AFR
Rob Luciano goes all Barbra Streisand
Mark Di StefanoReporter
Updated Jul 26, 2023 – 5.40pm, first published at 5.18pm
In 2005, tech blogger Mike Masnick came up with the concept of “The Streisand Effect”.
He was riffing off an incident that happened in the early internet, whereby Barbra Streisand tried to get a photo of her house removed online. Her lawsuit against an environmentalist photographer backfired, drawing online hordes to gawk at her massive coastal home.
The point is: Trying to erase something online will often rebound and whack you in the face with more attention than you would prefer.
VGI’s Rob Luciano. James Brickwood
Late last year, a Wikipedia page was written into existence for the highly self-regarded Rob Luciano, one of Australia’s most talked about fund managers. Luciano’s ASX-listed VGI Partners had successfully merged with Phil King’s Regal Funds Management to create Regal Partners months earlier.
The move was seemingly about freeing him up from the boring administrative and management work that comes with running a fund. As Luciano told this newspaper’s Chanticleer column at the time, fund manager founders can get “dragged into everything but investing”.
Despite all this new-found investment capacity, Luciano announced last month he was going on a three-month “sabbatical”. He handed over the reins of the VG1 portfolio to his lieutenants Marco Anselmi and Simon Birrell, likely scooting off to the European summer with the rest of Australia.
Two weeks ago, Luciano’s Wikipedia page sprung to life. An enterprising editor took a whipper snipper to the entry, pruning large sections off the Luciano life story.
Not only were the references to his abrasive management style and somewhat paranoid foibles, such as installing a panic room in his office and travelling with bodyguards, disappeared. So was a reference to a 2021 article about alleged tree vandalism to large eucalypts outside his Mosman mansion in Sydney.
It was an edit operation that went across several days. Gone were references to his $5 million investment in his brother-in-law Jonathan Cook’s micro-cap business and some criticism from activist investors for his returns. Even a reference that his VGI Partners was apparently co-founded with his sister-in-law Abbey Cook was sheared off.
Luciano’s hagiographer was anonymous. But alas they could not hide their IP address. That address points back to a domain owned by VGI. Oh, Roberto.
You could just imagine it. Luciano holed up in a beachside pied-à-terre, somewhere on the Adriatic, while wiki-minions back on Phillip Street got to work. The Luciano underlings may have contacted the boss and got an OOO announcement that he was on “sabbatical”. You’d truly hate to see it.
The bad news for Luciano was the edits didn’t last long. An industrious Wikipedia moderator seemingly smelled a rat, reverting all the changes a few weeks later.
Perhaps the editor-at-large should have taken a page out of ex-MP for Wentworth Dave Sharma’s book. Rather than hacking directly at the copy and potentially falling afoul of the website’s conflict-of-interest rules, Sharma successfully went to Wikipedia’s Biography of Living Persons noticeboard to have changes made.
There’s a helpful lesson here for Australia’s self-image-conscious class. Maybe it’s best not to have parts of your life story erased. You’ll just bring more attention to the unflattering details. You also risk coming across as a diva.
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