corruption investigation involving Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu. Last week, he checked into a $35,000-perweek private hospital in Boston. He plans “to step back from all commitments”.