Former Barrick CEO Mark Bristow. A power struggle and strategic disagreements with the company's chairman John Thornton led to Mr. Bristow's ouster, sources say.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Years of friction between Barrick Mining Corp. ABX-T chairman John Thornton and Mark Bristow, the company’s former chief executive, preceded the ouster of Mr. Bristow last week, multiple sources told The Globe and Mail.
Toronto-based Barrick on Sept. 29 said that Mr. Bristow had left the company, but it did not provide a reason.
Mr. Bristow had led Barrick since January, 2019, and was handpicked by Mr. Thornton after Barrick acquired Randgold Resources Ltd., the Africa-focused mining company founded and run by Mr. Bristow for more than two decades.
While Mr. Bristow and Mr. Thornton got on well in the early years of working together, disagreements over strategy, a mismatch of personalities and a power struggle led to a fracturing of the bond.
“The relationship between Bristow and Thornton had been frayed for a number of years,” said Pierre Lassonde, co-founder and chairman emeritus of Franco-Nevada Corp., the world’s biggest mining royalty firm, who has known and worked with both for decades.
“There was a personality clash.”
Over two decades at Randgold, Mr. Bristow burnished his reputation as a hard-charging, no-nonsense mine manager. He followed a similar path at Barrick, cutting costs aggressively, hollowing out the Toronto headquarters to a skeleton crew, and micromanaging mine operations across multiple continents. Early in his tenure, he negotiated a joint venture agreement in Nevada with rival miner Newmont Corp. at extremely favourable terms for Barrick using a period of vulnerability at Newmont to his advantage.
Mr. Bristow was also known for his big personality, proudly boasting about his track record while simultaneously bad-mouthing his competitors, once telling The Globe and Mail that Kinross Gold Corp.’s mines were cow dung.
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Mr. Thornton, a long-time investment banker at Goldman Sachs, was no shrinking violet either. While he rarely spoke to the press, and wasn’t someone to publicly denigrate a competitor, he had a powerful intellect and ego, and wasn’t afraid to show it.
Two sources familiar with the situation said that Mr. Thornton had a constant need to be seen as the smartest person in the room, a personality trait that set him on a collision course with Mr. Bristow.
The Globe and Mail is not identifying the sources because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Initially, the power structure at the top appeared to work, with Mr. Bristow acting as the public face of the company, getting stuck in on the nitty-gritty of running mines, and duking it out with pesky analysts on quarterly earnings calls. Meanwhile the jet-setting Mr. Thornton floated above the daily minutiae as the strategic guru, sitting on panels at international conferences, and only surfacing sporadically at Barrick with prepared remarks to shareholders at the annual meeting.
Barrick's Executive Chairman John Thornton speaks at the company's annual shareholders meeting in Toronto in April, 2017.Chris Helgren/Reuters
However, over time, the relationship between the two soured. Mr. Bristow’s laser focus on internal growth in lieu of mergers and acquisitions was a bone of contention. Despite doing diligence on many opportunities to buy smaller competitors over the years, Mr. Bristow would not pull the trigger.
In the meantime, Barrick’s competitors gladly filled the deal-making void, with Kinross acquiring Great Bear Resources Ltd., Kirkland Lake Gold Ltd. buying Detour Gold Corp. and Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd. then snapping up Kirkland Lake. These deals brought huge value to the acquiring companies, and sizable stock market gains, all of which was aided and abetted by a roaring bull market in gold.
A big part of Mr. Bristow’s reticence to pay up for M&A was his strong belief that mining deals should be done at no premium. In the mid- to late-2000s, companies routinely paid 30-per-cent or 40-per-cent premiums for acquisitions. The industry was later forced to take tens of billions in writedowns after the price of gold plummeted.
But with gold charging from about US$1,300 an ounce when Mr. Bristow started as CEO of Barrick to almost US$4,000 by the time he stepped down, his worries about overpaying for M&A have been proven wrong.
On more than one occasion, Mr. Lassonde tried to explain to Mr. Bristow that he wasn’t seeing the forest for the trees.
