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

  • 📰 dailymaverick
  • ⏱ Reading Time:
  • 57 sec. here
  • 2 min. at publisher
  • 📊 Quality Score:
  • News: 26%
  • Publisher: 84%

Nigeria News News

Nigeria Nigeria Latest News,Nigeria Nigeria Headlines

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.

 

Thank you for your comment. Your comment will be published after being reviewed.
Please try again later.

I was scammed through Bitcoin couple of months ago, I started hating Bitcoin until I was introduced to Allison_Grillo, and I gave Bitcoin trading another try, I successfully withdrew $35,000 after two weeks of trading, am so grateful Allison_Grillo thank you

I really appreciate allison_grillo effort for turning my little investment of R8000 i got a big smile on my face after withdrawing R80,000 as my profit i just want to make everyone know of allison_grillo and how she has helped me through tough times

Being the head of the home isn't easy, you are expected to provide for the home, I lost my job during the pandemic and relied on the little money I had,things were hard until I met JamesAlderson0 and started Bitcoin trading, I earned R800,000 in 3 weeks thanks JamesAlderson0

By exploiting the working class?

We have summarized this news so that you can read it quickly. If you are interested in the news, you can read the full text here. Read more:

 /  🏆 3. in NG

Nigeria Nigeria Latest News, Nigeria Nigeria Headlines