South African billionaire Koos Bekker loses $500 million as Naspers and Prosus slide 24% this year

Koos Bekker has lost approximately $500 million this year as shares in Naspers and its Amsterdam-listed subsidiary Prosus slid more than 24%, dragging the South African media billionaire's net worth from a January high of $4 billion to $3.5 billion, according to Forbes data.

The decline has reshuffled South Africa's rich list. Patrice Motsepe, whose mining and investment portfolio has held up better through the year's market volatility, has regained ground on Bekker as the gap between the 2 men narrowed on the back of the tech-driven slide.

Bekker held approximately 0.93% of Naspers, representing about 1.69 million shares, and 0.76% of Prosus, equivalent to about 19.65 million shares, at the time of the most recent disclosures. As both stocks fell, the dollar value of those stakes declined in tandem. Naspers's JSE market capitalisation has dropped to approximately $42 billion, while Prosus in Amsterdam stands at approximately $110 billion, both down sharply from the levels at which Bekker's wealth briefly touched $4 billion in January.

What's driving the decline

Naspers and Prosus are not operationally identical companies, but they move together because one owns most of the other. Naspers holds approximately 57% of Prosus, and Prosus's most important asset is a stake of roughly 25% in Tencent, the Chinese social media and gaming conglomerate. When Tencent moves, Naspers and Prosus move with it. And Tencent, which spent much of 2020 and 2021 at peak valuations before Chinese regulatory pressure and global tech sector sentiment deflated it, has not returned to those highs.

The 24% year-to-date slide in both stocks reflects a combination of factors: continued investor caution about the China tech regulatory environment, the global technology sector's sensitivity to rising interest rate expectations and growth downgrades, and a structural discount that Naspers and Prosus have carried for years because of the complexity of their dual-listed structure. The discount, meaning both stocks trade at a significant discount to the value of the Tencent stake they hold, has been a persistent frustration for Bekker and Naspers management, who have tried various corporate restructuring moves to close it.

None of those moves has permanently resolved the gap, and in a year when the underlying Tencent stake itself is under pressure, the discount compounds the damage.

What Bekker sold in December

Before the slide deepened, Bekker moved to crystallise some value. Company disclosures show that in December 2025, he sold close to R2.5 billion ($150.3 million) worth of shares through his family trust. The disposals covered just under 800,000 Naspers shares, generating R860.5 million ($51.7 million), and approximately 1.55 million Prosus shares sold at prices ranging from €51.24 to €53.68 each. Those December prices are above where both stocks sit now, meaning the timing of the sales proved sound in hindsight.

Who Bekker is

Koos Bekker, 73, is the man most responsible for turning Naspers from a South African newspaper company into one of the most valuable consumer internet holding companies in the world. He joined M-Net, the pay TV business that would eventually become MultiChoice, in 1985 after studying law at Stellenbosch and earning an MBA at Columbia Business School in New York. By 1997 he was CEO of Naspers, a position he held for 17 years before stepping back to the chairmanship in 2014.

The decision that defined his career was made in 2001, when Naspers invested $32 million in a then-obscure Chinese internet company called Tencent in exchange for a 34% stake. That investment, made when Tencent had roughly 200,000 users, became one of the most profitable technology bets in corporate history. The Naspers Tencent stake, worth tens of billions of dollars at its peak, funded the group's global expansion into food delivery, online classifieds, fintech and education technology through Prosus. Bekker's compensation over his tenure at Naspers exceeded R3 billion.

His personal life away from the markets is built around an unusual collection of hospitality properties assembled with his wife, Karen Roos. They own Babylonstoren, the luxury wine estate and farm hotel in South Africa's Cape Winelands, The Newt in Somerset, a British country house hotel that opened in 2019 to considerable international attention, and Vignamaggio, an historic estate near Greve in Chianti in Tuscany. In early 2024, they added Blou, a coastal retreat near Plettenberg Bay in the Western Cape.

Those properties are insulated from the equity market volatility that has trimmed Bekker's headline net worth. They will not restore the $500 million that Naspers and Prosus's slide has removed from his Forbes valuation this year. But they represent a deliberate long-term investment in physical assets that reflects how Bekker has always thought: take a long view, pick assets that others have not yet recognised, and hold them.

The Tencent bet was built on exactly that logic. Whether Naspers and Prosus recover the 24% they have lost this year will depend on whether the Chinese regulatory environment stabilises, whether Tencent can continue to grow and whether the market eventually closes the discount that has shadowed the dual-listed structure for years. Those are not small questions. But the man who paid $32 million for a stake now worth tens of billions is probably not particularly worried about a $500 million paper loss in a single year.