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Lebashe sits on $2.5 billion of Capitec shares — bought with borrowed money and pledged to two banks as collateral. The week Dangote's fortune jumped $23 billion on a filing, it's the counter-lesson: a headline number and a real fortune are not the same thing. Gross vs. net.
Nigeria rejoins FTSE's frontier index on Sept 21, sending global passive capital to ten giants — Dangote Cement, First HoldCo, MTN. But BUA, UBA and Seplat were left out on free float, not size. The paradox: the concentration that makes these owners rich keeps their companies out.
Nassef Sawiris spent two years selling off OCI's fertiliser and methanol empire and paying shareholders billions. Now he's buying back the shell at a 2% premium to take it private. The lesson: value is realised by what you sell, not what you hold.
Christo Wiese chaired Shoprite for 29 years as it became Africa's largest retailer. This week he explained why its great rival fell behind: Pick n Pay, he said, spent decades handing cash to shareholders instead of reinvesting it.
Angola raised $321 million floating 15% of Unitel — the mobile operator it took from Isabel dos Santos four years ago. The largest IPO in the nation's history is really a test of a much bigger question.
Merck handed Aspen the right to make a once-monthly HIV pill across 129 countries. It is the second pharma prize Africa's largest drugmaker has landed this month.
Johann Rupert spent months examining a "potentially very significant" investment — and walked away. Reinet is now buying back up to €500 million of its own shares instead, sitting on the largest cash pile in its history.
Femi Otedola is a Forbes-listed billionaire and the author of one of the boldest bets in Nigerian banking. Yesterday his First HoldCo stake hit a record $530 million. Inside the holdings, the cash flows and the pivot behind the number.
How Aliko Dangote's $17 billion Lamu bet turns a single plant into a continental system — and what it signals about the IPO to come.
He built Capitec for the customers South Africa’s banks ignored — and rode it to a $3.8 billion fortune as the lender became Africa’s most valuable bank.
Africa’s second-richest man controls Cartier, a healthcare empire and a web of listed holdings — quietly, from Stellenbosch. As Remgro seizes full control of Mediclinic, a full read of the Rupert fortune.
A single Johannesburg pharmacy became a $1.9 billion retailer and South Africa’s newest billion-dollar family fortune. Now, at 75, Ivan Saltzman is handing it over — and the handover is the real test.
This week, Nassef Sawiris moved to take his flagship, OCI Global, private — a fitting bookend to one chapter and the opening of another.
BUA’s cement-and-food champion nearly doubled his fortune in 2026 to become Africa’s second-richest — and just handed his son the next chapter. A full read of the holdings, the surge, and the succession.
Nigeria’s most private billionaire built a fortune of roughly $6.5 billion on telecoms and oil — and tells almost no one how. A full read of an empire that hides in plain sight.
A gold correction stripped $700 million from South Africa’s richest Black industrialist in three months. The episode is a window into a fortune built on mining beta — and the quieter machine built to offset it.