South African billionaire Douw Steyn left an insurance group, a hotel and a private city

Douw Steyn was a quantity surveyor who could not get an insurance licence. In 1984 he bought a bankrupt South African company called Crusader, reportedly for fifty rand, because it had one.

When he died on Feb. 4, 2025 at the age of 72, the businesses that came out of that purchase employed more than 10,000 people across seven countries and owned the parent of Comparethemarket, the price comparison site behind Britain's meerkat advertisements.

He also left a 900-hectare private city north-west of Johannesburg, a game reserve in the Waterberg, and the Sandhurst house where Nelson Mandela wrote Long Walk to Freedom.

What he owned

The estate divides into three parts, and only one of them is insurance.

Budget Holdings Limited holds the insurance operations. It owns Telesure Investment Holdings in South Africa outright, which houses Auto & General, Budget Insurance, 1st for Women, Dialdirect, 1Life and hippo.co.za. It also owns 70% of BGL Group in Britain, with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board holding the other 30%.

Steyn City Properties is separate. The Saxon Hotel and Shambala Private Game Reserve are separate again.

Above the insurance side sits the Douw Steyn Family Trust, which held on behalf of Steyn and his family. The structure was set out publicly in April 2020, when the trust and the companies together pledged 320 million rand toward coronavirus relief.

The door

Douw Gerbrand Steyn was born in December 1952 and went to school in Linden, Johannesburg. He took a bachelor's degree from Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education in 1978, and his first job was costing construction projects as a quantity surveyor at Eskom's Megawatt Park headquarters.

He started selling insurance by knocking on doors.

The product was a single monthly policy covering both a car and household contents, which was unusual in a market where the two were sold separately and both came with a broker attached. Steyn promoted it with leaflet campaigns and sold it himself. South African outlets have reported that he founded Steyn's Insurance Brokers as early as 1975.

The regulator would not license him. He went to the United States for several years to see whether the model would travel, and came back in 1985.

The telephone

The Crusader purchase got him inside the industry, and in 1985 he obtained a licence to sell motor insurance over the telephone.

Auto & General launched in Johannesburg that year. Steyn was 32.

Nobody in South Africa had done it at scale. A broker took a commission on every policy, and selling directly meant Steyn kept it. He added paperless policies and monthly debit orders while the rest of the industry still worked on annual premiums and physical paperwork.

The model worked well enough that he built five more brands on it, each aimed at a different customer. First for Women sells directly to female drivers. Dialdirect competes on price. 1Life handles life cover. Budget Insurance serves the value end. Hippo.co.za compares quotes across providers, including several insurers he owned.

Telesure expanded into Australia, Turkey and Britain.

Peterborough

Steyn moved to Britain in 1992 and founded Budget Insurance Company as an underwriter, replicating the direct model.

Budget Insurance Services Limited followed in 1997, and the next year the company stopped underwriting its own risk to become an intermediary, distributing policies underwritten by others. That traded margin for volume.

It became BGL Group, based at Orton Southgate in Peterborough, employing 2,852 people. It also owns Bennetts, the motorcycle insurance broker, and Budget.

Comparethemarket is the business everyone in Britain knows. The site has run its meerkat campaign, built around the character Aleksandr Orlov, since 2009, and it made the brand one of the most recognised names in British consumer finance.

Steyn was no longer listed as a BGL director by 2011, with a spokesman calling the change administrative rather than strategic. He resigned as executive chairman of his global interests in 2012, at 60.

The house Mandela wrote in

Steyn built the Saxon in Sandhurst in the mid-1980s as his own home, over objections from his new neighbours.

Nelson Mandela lived there for six months after his release in 1990, working on the autobiography that became Long Walk to Freedom. It later opened as a 26-suite luxury hotel and has repeatedly ranked among the leading properties in Africa.

Shambala came out of his conservation interests, and he built Mandela a private villa there as well.

A private city

Steyn City covers roughly 900 hectares, about 2,200 acres, between Fourways and Lanseria. Steyn launched the development in 2015 with his friend Giuseppe Plumari.

It drew 6.5 billion rand of investment initially and a further 5.5 billion in 2019, and has generally been reported as a 9 billion rand project. The estate holds residential property, a golf course, parkland, schools and commercial space, and was designed as a self-contained city rather than a housing development.

Construction created more than 28,000 jobs. At Steyn's request, most went to residents of the neighbouring settlements of Diepsloot and Cosmo City.

He lived on the estate for more than a decade.

The family

Steyn married twice and had three children.

TJ and Louis came from his first marriage, to Elizabeth Margaret Steyn, a former social worker. The brothers founded the EMS Foundation, a wildlife protection organisation named for their mother, and invest in real estate and private equity across South Africa, Britain and the United States.

His daughter Tanya was named in the family statement and appears nowhere in the businesses on the public record.

He married Carolyn Steyn at the Saxon in February 2013. Born Carolyn Barkhuizen in Johannesburg in 1960, she is a radio presenter who founded 67 Blankets for Nelson Mandela Day and received France's Ordre national du Mérite in 2022.

The woman who claimed half

Donne Botha was Steyn's partner from 2005 to 2009.

In 2014 she claimed that an elaborate ceremony held in London in 2007 had married them, and she sought half his assets. The Durban High Court ruled in August 2021 that the two had never been married, and awarded punitive costs against her.

What happens now

Steyn City Properties said when he died that his legacy would endure thanks to TJ and Louis and their fellow board members and shareholders.

That covers the estate. Nothing comparable has been said about the insurance group, which is considerably larger, and no filing has emerged showing who holds Budget Holdings Limited since February 2025.

The businesses have continued trading and the family asked for privacy when he died.