Rio Tinto CEO Simon Trott faces Donald Trump test over Arizona Resolution copper mine

For a room that is the world’s most recognisable, the Oval Office can disorient guests.

Its soaring 5.6m-high ceiling exaggerates the room’s size, which at 75sqm is far from expansive, given the number of important people it is required to regularly host.

The office’s four entrances connect it to different parts of the West Wing.

The door to the Cabinet room is used by White House staffers and the one to the private study is opened by few except the president.

The glass-panelled entrance on the south side opens onto the famous Rose Garden. The fourth door connects the Oval Office to the storied mural room.

When Simon Trott walked through that last door on August 19, 2025, he was still six days away from taking the reins from Jakob Stausholm as chief executive of Rio Tinto.

Stausholm was with him that day in Washington, as was BHP boss Mike Henry.

How well Donald Trump was briefed about his guests’ tenures is not known but the President’s advisers were fully aware that, despite being the most junior in the trio of mining executives, Trott was the most important visitor that day.

Stausholm was leaving Rio inside a week and rumours of Henry’s imminent departure from BHP had reached fever pitch. The White House likely understood that only Trott would be around to make good on any long-term commitments made during the meeting.

It would be another seven months before the world understood the gravity of that brisk conference in the Oval Office; the following March, Trump green-lit a huge mine in Arizona that will unlock the world’s second-biggest copper deposit.

The Resolution mine is a joint venture between Rio and BHP that has the potential to supply a quarter of America’s copper needs for the next four decades.

In March, Trump used his executive powers to transfer 1000ha of the Tonto National Forest to Resolution Copper.

Look at it from any angle and the Resolution project is a high-stakes play.

Politically, it’s do or die. The 500,000 tonnes it could yield each year will put the US on roughly equal footing with China in terms of global production.

Trump knows the more copper you have, the more electricity you control. The most erratic president in US history wants it to happen and there will be hell to pay if it doesn’t.

Culturally, it’s got baggage. The San Carlos Apache Tribe has been arguing for more than 20 years that a part of the Tonto forest called Oak Flat is a sacred site.

Traditional owners will not let an executive order deter them from disrupting the mine.

Technically, it’s challenging. At just shy of 2km underground, the deposit is a long way from the drilling rigs. Preliminary work required the digging of the world’s deepest single-lift mine shaft.

The block-caving mining technique that will be used to retrieve the mineral — in which the ore body collapses after being undercut — has rarely been tested at such depths.

Financially, it’s an unknown. A feasibility study is still on the drawing board, yet BHP and Rio have managed to spend $US2 billion ($2.8b) on the project. Completion is a good decade away.

Construction cost blow-outs are assured but an economically viable future copper price is not.

Two of the three men who shook Trump’s hand in the Oval Office last year have since resigned, so Trott is now holding the President’s baby.

Labouring under such a weight of expectation would break most, but for the chief executive of Rio Tinto — whether that person is an urbane Frenchman like Jean-Sebastien Jacques, a hippy-ish Dane like Stausholm or a Wheatbelt-bred scientist like Trott — it’s just another day in the office.

ROLLING UP HIS SLEEVES

Ego is a dirty word in modern business, but every successful chief executive has one.

Trott’s is smaller than most. It’s more accurate to say he is a man with the courage of his convictions than someone whose self-esteem needs constant bolstering.

Whereas Stausholm’s predecessor Jacques relished his dubious status as a rockstar executive, Trott understands a company the size of Rio will always be bigger than the boss.

That point was made clear to him at his first all-staff meeting as chief executive. His address was listened to by about 5000 people, which is seven times the population of the 51-year-old’s home town of Wickepin, 180km south-east of Perth.

The company-wide presentation had to be translated into dozens of languages, such is the geographic breadth of Rio’s mining operations.

The company has a presence in 34 countries and mines on every continent except Antarctica.

The tens of thousands of people under Trott’s command spend their days extracting a range of elements from the earth’s crust. Copper, aluminium, lithium, gold, silver, molybdenum and scandium are all produced by Rio, either as a primary business or a by-product.

Rio’s workforce creates half the world’s supply of borates (which are used in everything from Pyrex cookware to detergents) and a fifth of the world’s titanium oxide (a substance which whitens everything from paint to confectionery).

They manage massive herds of cattle which roam the company’s mining leases and, until relatively recently, produced diamonds, coal, uranium and talc.

