BOOK EXCERPT: ‘Koos Bekker’s Billions’ – TJ Strydom delves into a private billionaire’s life, career and business decisions

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What did a boy who grew up on a mealie farm do to build such a fortune? Read an excerpt from Koos Bekker’s Billions:

Under Koos Bekker, Naspers made several bad investments, a few mediocre ones, a few good ones … and one that shot the lights out. A modest bet on Chinese technology startup Tencent changed Bekker’s destiny. Was this genius, strategy or just plain old good luck?Reuters, the Sunday Times, Financial Mail. His unauthorised biography of Christo Wiese scaled the bestseller lists in both English and Afrikaans.

More likely the young man just grasped early on how to put the best spin on results when delivering an annual report to stakeholders. And he was not wrong about the imminent death of the drive-in … movie magic would find a new parking spot in the decades that followed. In this case, it turned out to be a stake worth a tidy sum half a century later. Page to a footnote below the chair’s remuneration for 2020 in the Naspers annual report, and the fine print reads: ‘Koos Bekker elected to donate the rand equivalent of his director’s fees, being R2,1m , to education. This year the recipient was the Hoër Volkskool in Heidelberg.’‘I’m not convinced that great wealth is really correlated to happiness,’ Bekker told a room of MBA graduates in the Netherlands in 2014.

‘Beyond a certain point, money is pretty pointless and certainly not worth devoting your life to,’ he added. In the meantime he married Karen, who became one of the nation’s first television presenters. By the early 1980s, with South Africa descending into violence in apartheid’s deadly final decade, they had decided to leave the country.

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