Mark Shuttleworth

Who Mark Shuttleworth is

Mark Shuttleworth sold an internet security company for US$575 million at twenty-six, spent twenty of those millions going to the International Space Station, and has spent the two decades since funding Ubuntu — the Linux distribution that runs a very large share of the world’s cloud servers.

He is also the reason a great many South Africans know what exchange control is, having fought the Reserve Bank to the Constitutional Court over it and lost.

Welkom to Cape Town

Shuttleworth was born on 18 September 1973 in Welkom, in the Free State. He took a Bachelor of Business Science in finance and information systems at the University of Cape Town.

The degree is worth noting. He is frequently described as a technologist, and the businesses bear that out, but the training was commercial — and the pattern of his career is less “engineer who happened to sell something” than “person who saw a market before it existed and got there first”.

Thawte: the certificate business

In 1995, while still a student, Shuttleworth founded Thawte Consulting. It issued digital certificates — the credentials that let a browser establish an encrypted, authenticated connection to a website.

The timing was the whole of it. In 1995 the commercial web barely existed, and nobody could buy anything online without a way of proving that the shop was the shop. Thawte became the second-largest certificate authority in the world after VeriSign, from Cape Town, in a market almost nobody had yet noticed was going to be compulsory.

In December 1999 he sold Thawte to VeriSign for R3.5 billion (US$575 million) — equivalent to roughly US$1.015 billion in 2024 money.

It is worth pausing on what that was, in 1999, for a South African. This was not a founder taking a stake in an acquirer and hoping. It was a very large sum of hard currency, paid to a twenty-six-year-old in a country with capital controls, four years after the end of apartheid.

What he did with it

Three things, quickly. In September 2000 he formed HBD Venture Capital, a business incubator and venture provider. In 2001 he established the Shuttleworth Foundation, funding social innovation, education and open-source software. And in March 2004 he formed Canonical, to support free-software projects and in particular Ubuntu; the Ubuntu Foundation followed in 2005 with an initial investment of US$10 million.

Ubuntu is the part with the longest tail. It is a free operating system, given away, which makes it a strange asset for a wealth index: Canonical earns from support, certification and cloud services around a product with a price of zero. Two decades on, Ubuntu is one of the most widely deployed server operating systems in existence, and Canonical remains private.

How you make money giving software away

The obvious objection to Canonical is that its main product is free, so the business model deserves setting out — particularly on a site about money.

What a company running thousands of servers actually buys is not the software. It is somebody to be accountable when the software breaks at three in the morning; a guarantee that security patches will keep arriving for a defined number of years; certification that the operating system is supported on the hardware and cloud platforms it has to run on; and a commercial licence that satisfies its own auditors. Canonical sells those. The code stays free.

That arrangement has two properties worth noticing. It is extremely sticky, because an organisation that has standardised on an operating system does not casually change it — the switching cost is measured in years of engineering. And it inverts the usual marketing problem: giving the product away is the distribution strategy, so the free users are not lost revenue but the funnel that makes the paid product worth buying.

It also explains why the fortune is hard to see. A private company earning subscription revenue from enterprises publishes nothing, and its value depends on renewal rates and contract terms that are nobody else’s business.

Twenty million dollars for eight days

On 25 April 2002 Shuttleworth launched aboard Soyuz TM-34, arranged through Space Adventures, and returned on 5 May 2002 — a total flight of 9 days, 21 hours and 25 minutes, about eight of them aboard the International Space Station. The cost was approximately US$20 million, roughly US$33 million in 2024 terms.

He was the first African in space. For an index that spends its time on share registers, it is a useful reminder that a net worth figure is a measure of capacity rather than of behaviour: the same number can sit in a family trust for thirty years or buy a seat on a rocket.

The Reserve Bank case, and why it belongs on this page

This is the episode with the most direct relevance to anyone reading this site for their own financial life.

Shuttleworth moved R2.5 billion out of South Africa. Under the exchange control regime then in force, the Reserve Bank levied an exit charge of R250 million — ten per cent. He challenged it, arguing the levy was unconstitutional, and won in the lower courts.

On 18 June 2015 the Constitutional Court reversed those rulings and found the exit charge constitutional. He lost, and the R250 million stood.

The case is the clearest statement available that South African exchange control is not a formality. Money leaving the country does so on the state’s terms, those terms have survived constitutional challenge at the highest level, and a man with the resources to litigate it for years did not prevail. The limits that apply to ordinary residents — on offshore allowances and the process for moving money abroad — sit within the same regime.

There is a second lesson in it, less about law than about sequence. The charge was levied on capital leaving, which means the cost of emigrating money is incurred at the moment of exit rather than spread over the years of earning it. Someone who has built a fortune inside an exchange-control regime has not yet paid the full price of holding it somewhere else, and the size of that unpaid price only becomes visible when they try. It is one of the reasons several fortunes on this index were restructured across borders decades before their owners needed the money — the arrangement is far cheaper to build early than to unwind late.

Shuttleworth holds dual South African and British citizenship, and has been based abroad for many years.

How Rateweb values him — and why this one is hard

Shuttleworth is one of the least tractable entries on the index, for a reason opposite to most of the difficult ones. There is no valuation puzzle about a business he is trying to sell. The puzzle is that the founding asset was converted to cash a quarter of a century ago, and everything since has been private.

What is known: a US$575 million sale in December 1999, dated and documented. What is not known: what that became. Canonical is private and does not publish accounts. HBD’s portfolio is not disclosed. The Shuttleworth Foundation has been giving money away for two decades. Twenty million went to orbit. R250 million went to the Reserve Bank.

The Sunday Times Rich List put him at £500 million in 2020. Our figure is an estimate in the same region rather than a computed valuation, and the index marks it as a fixed estimate rather than letting it sit beside live-priced holdings as though it were the same kind of number. See the methodology.

He is also the entry that most tests what this index is for. Shuttleworth is a South African by birth and citizenship whose company is British, whose product is free, and whose money left the country legally in 2015. We include him on the same basis as Natie Kirsh: the index ranks South Africans, not South African assets. Nobody should read the total at the top of it as a measure of anything domestic.

What we do not know

Canonical’s valuation, and what share of it he holds. The composition and performance of HBD’s investments. How much has been given away through the Foundation. What was retained after the Reserve Bank levy and after two decades of funding a company that gives its main product away for nothing.

That last point deserves stating plainly rather than buried: a person who has spent twenty years funding free software has been converting a fortune into something that does not appear on any balance sheet. An index like this one cannot see that, and should not pretend the number it publishes is a complete account of what someone has done with their money.

If you can sharpen any of this with a public document, tell us.