Adrian Portelli is one of those self-made tycoons that has people in Australia talking. This entrepreneur from Melbourne who had a passion for luxury cars built a luxury car subscription business which is not yet a year old but has already reached a valuation of one billion dollars. Portelli is well-known across the country for the catchy media nickname “Lambo Guy” and is the founder of LMCT+ which besides being a membership rewarding platform gives out supercars, multimillion-dollar homes and big cash prizes, among other things, to its subscribers. A bold person, quite vocal and rarely out of public view, he has become almost a household celebrity besides running a successful business, appearing on prime-time television shows, collecting legal battles alongside supercars and just recently, moving his family to a UAE metropolis Dubai that generated a public discussion nationwide about wealth, taxation and generally being a good citizen of, or rather loyal to one’s country
Early Life and Education
Adrian Portelli was born on 26 January 1989 in Melbourne, Australia, and raised in the working class suburb of St Albans. His parents were Maltese immigrants, and the family’s humble beginnings gave him an early sense of what hard work looked like up close. He went to Keilor Downs College and then Victoria University, where he studied Building and Design. There are contradictory accounts over the years about whether he completed his degree or left before graduating, but what remains the same in every retelling of his story is that formal credentials were never the thing that determined his trajectory.
Portelli’s first job was working in his father’s auto repair shop as a teenager, which helped him combine his entrepreneurial spirit with a practical understanding of the auto world. He was already selling and trading wherever he saw an opportunity, the kind of restless commercial energy that tends to appear early in people who go on to build empires. Soon he was looking beyond Melbourne to a bigger stage.
Adrian Portelli Career’s
Portelli’s career took a serious turn the first time he moved to Los Angeles, where he got in on the ground floor of the tech startup scene that was reshaping the global economy in the early 2010s. He found a flatmate with the same technical ambitions and together the two created a series of mobile applications they later sold for big profits. The experience gave Portelli both the capital and the confidence. He launched Xclusive Hire in February 2013, a luxury booking platform based out of Los Angeles which connects users to high-end vehicles, yachts and hotel experiences. He then followed that with Kinekt in June 2014, building out a portfolio of platforms in the lifestyle and automotive space.
The venture that would define his public persona came with the founding of LMCT+, originally a membership-based automotive rewards platform. The structure of the model was simple but commercially powerful: subscribers paid a monthly fee, with levels ranging from about twenty dollars to one hundred dollars, in exchange for access to retail discounts from a network of merchants and entries into prize draws that included luxury cars, properties and cash prizes. But unlike a mere lottery, LMCT+ was marketed as a rewards and shopping service. This distinction allowed it to operate within the bounds of trade promotion laws in most Australian states and to generate huge commercial momentum.
Portelli had spent eight years and an estimated one hundred million dollars building the brand’s social media presence and subscriber base, and by the mid-2020s the results were extraordinary. LMCT+ had grown to over 300,000 paying subscribers across Australia with annual revenue estimates approaching $100m and EBITDA margins reported to be as high as 75%. The company gave away tens of millions of dollars in prizes each year. His large online following made live-streamed giveaway events must-see TV.
His public profile exploded when he started appearing at the auctions of The Block, the long-running Channel Nine renovation competition that attracts huge national audiences. His ostentatious and infrequent appearances in supercars with cameras already focused on him made for irresistible television. In 2022, he bought one of The Block’s renovated homes and promptly raffled it through LMCT+, a bit of circular promotional genius that generated huge coverage. He created history on the show’s Phillip Island season in 2024 when he bought all five renovated properties at auction for just over fifteen million dollars while cuddling his newborn son in his arms, making for one of the most talked about scenes in the show’s history.
However, by 2025 Portelli had a public falling out with The Block host Scott Cam and moved to Channel Seven, co-hosting My Reno Rules with veterinarian and television personality Chris Brown. The show, which first aired on 21 April 2026, was based on a competition format with teams renovating two homes that had been bought by Portelli, with a prize draw for members being touted as the biggest viewer giveaway in Australian television history. The pivot proved that his relationship with the wider media landscape was more important to him than any one platform, and he remained as commercially central on Seven as he had been on Nine.
LMCT+ had also moved beyond its digital roots, Portelli said, with the rollout of branded petrol stations offering fuel at cost price to members only, and plans for a similar supermarket. The expansion is part of a wider strategy to create a self-contained commercial ecosystem around the LMCT+ subscriber base, where loyalty is rewarded not just with prize draws but with everyday savings on essential goods.
Private Life
Portelli has two children with long-term partner Karlie Butler. They welcomed their son, Mercy, in January 2024 and their daughter, Ayla Grace Portelli, arrived in early 2026. It was a business triumph and a family milestone, as he was famously holding Mercy at the 2024 Block auction. Despite the very public nature of Butler’s professional life, she has managed to stay largely out of the spotlight, making appearances at family events but keeping a lower profile than her partner. Fatherhood has grown to influence more and more of the emotional tenor of Portelli’s public image, and he has spoken fondly and candidly about his children on social media.
