How Koos Bekker made his billions

If I were a rich man
Ya ba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum
All day long, I’d biddy biddy bum
If I were a wealthy man.

I am not sure about all the dibba, dibba duming, but like most of us it is fun to dream of life as a billionaire, as these lyrics from Fiddler on the Roof suggest.

As a kid, my own wish list was headed by a free vending machine dispensing fruit gums 24 hours a day. To the relief of my dentist, I never won any jackpots, and that never materialised.

However, there will always be a fascination with the very, very rich, as is seen in recent British debates about lifting limits on bankers’ bonuses — and the successful backlash against the Truss government’s plans to scrap the 45% tax threshold for the very well off.

Here in SA, the issue of a wealth tax is constantly bubbling below the surface, which is hardly surprising in a country with such extremes of inequality and no shortage of populist politicians.

Koos Bekker, the subject of this impressively researched and written biography by TJ Strydom, is an excellent candidate for envy, having made an extensive fortune in pay TV and mobile communications and then in the media conglomerate Naspers, which he transformed.

“Something happened between 1970 and 2020. Bekker dabbled in media and investments and made himself billions. But how? What did a boy who grew up on a mealie farm do to build such a fortune?” the author questions, before providing an extensive analysis of this remarkable entrepreneur and his  business triumphs (and failures).

He notes that in January 2022, Forbes estimated Bekker’s fortune at $2.8bn, “and ranked him the 1,008th richest person in the world”.

Some luck, a lot of vision and judgment propelled this very Afrikaner boitjie from the residences of Stellenbosch University to a club I would love to be able to join — owning a Cape wine farm, Babylonstoren.

“During his tenure, Naspers made a number of bad investments, a few mediocre ones, a few good ones and one that shot the lights out. The stake Bekker and his team bought in 2001 in the Chinese technology firm Tencent outperformed everything else and was one of the best technology investments of the 21st century,” Strydom suggests, referring to the deal of a lifetime that transformed the fortunes of both Bekker and Naspers.

How was a company executive, however senior, able to reap such a gargantuan reward from the company he headed? The secret lay in his canny, genius, remuneration agreement, as Strydom explains: “Thanks to his initial deal with [Naspers], Bekker was in a position to reap the full reward. He got paid not as a regular CEO but as an entrepreneur.”

As well as an extensive — often a little too extensive — analysis of the complex share structure of Naspers that was framed as a defence against predators, the book also looks at the rather uncomfortable history of Naspers, which was born out of Afrikanerdom, as Strydom writes: “Founded in 1915 to publish the Cape Town daily De Burger (later Die Burger), Nasionale Pers (which became Naspers) was one leg of the spider that was Afrikaner nationalism. Another was the NP, established only a year earlier by JBM Hertzog as a counterpoint to the governing South African Party, which was loyal to the British Empire.”

Koos Bekker’s Billions will delight those who are interested in such a cosmically successful career, which first advanced through satellite TV and MultiChoice, involved a key role in the founding of MTN, and then several years (with a few sabbaticals) as CEO of Naspers, where “he would mould a traditional print media group into what could best be described as a Sun City slot machine — an apparatus for winning big. Some, perhaps kinder, commentators would call it a venture capital business or a tech investment company.”

However, it is correct to dwell on that transformative deal when Naspers invested in Tencent, because this created the most wealth for Naspers and its canny CEO, who ensured his share-based remuneration would provide him with loads and then more loads of money.

“The JSE’s two standout successes after the global financial crisis were the no-frills bank Capitec and, of course, Naspers. Between 2008 and 2018, Capitec’s market cap grew from about R3bn to more than R100bn. Naspers ballooned from R60bn to more than R1,200bn in the same period. Capitec’s success was a local story ... by contrast, Naspers was all China,” Strydom writes.  

The book also chronicles the latest corporate changes, with Naspers listing its international investments through a subsidiary, Prosus, a consumer technology and internet group that is headquartered in Amsterdam. It also looks at recent setbacks to the Prosus portfolio, among them Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which has led to a huge writedown in the value of assets in that ravaged country.

But what of Bekker, the man?

We learn a bit about this business person, who has worked hard to preserve some privacy despite “white men in their sixties raking in billions [becoming] a source of both intense fascination and severe criticism, spawning a number of best-selling books and pushing loaded tags such as ‘white monopoly capital’ and ‘Stellenbosch Mafia’ into the public discourse”.

We are told that Bekker, as well as owning his Paarl wine farm “has impressive homes in Cape Town and Amsterdam. In 2013, he added a stately manor in the Cotswolds, 200km southeast of London, to his property portfolio. The SA billionaire scooped up Hadspen House and rejigged it into The Newt, a luxury destination that is the stuff of high-end lifestyle magazines.”

I chuckled to read of a wine farm owner naming one of his houses The Newt even if some of the temperance fanatics in our government might be pissed by the choice.

It might have been inappropriate in this business-focused book to dwell on how Bekker spends his cash, but a few titbits might have lightened it a bit. Does he have a magnificent wine cellar, a fleet of luxury cars, a private jet and some high-end art? Or is he like the late Queen Elizabeth II, pouring his breakfast high-fibre cereal from a Tupperware container, a model of frugality and financial prudence?

We may never know the intimate personal details, but Strydom has done a first-class job with his enthralling business-focused biography.