Koos Bekker

Who Koos Bekker is

Koos Bekker is the chairman of Naspers and Prosus, and the man responsible for what is probably the single best investment ever made by a South African company. He is also the only person on this index whose fortune was built almost entirely out of share options rather than salary, inheritance or a founding stake — which makes his entry unusually clean to reason about and unusually easy to get wrong.

His net worth was estimated at US$2.9 billion as of January 2025.

Potchefstroom, Stellenbosch, Columbia

Bekker was born on 14 December 1952 in Potchefstroom. He took degrees in law and literature at Stellenbosch, a further law degree at Wits, and then an MBA at Columbia Business School, graduating in 1984.

The Columbia MBA is not a throwaway line on this CV. A project paper he worked on there — on the economics of subscription television — became the plan for M-Net, which he and colleagues launched as one of the first two pay-television services anywhere outside the United States.

In the 1990s he was also a founding director of MTN, the mobile operator that went on to become Africa's largest. Two businesses that reshaped South African media and telecommunications, before the thing he is actually famous for.

Both were the same bet in different clothes. Broadcast television and fixed-line telephony in South Africa were state-run monopolies that treated the viewer or the caller as a licence-fee payer — a citizen to be served, at a price set administratively, with no alternative. Pay television and mobile telephony proposed something different: that people would voluntarily hand over a monthly sum for a service they had previously been given, or denied, by the state. In a country where most households had little disposable income, that was a genuinely contested proposition rather than an obvious one.

Subscription businesses also have a property that a young executive with option-based pay would appreciate sooner than most. They compound. A subscriber acquired this year keeps paying next year, and the year after, so the value of the company is not this year's revenue but the discounted stream of everything that customer does afterwards. That is the same arithmetic that makes an early internet holding worth keeping for twenty years, and Bekker had internalised it long before 2001.

Fifteen years, no salary

Bekker became chief executive of Naspers in 1997. For fifteen years in the job he earned no salary, no bonus and no perks. He was compensated solely through grants of stock options.

It is worth pausing on how unusual that is, and on what it actually means.

A salaried chief executive is paid whether the share price rises or falls. Options pay nothing unless it rises, and pay spectacularly if it rises a great deal. Bekker took a position in which fifteen years of work was worth precisely zero unless Naspers became dramatically more valuable — and then took decisions, most notably one in 2001, that only a person with that payoff structure would rationally take.

Whether the arrangement was wise for shareholders is a fair question and was argued about at the time; the options were eventually worth a great deal. What is not arguable is that the incentive and the outcome were pointed in the same direction, which is more than can be said for most executive pay.

May 2001: thirty-two million dollars

In May 2001, Naspers bought 46.5 per cent of the Chinese internet company Tencent for an initial investment of US$32 million.

Tencent at the time was a small Shenzhen messaging company. It became the owner of WeChat, one of the largest video-game businesses on earth, and for a period one of the most valuable companies in the world. The stake bought for thirty-two million dollars came to be worth, at points, more than a hundred billion.

Almost every account of this stops at the return, which is the least interesting part. Three things about it are worth more attention.

First, it was made from Johannesburg, by a media company with no particular expertise in Chinese consumer software, at a moment when the dot-com crash had just made every board on earth risk-averse about internet assets.

Second, Naspers held it. A great many investors have found a hundred-bagger; almost none sit through two decades of volatility, regulatory scares and repeated pressure to crystallise the gain. The holding was the achievement, not the entry.

Third, it eventually became a problem — which is the part that explains the group's corporate structure today.

The discount, and the machinery built to fix it

By the late 2010s Naspers had a peculiar difficulty: it was worth substantially less than the Tencent shares it owned. The market was pricing the whole company below the value of one of its assets.

Part of the reason was mechanical. Naspers had grown so large on the JSE that South African institutional investors bumped against mandate limits on how much of a single stock they could hold — forced sellers, not unwilling ones. A local exchange could no longer carry a company that size.

The response was to move the asset closer to the money. In September 2019 Naspers listed its global internet investment business on Euronext Amsterdam as Prosus, with a secondary inward listing on the JSE. In August 2021 a share swap reduced Naspers' stake in Prosus to 56.92% and gave Prosus roughly 49% of its own parent — a cross-holding explicitly intended to narrow the valuation gap between the two.

Prosus has since sold Tencent shares down over time, partly to fund buybacks; it held 22.996% as of 17 July 2025. Readers will find several different Tencent percentages quoted in different places, and they are not all wrong — the stake has been reduced repeatedly. Always check the date attached to the number.

The one-asset problem

Strip the group back and a single question governs it: what is Naspers, and what is Prosus, other than a way to own Tencent?

The honest answer is that the group has spent two decades and a great deal of money trying to make the answer be “quite a lot”. Proceeds from selling down Tencent shares have been recycled into other internet businesses — classifieds, food delivery, payments, education — precisely so that the group is not one holding wearing a corporate structure.

The persistent discount is the market's verdict on how that has gone so far. When a company trades below the value of one of its assets, investors are saying they would rather own the asset directly than pay management to own it for them, and that everything else on the balance sheet is worth less than nothing to them. That judgement may be unfair, and the group argues it is. It has nonetheless been remarkably durable, and it survived both the Amsterdam listing and the cross-holding built to address it.

For a reader of this index the implication is narrower but sharper. Whatever the group does, Bekker's fortune remains a leveraged bet on one Chinese technology company, transmitted through two listed vehicles that own large pieces of each other. Beijing's regulatory posture towards gaming and messaging platforms has moved this number more than any decision taken in Cape Town has.

Chairman, not chief executive

Bekker stepped back from the chief executive role and now chairs both Naspers and Prosus. He is known for taking long sabbaticals and for a deliberately low public profile — he gives few interviews and does not court the press in the way some of his contemporaries on this index do.

How Rateweb values him

Bekker's position is, in principle, among the more tractable on this index: option grants and director shareholdings in a JSE-listed company are disclosed, and Naspers is one of the twelve companies for which we hold a market capitalisation, so the listed portion can be revalued rather than asserted.

The complications are real, though. Options exercised over fifteen years may since have been sold, diversified or given away, and none of that is public. The Naspers/Prosus cross-holding means a naive calculation can double-count the same underlying Tencent exposure through two different listed vehicles. And a fortune this concentrated in one asset moves hard: a bad quarter for Chinese technology regulation is a bad quarter for this entry.

Our figure sits somewhat above the US$2.9 billion reported in January 2025. We note the difference rather than quietly reconcile to it — see the methodology — and the confidence rating reflects how much of the private side we cannot see.

What we do not know

What he did with the proceeds. Bekker's private investments, property and philanthropy are not disclosed in any form we can value, and he has never been a man who explains himself in public. We do not know how much of the option wealth was sold along the way, nor where it went.

What we do know is dated and checkable: the pay structure, the thirty-two million dollars, the month it was spent, the percentage it bought, and the corporate machinery built afterwards to deal with the consequences of it working.

If you can sharpen this with a public disclosure, tell us.