“I would say, ‘Mark, price is what you pay, value is what you get. Yes you may end up paying 20 per cent more, but if it’s worth 50 or 100 per cent more, why do you hesitate?’” Mr. Lassonde said.
“‘No, I will never pay a premium,’ was his response. So that became a dogma, and he shot himself in the foot because there were acquisitions to be made.”
Mr. Bristow’s reticence to strike on M&A also wore thin on Mr. Thornton. At an international mining conference in June last year, Mr. Thornton criticized his strategy, mining news site Miningmx reported.
“Barrick has been, in my view, very slow to say to themselves: the most important thing when you’re buying companies in the mining industry … is just buy it," Mr. Thornton said. “We have not done that. We have insisted on getting into the weeds and that has been a mistake.”
The power structure at Barrick in the early years was tipped in Mr. Thornton’s favour. While responsible for running the board of directors, as executive chair he also had latitude to essentially act as second CEO. For years, shareholders had sent signals that the executive chair role at Barrick wasn’t needed, with Mr. Thornton’s approval numbers at AGMs consistently trailing Mr. Bristow’s. In 2023, he received the lowest rating of any director, garnering 81.9-per-cent approval, while Mr. Bristow cruised to a 99.5-per-cent approval.
The sources said that Mr. Bristow seized on the discontent to increase his own power inside Barrick. A major shareholder expressed reservations to Mr. Bristow about the value Mr. Thornton brought to the company, the sources said. The investor felt that Mr. Bristow was capable of running the company by himself, and there was no need for an executive chair. Mr. Bristow subsequently obtained a letter from the shareholder outlining his concerns. The sources said this episode ratcheted up the tension between Mr. Bristow and Mr. Thornton.
Both Mr. Bristow and Mr. Thornton declined to comment for this story.
Mark Bristow, right, rings the New York Stock Exchange opening bell, on May 9, 2025. Mr. Bristow had led Barrick since January, 2019, and was handpicked by Mr. Thornton after Barrick acquired Randgold Resources Ltd.Richard Drew/The Associated Press
In February, 2024, Mr. Thornton left his position as executive chair and assumed the role of chairman, resulting in a diminution of his power, and a pay cut.
From that point, relations deteriorated further between Mr. Bristow and Mr. Thornton, the sources said, with much of the friction this time centred around Mr. Bristow’s track record.
Despite promising to wring billions in cost savings in Nevada through the joint venture with Newmont, Barrick saw its costs climb considerably. The company also struggled to hit its guidance, one of the most important metrics for any mining company. Barrick failed to meet its production forecast in 2022 and 2023, and barely met the low end of its guidance last year.
In addition, Barrick under Mr. Bristow got ensnared in a nasty geopolitical situation in Mali that ultimately led to it losing control of its Malian operation. Relations between the company and the government deteriorated to such an extent that an arrest warrant was issued for Mr. Bristow.
Meantime, a good portion of Barrick’s future growth prospects rests on putting a gigantic copper and gold mine into operation in Pakistan, a move that some shareholders have deep reservations over, given how risky a jurisdiction Pakistan is considered.
John Tumazos, an analyst with Very Independent Research, in a conference call in February pointed out to Mr. Bristow that investors had concerns about the company’s risk profile, and asked him whether Barrick should focus more on developing mines in politically safe North America instead. Mr. Bristow made it clear in his response that a fundamental change in the company’s strategy wasn’t in the cards.
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But the ultimate arbiter of Mr. Bristow’s tenure has been the poor stock performance. Barrick shares have not only widely trailed gold bullion, but have been roundly thumped by its competitors. Since Mr. Bristow took over the company in 2019, Barrick shares have returned roughly 160 per cent, compared with 315 per cent for Agnico. And Kinross, whose operations Mr. Bristow harshly criticized, has had the last laugh, with its stock returning a whopping 675 per cent.
The denouement of Mr. Bristow occurred over a weekend. Both sources said Mr. Thornton talked to him on Sat. Sept 27. The next day, the board met and voted to remove Mr. Bristow. The press release was issued early Monday morning.