Koos Bekker Biography, Early Life, Career, Personal Life and Net Worth
Full Name:Jacobus Petrus Bekker
Date of Birth:14 December 1952 (age 71)
Place of Birth: Potchefstroom, North West, South Africa
Occupation: Chairman of Naspers
Spouse: Karen Roos
Children: 4
Jacobus Petrus “Koos” Bekker is a South African billionaire businessman who was born on December 14, 1952. He is the head of the media group Naspers. The company is traded on the London Stock Exchange and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and does business in 130 countries.
It is worth more on the stock market than any media company outside of the US, China, and India. His net worth was thought to be US$2.4 billion in July 2023.
Early Life
Koos Bekker was born in 1952 in Potchefstroom, South Africa. At 17 He went to Hoër Volkskool Heidelberg and got his law degree at Stellenbosch University and his writing degree at Wits University. He has an honours doctorate from Stellenbosch University and an MBA from Columbia Business School in New York.
Read also: Alex Iwobi Biography, Club Career, Net Worth and Honours
Career
After working in advertising for a while, he went to Columbia Business School and got his MBA in 1984. Because of a project paper, he and a few other young people started one of the first two pay TV services outside of the US. In the end, M-Net and its sister companies, like Multichoice, grew to cover 48 African countries. In the 1990s, he was one of the founders of the mobile phone company MTN.
When Bekker became CEO of Naspers in 1997, the company was one of the first to invest in the M-Net/Multichoice group. The other owners were bought out by Naspers. Naspers’ market value rose from about $1.2 billion to $45 billion during his time in office.
His pay was unique because he didn’t get a salary, bonus, or any other kind of perk for fifteen years as CEO. He was only paid with stock option grants that became real over time.
Naspers put money into pay TV, cell phones, and different internet services while Bekker was in charge. The company does business in China, India, Russia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and a number of smaller countries.
In 2020, Yunus Carrim, who used to be the South African Minister for Communications, told the Zondo Commission into State Capture that Bekker had put a lot of pressure on government officials to protect MultiChoice’s control over South Africa’s pay-TV market.
Carrim said that this was done by putting pressure on the government to stop the security features in set-top boxes from being made available to more people. MultiChoice has denied these claims, saying that Carrim stated that he knew nothing of any wrongdoing or fraud on MultiChoice’s part.
The Constitutional Court said that the government’s digital migration policy is not focused on specific players in the broadcasting industry. They also said that the policy decision to remove the ability to decrypt content from government-funded DTT set-top boxes was best for the poor and the public as a whole.
Personal Life
Bekker lives in Cape Town, South Africa, with his wife Karen Roos and their two children.
Net Worth
Koos Bekker is admired for turning Naspers, a South African newspaper company, into a major player in e-commerce and cable TV.
He was in charge when Naspers paid $34 million for a third of the Chinese Internet company Tencent Holdings in 2001. This was reportedly the biggest venture capital acquisition ever.
Naspers invested some money in two public companies in 2019: the entertainment company MultiChoice Group and the company Prosus, which has a stake in Tencent.
Naspers sold 2% of Tencent in 2018. In April 2021, Prosus sold nearly $15 billion worth of Tencent, increasing its ownership to 29%.
Bekker left his job as CEO of Naspers in March 2014 and came back as chairman in April 2015.
He’s Net Worth as of 2024 is reportedly $2.7 billion
Read also: Johann Peter Rupert Biography, Personal Life, Business Career, Interest and Controversies