One Moonshot Bet Covers All the Misses

“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 twenty-first century.”

“‘When the internet started, I completely underestimated it,’ he told an interviewer in 2016. ‘Only by about 1997 did we realise, here is something really big.’21 And by then, he was the CEO of a listed company with money to allocate to new ventures.”