Madagascar's richest man Ylias Akbaraly attacks Elon Musk's layoffs in a new book

Ylias Akbaraly, Madagascar's wealthiest businessman, has criticised Elon Musk's use of mass layoffs to improve profitability in a memoir published this year, saying that dismissing an employee exposes that person to a possible social death.

The book, "Y croire," was published by Fayard in April and reviewed by Mondafrique on Saturday. The French publication described Akbaraly's position as that of an anti-Elon Musk, and said he had been deeply saddened and shocked by the American billionaire's approach.

Akbaraly argues that employment must be a company's first priority and that economic performance cannot be separated from the common good. He describes himself in the book as a man of the left and a social democrat, though of a liberal left founded on justice and equitable sharing.

On taxation, he writes that when a person has a great deal, giving a small amount can only do good.

The memoir traces his rise from a modest family in Antananarivo to the chairmanship of Redland, the holding company that controls Sipromad Group and the French manufacturer Thomson Broadcast, with operations across three continents.

His grandfather, Merally Manjee, left Gujarat in India in 1918 and settled at Belo Tsiribihina on Madagascar's southwest coast, trading sugar and salt. His father, Sermamod Akbaraly, moved to Antananarivo in 1972 and began making soap, candles and shoe polish by hand for informal traders in the capital, founding the business that became Sipromad.

Akbaraly attended the Lycée Lavoisier in Paris and studied at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned to Madagascar in 1989 as sales manager in the family company, and writes that he pressed his father immediately to invest and diversify.

"Invest, because it is by injecting money that one can develop and innovate," he writes. "Diversify, because it is by not having all one's eggs in the same basket that one reduces risk."

He says he turned down opportunities at Bank of America after Berkeley to return home and apply his own economic model, seeking prosperity with concrete benefits for the population.

Sipromad has since become one of Madagascar's largest privately held companies, with annual revenues around $350 million and interests spanning agribusiness, private aviation, hotels, security services, pay television, utilities, consumer goods, paper manufacturing, telecommunications and information technology. Akbaraly is the largest individual shareholder in Madagascar's BM Bank, and the group owns the country's tallest building, the 33-storey Orange Telecommunication Tower in Antananarivo.

Thomson Broadcast completed the acquisition of the American broadcast equipment manufacturer GatesAir in 2022, extending the group into the United States.

Forbes has identified Akbaraly as Madagascar's richest man and placed him among the five wealthiest individuals in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. It valued his Sipromad stake at $700 million in 2016, and no current figure has been published.

The book is also critical of conditions in Madagascar. Akbaraly writes that the country remains held back by structural blockages despite exceptional natural resources, and calls for more rigorous governance and genuine development of local resources. He told BFM Business in May that the political crisis was frightening investors away.

He describes Africa as a land of innovation, ambition and future prospects, and says his greatest honour is being African and having built a global group that deals with Amazon, Google and Thales.

Mondafrique's reviewer, Daniel Sainte-Roche, noted that Akbaraly's success also rested on advantages not available to most. His father paid part of the cost of his studies in Paris and Berkeley, and Sipromad's early growth depended on an arrangement with a Réunion-based group that prefinanced goods the company then resold before repaying the supplier.

Akbaraly's philanthropy runs through the Akbaraly Foundation, which funds health and education work in Madagascar.