Trott holds in his hands the economic futures of Guinea and Mongolia, where, respectively, the Simandou iron ore mine and the Oyu Tolgoi copper/gold operation are expected to boost the gross domestic products of those countries by between 20 and 30 per cent.

It’s an incomprehensibly diverse operation and one of Trott’s first orders of business was streamlining the business model.

He subscribes to the Kaizen management philosophy (which preaches that organisations advance faster by making small, consistent improvements than by sweeping reforms), but his first few months as chief executive were anything but incremental.

Within days of being in the job, he announced an organisational overhaul which saw the sprawling company restructured into three business units.

“Being chief executive is about dealing with short-term and near-term issues as they arise, all the while keeping your eye on the long-term strategic vision” is how he characterises the leadership of Rio.

Short and medium-term considerations include the weather (the best-laid plans can be brought undone effortlessly by cyclones in the Pilbara or torrential rain in South America); industrial relations (after decades of workplace peace in the Pilbara, trade unions are on the march); commodity price volatility (China’s state-backed iron ore buying cartel has focused on BHP but there’s nothing stopping Rio being next); and activist investors (either acting on behalf of Extinction Rebellion or those opposed to the company’s dual listing in Australia and London).

By comparison, Trott’s long-term vision for Rio is simple: four commodities arranged in three streams — aluminium and lithium, copper, and iron ore.

To successfully reshape his company, he must fight an unconscious bias towards iron ore. He understands it was his stewardship of Rio’s most important division that got him the top job.

MR FIX-IT

After spending 10 years running the company’s salt, uranium, borates and diamonds divisions, and taking on the inaugural chief commercial officer role in Singapore, Trott was brought back to Australia in 2021.

His mission was to rescue the miner’s reputation after the Juukan Gorge scandal. The destruction of the ancient rock shelters had cast a long shadow over the iron ore business which, with two-thirds of the company’s income coming from the Pilbara, Rio could ill-afford.

Trott’s five-year tenure as chief executive iron ore — a position responsible for 18 mines, close to 2000km of rail and four ports — will go down as one of the most astute leadership periods in contemporary Australian business.

He methodically rebuilt trust with traditional owners, and a furious WA Government, to the point that Rio’s social licence to operate was stronger than before the disaster.

In 2023 he oversaw the second-highest shipment volume on record, an achievement made possible in part by his successful rollout of autonomous haul trucks and the ramp-up of the Gudai-Darri mine.

The Rio board took notice.

In announcing Trott as the company’s new chief executive, chairman Dominic Barton called him “an outstanding leader with a deep understanding of mining and a track record of delivering operational excellence and creating value across our business”. In a sign of Rio’s imminent focus on day-to-day matters after a long period of putting the spotlight on governance, Barton noted that Trott and the board were “aligned that Rio Tinto’s next phase is about unlocking significant value for shareholders from our portfolio, driven by operational performance, and cost and financial discipline”.

Trott is now balancing the company’s growth agenda in copper with the need to keep the iron ore behemoth chugging along efficiently.

Guinea’s Simandou iron ore project, in which Rio holds a big stake, is promoted as a “Pilbara killer” by analysts but Trott is ensuring the Pilbara is boxing clever.

The company is investing $23 billion in WA over the next three years, with the giant Rhodes Ridge project scheduled to start producing 40 million tonnes a year around 2030.

His actions suggest Trott, whose London office is a stone’s throw away from Buckingham Palace, suffers no cultural cringe.

One of his first senior appointments was Matt Holcz, a Pilbara-bred Rio veteran, and he ensured Perth was the site for the company’s first concurrent, dual annual meeting. Trott reinforced Rio’s social licence Down Under by opening his diesel reserves for use in WA and pledging millions to boost housing in regional areas.

WEIGHT OF HIS WORDS

At a recent Bank of America conference, Trott outlined his vision for Rio under his tenure.

He made it clear he was committed to injecting simplicity into complexity.

“Since becoming CEO, my focus has been on making Rio stronger, sharper and simpler,” he told the Miami audience.

“We’ve reduced senior roles by around a fifth, and shifted decision-making and accountability close to the point of impact.

“I was talking with a team about changes they are making to a group standard that applies across our operations. They reduced that standard from 185 pages to just seven.”

Trott knows the language he uses can shift markets, so is circumspect about his turn of phrase.

Mostly.

At the same banking conference, he told a blunt anecdote about a business philosophy based on “the five Ps”.

“Preparation prevents piss-poor performance,” he explained to the crowd of conservative suits.

You can take the boy out of Wickepin . . .