He is known for an over the top lifestyle that serves as both self-expression and brand infrastructure. He has a collection of over 40 supercars, including rare hypercars and custom builds, and has staged theatrical public stunts with them, most famously when he had a three-million-dollar McLaren Senna GTR lifted into his Melbourne penthouse. He flies around in a private jet, has property in many places and lives a life that always gets press coverage. That isn’t incidental to his business model, it’s central to it.
His charity work has also received attention. He is an advocate for children with illness and adversity through the Little Legends Foundation. He has distributed over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in supermarket gift cards to South Australians and has used LMCT+ prize distributions to dramatically change the lives of individuals, including giving the winner of his five Phillip Island homes the option of either keeping the homes or taking eight million dollars tax-free cash.
Adrian Portelli Net Worth
As of 2026, Portelli is estimated to be worth between AUD 1.2 billion and AUD 1.41 billion on the latest published rankings and he is ranked fourth in the Australian Financial Review’s Young Rich List. He was first listed in 2023 with his net worth reported at AUD 1.03 billion, making him officially one of Australia’s youngest billionaires. Much of his wealth is derived from subscription revenues and the high margin prize promotion model of LMCT+, supplemented by a real estate portfolio thought to include in excess of twenty properties as well as a portfolio of luxury assets including his supercar collection. His annual earnings from LMCT+ alone are estimated to be around fifty million dollars. His scale and speed of wealth accumulation – at the age of thirty-seven – makes him one of the more striking entrepreneurial stories in recent Australian history.
Social Media
For Portelli, social media isn’t just another marketing channel – it’s the foundation upon which LMCT+ was built. He has more than 1.2 million followers on Instagram, where he posts a mix of lifestyle content, prize announcements and pointed commentary on business, politics and Australian culture. He is also active on TikTok where his giveaway reveals and confrontational opinions on regulation and taxation attract large audiences among younger demographics. The approach to content has always been spectacle and personality over polish, and the authenticity of that voice has been a huge driver of subscriber growth. He has spoken in interviews about how well-cultivated his social media assets are, with promotional spending converting at unusually high rates, a direct competitive advantage for a business that lives and dies by its member count.
Relationships
Portelli is in a long-term relationship with Karlie Butler and they have two children together. The couple aren’t married. Portelli has maintained the privacy of Butler, who is not a public figure in herself, though the birth of their children has seen her in the public eye on a number of occasions. The family moved together to Dubai in mid-2026, with Portelli saying his goal was to run his increasing international business operations from a more tax-efficient base.
Awards and Recognitions
Portelli has been publicly recognized mostly through commercial rankings rather than formal institutional awards. His biggest recognition of his business success is his listing on the AFR Young Rich List, first in 2023 and climbing since. He made history on The Block in 2024 when he bought all five Phillip Island properties in one hit at auction – something that had never been done before in the show’s history. Financial analysis has cited his company’s reported EBITDA margins and revenue trajectory and subscriber growth as remarkable by any standard in the Australian retail and promotions sector. He was also named in 2023 as the first individual buyer to purchase an entire season of Block properties, a record that garnered continued media analysis of his business model.
His biggest and ongoing controversy is the legal status of LMCT+ in South Australia. He and his company Xclusive Tech Pty Ltd were charged in December 2024 with nineteen counts of conducting unlawful lotteries. In March 2026 the company was found guilty of 10 of those counts relating to prize draws held between January 2023 and May 2024. Portelli himself pled not guilty to the individual charges against him. He has also filed a defamation suit against former South Australian minister Andrea Michaels over comments she made about his business practices, saying her remarks painted him as a man who ripped off consumers. Both legal cases are symptomatic of the broader regulatory standoff in Australia between operators of trade promotions and state-based gambling laws, a standoff the federal government’s Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 was seeking to resolve, albeit at the cost of new ministerial powers that Portelli and similar operators are watching closely.
Conclusion
Adrian Portelli’s story is one of the more vivid examples of what Australian entrepreneurship looks like in the social media era: loud, visual, legally contested and financially extraordinary. He went from his dad’s repair shop to a Dubai apartment through a Lamborghini collection, a reality TV rivalry, a billion-dollar subscription platform and a string of prize giveaways that have made him a household name for a demographic that has never watched a financial news broadcast. His August 2026 statement that Australia was “genuinely finished” under its current government sparked significant backlash, but he was clear that his ties to Australia remain deep, that the move had been planned for years and that he has even hinted at a future in politics if the country’s direction does not improve. Is it genuine ambition or clever provocation? It’s hard to say – but with Adrian Portelli, the line between the two has always been productively blurred.
