Naspers

"‘So I said, all right, I’ll come, but I don’t want a salary or a bonus or a car or a medical scheme or anything like that,’ Bekker told an interviewer later in life.8 The job on offer was Vosloo’s, as CEO of Naspers. The starting date was 1 October 1997."

"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."

"Gorilla in the Room: Koos Bekker and the rise and rise of Naspers,"

"When he retired as CEO seventeen years later, congratulations were certainly in order. Naspers had grown from its R6 billion market cap to more than R530 billion. And Bekker held nearly 16,4 million shares worth more than R1 000 each. An impressive haul, comfortably making him a dollar billionaire."

"One of my major mistakes was that I was in too much of a hurry to try other ventures and didn’t pay enough attention to Iceland’s problems. I was trying to lay as many bets as I could while the plentiful supply of surplus capital lasted. But I had lost focus and was involved in too many things. I sold Bulgarian telecoms group BTC but then, before I had finished a project with Finnish telecoms firm Elisa, I was engrossed in the Actavis leveraged buy-out. Before completing my ill-fated investment in Amer Sports, I made a derivative bet on Allianz, with an even worse outcome. And I also negotiated a complex deal to come to the rescue of the beleaguered Polish owners of QXL, an early online auction competitor to eBay that had run into trouble. The company then recovered, with its shares rising a staggering 1,260 per cent in 2005, making it the year’s best performing stock on the London Stock Exchange. We then sold it to Naspers, a subsidiary of a South African media group. The problem was that I couldn’t handle the pitch or the speed because there were so many things going on. My focus was always on doing the next deal, restructuring and rejigging something I already had, and not so much on the oversight, which is an important check and balance. I was not good at that. I’m always more interested in creating something new. I had lost my ability to focus, something that had served me so well in Russia, and which is essential for an investor looking after his money."