South African billionaire Michiel le Roux borrows $402 million against his Capitec shares

Michiel le Roux, the billionaire who co-founded Capitec, has raised about $402 million (6.56 billion rand) by borrowing against a slice of his stake in the bank, according to a regulatory filing published Tuesday.

The transaction runs through Kalander Sekuriteit, one of his investment vehicles, and covers 1,374,356 Capitec shares. Kalander cash-settled an earlier deal, first announced in May 2023, and replaced it with a new hedging and refinancing arrangement over the same block.

Nothing was sold. The shares are pledged as collateral, which leaves Le Roux with his ownership, his votes and whatever upside the stock delivers, while handing him cash today.

Capitec set out the mechanics in the filing. A hedging counterparty lends money to Kalander for the life of the deal. The maximum obligation, interest included, can never exceed the number of hedged shares multiplied by the put strike price, so the pledged stock will always cover the debt.

Le Roux sits on the Capitec board as a non-executive director, which is why the deal had to be disclosed under Johannesburg Stock Exchange rules governing dealings by associates of directors. PSG Capital acts as the bank's sponsor. Capitec did not say what Le Roux intends to do with the money.

Borrowing against a concentrated holding rather than selling it is familiar territory for founders whose fortunes sit in a single stock. Elon Musk took more than $12.5 billion in loans against his Tesla shares in 2022 to help fund his purchase of Twitter, then had to sell stock when Tesla's price slid, a reminder of what happens when the collateral falls.

Le Roux has been running versions of this trade for years. He first hedged 1.25 million Capitec shares in December 2018 through another vehicle, Limietberg Sekuriteit, a step the bank attributed at the time to market volatility and his age. Until then he had almost everything he owned tied up in Capitec stock.

The deals have grown with the share price. A refinancing in June 2025 covered 672,220 shares worth about 2.39 billion rand, with a put strike of 2,825.66 rand. Another in October 2025 rolled 507,500 hedged shares into a new arrangement over 350,000 shares, valued then at 1.42 billion rand. Tuesday's transaction dwarfs both.

Forbes puts Le Roux's fortune at about $3.8 billion (62 billion rand).

He built it from a standing start. Le Roux set up Capitec in 2001 alongside Jannie Mouton and Riaan Stassen to serve customers South Africa's big banks had largely ignored, ran it as its first chief executive until 2004, chaired the board from 2007 to 2016, and remains one of its largest shareholders with more than 10 percent held across his two vehicles.

The Stellenbosch lender has since outgrown anything its founders could have priced in. It began as a micro-lender and now counts 26 million active clients, with digital adoption close to 90 percent, 25.2 million personal banking customers and 9.9 million classified as fully banked. It moved into business banking in 2019 and has pushed into insurance and mobile services through Capitec Connect.

The numbers have followed. Headline earnings for the year to Feb. 28 rose 23 percent to about $1.03 billion (16.8 billion rand), return on equity reached 31 percent, and the total dividend climbed 23 percent to 79.80 rand a share.

Growth has come with strain. Loan disbursements jumped 34 percent to about $6 billion (98.3 billion rand), while the credit loss ratio, which measures bad loans against the book, rose to 8.1 percent from 7.5 percent, a sign of pressure on borrowers.

The share price has done the rest. Capitec stock has climbed roughly 191 percent in five years, and in January the bank became the fastest South African company to reach a 500 billion rand valuation. It is now worth about $35 billion (566 billion rand), narrowly ahead of FirstRand at 547 billion rand and Standard Bank at 530 billion rand, though the three have traded the top spot repeatedly this year.

That climb has made Capitec's founders extraordinarily wealthy, and they have handled it in different ways. Mouton, who also built the investment group PSG, used his family foundation last year to buy the private school operator Curro for about $441 million (7.2 billion rand), delist it from the exchange and convert it into a not-for-profit aimed at widening access for children from poorer backgrounds. It ranked as the largest philanthropic transaction South Africa has seen. Curro taught roughly 72,638 pupils at the end of its 2025 financial year.

Le Roux has taken the other road, holding his stake and drawing liquidity from it. Each refinancing extends the arrangement rather than unwinding it, and each one lands on the market's screens because of who he is.

The structure shields him from a collapse in the share price, since the debt cannot outrun what the shares are worth at the put strike. It also caps what he collects if Capitec keeps running. Whether that trade looks shrewd will depend, as it has since 2018, on where the stock goes next.