Lessons From Billionaires

Ever wondered why some people succeed and others don’t? Why some lives are more remarkable than others? After studying entrepreneurs for decades, financial commentator Bruce Whitfield has concluded it’s mainly down to mindset, and it might also help if you’re a little mad

There’s a 47-minute video I once shot on my phone. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched it. It was an interview I did with retail magnate Christo Wiese in 2017 as his world was collapsing around him. He’d not yet come to the final realization that Markus Jooste, his trusted lieutenant, would soon stop returning his calls and issue his mea culpa apologising for “mistakes”, accepting responsibility for Steinhoff ’s imminent collapse.

Less than a week after our conversation, most of Wiese’s fortune had evaporated. Auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC ) would later uncover the details of R105 billion in corporate fraud – the biggest in South Africa’s history.

Looking at Wiese and his responses to my questions about the multinational retailer he and Jooste were then building, I can see no obvious signs of distress. Either he was a consummate poker player or he had no idea about the catastrophe that was about to befall his empire.

What was it in Wiese’s personality that allowed him to mastermind his stellar rise? He’d become one of the most extraordinary entrepreneurs the country has seen in the past half-century. And was there anything in his character that contributed to his losing most of his fortune in a matter of a week when Steinhoff, once the sixth most valuable company on the JSE, went into freefall, hemorrhaging billions?

“To be an entrepreneur you have to be quite mad,” Christo told me, without a hint of irony. “There’s so much in the world that’s beyond your control. If your personality is such that you focus on all those things that can go wrong, you’ll never get started.”