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Koos Bekker was a newspaper man's son from the maize farms of Transvaal who built a $32 million bet on a Chinese startup into one of the most profitable investments in corporate history. Now he is spending part of that fortune on gardens.
The South African billionaire who led Naspers's 46.5% acquisition of Tencent in its early years — a stake worth $167 billion by 2018, when Naspers began selling down — has been quietly channelling his wealth into historic farming estates across four countries, the Financial Times reported in a recent profile. To help finance that project, a family trust linked to Bekker sold $184 million in Naspers and Prosus shares in 2024 and another $150 million in 2025, a total of $334 million directed largely at converting centuries-old properties into luxury hotels with meticulously designed grounds.
The centrepiece of that effort is The Newt, a 3,000-acre Somerset estate built around Hadspen House, a 17th-century limestone building that the Hobhouse family occupied for 200 years. When Bekker and his wife Karen acquired it, it sprawled across roughly 800 acres. Today it is nearly 4 times that size, with rooms starting at £795 per night and 40 gardening staff tending 12 distinct gardens. Bekker acknowledges the property is not yet profitable.
On May 9, The Newt will open the Great Garden Show, a nine-day horticultural festival running through May 17 that positions the estate as an educational counterpoint to the Chelsea Flower Show — the event Bekker's team spent four years sponsoring before stepping back last May.
From Tencent to topiary
The trajectory from technology investor to gentleman farmer is not the obvious one. Bekker spent 16 years as CEO of Naspers, steering what had been an ageing South African newspaper publisher into pay television and then digital investment. The Tencent stake, acquired in 2001, is the deal that defined the era: a $32 million purchase that transformed into an asset worth hundreds of billions, made Naspers the most valuable company in Africa and made Bekker, who was paid in stock options rather than a salary, a multibillionaire.
He has been non-executive chairman of Naspers and its investment arm Prosus since 2015. Naspers currently carries a market capitalisation of $40.1 billion.
Growing up on a farm, Bekker told the Financial Times he felt he had "drifted away from a connection with the soil" during his corporate years and wanted to return to it. He has done so at considerable scale. Alongside The Newt, he and Karen own Babylonstoren, a 2,600-acre wine and produce estate outside Cape Town; Over-Amstel Boerderij, a smaller farm near Amsterdam; and Vignamaggio, a villa with 1,000 acres in Tuscany currently under renovation with a summer 2027 opening planned.
Karen, formerly editor of Elle Decoration South Africa, captured the dynamic between them simply in her own FT interview: "I would have been happy with a little courtyard. But my husband, he is different. He thinks on scale."
The Chelsea chapter
The Newt was the headline sponsor of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show for four years, from 2021 through May 2025. The partnership began during the Covid pandemic after M&G Investments, Chelsea's decade-long sponsor, withdrew. Sue Biggs, then RHS chief executive, approached Bekker during that period. He initially declined, but changed his mind when the RHS kept its four gardens open during England's November 2020 lockdown while others shut their doors.
Recounting the approach to the FT, Bekker said Biggs told him: "We're in trouble, we need a sponsor and this is Covid, who is going to sponsor a stupid garden show when there is no garden show?" He said he thought the RHS's decision to keep its gardens open was admirable and committed to four years of sponsorship on that basis.
The Newt team built feature show gardens each year: bees in 2023, an Anglo-Roman villa in 2024 and, last May, a display of African succulents Bekker described to the FT as "horrendously expensive." He continues to support the London event as its official rosé and cider provider.
Land Rover has since taken on the title sponsorship, though the automaker has confirmed only a one-year contract, leaving the RHS facing fresh uncertainty. A separate initiative called Project Giving Back, funded by two anonymous donors who have bankrolled major Chelsea gardens since 2021, is also in its final year.
Chelsea itself faces headwinds beyond funding. The RHS ambassador for young people, Tayshan Hayden-Smith, resigned ahead of the 2025 show in protest of what he called the "environmental, financial and social costs of creating temporary gardens at such scale," arguing the event celebrates "spectacle over sustainability, exclusivity over equity."
Bekker is unapologetic about Chelsea's elitism. "Of course it's elitist, but so what? It lifts our expectations and ambitions. It pulls us all up," he told the FT.
The Great Garden Show
The event The Newt has designed is deliberately different in character. Tickets begin at £25 for a day pass, with annual membership at £85 and a £45 rate for local Somerset residents. Entry is free for anyone aged 16 and under. Chelsea tickets start at £96 for members and £107 for the general public.
The programme runs across nine days from May 9 to 17. Full days are dedicated to trees, ornamental plants, early career development in horticulture and plant sales. Workshops cover willow weaving, propagation and botanical watercolours. Talks address soil health and fermentation. Speakers include Alan Titchmarsh, the former host of BBC's Gardeners' World; Charles Dowding, who has built a following around "no dig" growing methods; and soil and cut-flower specialists Bridget Elworthy and Henrietta Courtauld of the Land Gardeners. There are no temporary show gardens, no judges and no BBC broadcast. The Newt can accommodate roughly 2,000 visitors a day.
"When you challenge people, you bring out the best in them, and I said OK, let's give you nine days to tell people useful things about gardening," Bekker told the FT.
What the gardens are
The Newt's grounds were designed by Italo-French architect Patrice Taravella, who told the FT he arrived at the estate to find "a dilapidated property. The gardens were no longer visible." His brief was to create spaces that celebrated the British horticultural tradition. The result includes a cottage garden, a water garden, a winter garden, a kitchen garden supplying three restaurants, a series of single-colour ornamental spaces and the Four Seasons garden, planted as recently as 2024.
The most striking feature is the Parabola garden, an egg-shaped walled enclosure on a steep slope erected by an 18th-century owner, replanted by Taravella with 330 apple cultivars trained into double-U cordons, helixes and stepovers and under-planted with strawberries and thyme. Elsewhere on the estate, a grotto and full-scale recreation of a Romano-British villa — the estate sits on an AD351 settlement discovered during construction — now serves as a museum complete with a working bathhouse. A snaking treetop walkway called the Viper leads to a garden history exhibition. The Beezantium houses a cluster of observation beehives.
British landscape designer Jinny Blom, speaking to the FT, offered a verdict that is admiring and pointed in equal measure. "They are lavishly built. I feel they sit on the edge of theme park more than garden. That said — I am glad they exist and admire Bekker's chutzpah."
Bekker himself sees something more philosophical in garden making. He told the FT it is "impractical" by nature — it does not produce food at volume like a farm, arrange plants scientifically like a botanical garden or structure space for exercise like a city park. Its appeal is precisely that it allows its makers to "play at being a little god managing lives." He said he works through business problems while pruning.
"It should hardly surprise you to learn that the scale of this project ran away with us," he told the FT. "As you can see, creating gardens brings out a certain insanity in their owners."
