By admin 
Australia’s fourth richest person will officially move to the US with his family after being given the honorary title of colonel in a US state.
Billionaire cardboard box magnate Anthony Pratt, 64, whose $23.3 billion fortune also ranks him among the 250 richest people in the world, has started using the honorific on his social media and it even appears on his Wikipedia article.
But despite a years-long friendship with the president-elect, during which he was reportedly once given U.S. nuclear secrets, it wasn’t Trump who gave him the title, but rather Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear.
Pratt was named a non-military colonel by Beshear after donating $1 billion for a new recycled paper mill in the Bluegrass State, which was heralded as the greenest in the world.
The 450,000-square-foot facility located in Henderson, two hours north of Nashville, was touted as one of the key projects in relaunching the U.S. as a domestic manufacturing powerhouse.
At the opening of the facility on September 14 last year, Pratt and Beshear were joined by Lonnie Ali, the widow of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, a native of Louisville, Kentucky.
And the 750 guests were served a KFC banquet, courtesy of perhaps the state’s most famous colonel, one Harland Sanders.
On LinkedIn last week, Colonel Pratt revealed that he had been granted a green card for permanent residence in the US and would be moving there with his family after spending most of his time there in recent years.
Colonel Anthony Pratt and sister Heloise Pratt attend the 2023 Met Gala in New York
Pratt has been given the honorary title of non-military colonel by the US state of Kentucky
Pratt said his company, known as Visy in Australia and New Zealand and Pratt Industries in the US, has built a significant footprint in America since the early 1990s, investing in 70 factories and creating 12,000 jobs.
“We decided it was time to live in America because my family are all American citizens,” said Pratt.
“I will continue to chair Visy Australia and return to Australia regularly.”
Pratt was an outspoken supporter of Trump during his previous presidency, praising him on what was formerly Twitter and taking out full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal.
In 2017, he joined Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida for nearly half a million dollars. the two become friends.
“The most important thing about being a member,” Pratt told an Australian gathering, according to The Australian Jewish News.
“Is it that I see President Trump two or three times a year, and each time I tell him about our manufacturing activities?
“My early support resonated with Trump, who takes things very personally, and he remembers it.”
Donald Trump befriended Pratt after joining his exclusive Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in 2017 (the pair are pictured at the opening of Pratt Paper Plant in Ohio in 2019)
Pratt claimed that Trump’s tax cuts and corporate write-off initiatives have encouraged him to invest and create jobs.
His company has built six of the last eight paper mills in the U.S., and the Henderson plant will be joined by a cardboard box plant in 2026, providing another job boost for an estimated 30,000 residents.
That said, Pratt has also praised incumbent President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act for being a “game changer” for regional centers like Henderson, which have been hit by the “core-out of American manufacturing” and off- shoring of industries. to places like China.
In 2023, America’s ABC News reported that Trump had discussed sensitive national security issues with Pratt shortly after leaving office.
It alleged that Pratt shared the information, allegedly about the U.S. fleet of nuclear submarines and how close they can get to Russian submarines, with about 45 people.
Trump vehemently denied the reports and labeled Pratt a “red-headed weirdo from Australia” in a post on his social media site Truth Social.
The Australian billionaire made quite an entrance at this year’s Met Gala event in a bright pink coat
“I never talked to him about submarines, but I did talk to him about creating jobs in Ohio and Pennsylvania because that’s what I care about: JOBS, A GREAT ECONOMY, LOW TAXES, NO INFLATION, ENERGY DOMINANCE, STRONG BORDERS, NO ENDLESS WARS, LOW INTEREST RATES and much more!’, Trump wrote on his own in October 2023 social networking platform TruthSocial.
Pratt was later interviewed by US law enforcement authorities Bloomberg.
The billionaire’s move to the US comes after Trump’s victory in the presidential race against Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris.
The stock market soared following the news, with two of America’s three major stock indexes hitting record highs.
A sweeping Trump victory has led to bets on a business-friendly agenda, with expectations of lower corporate taxes and looser regulations.