Six South Africans who made billions in the US
South Africans are some of the most successful immigrants in the United States, with several founding some of the largest companies in the world and others running venture capital firms that fund them.
Many countries worldwide benefit from brilliant South Africans who have gone searching for better opportunities or a safer, more stable place to live.
Over the last few decades, thousands of highly skilled South Africans, including doctors and engineers, have emigrated to English-speaking countries.
The latest data from the Outlier shows that over 900,000 South Africans live abroad, up from 500,000 in 2000.
The vast majority of them live in Europe, in cluding the UK, and Australasia. Australia and New Zealand have seen a large growth in South African residents.
In 2020, about 273,000 South Africans lived in those two countries, more than double the 106,000 who lived there in 2000.
The United Kingdom has the most South Africans. Around 247,000 lived there in 2020, an increase of about 80% since 2000.
The US and Canada are also among the top 5 countries. About 117,000 South African citizens were living in the US in 2020, up 80% from 2000.
Many of these expats from South Africa are highly skilled and become very successful in their adopted countries.
As a result, alarm bells are beginning to go off among government officials. SARS Commissioner Edward Kieswettter says the emigration of skilled South Africans impacts the state’s tax revenue.
“We’ve also seen an uptick in applications for individuals to end their tax residency because they relocate to overseas countries,” Kieswetter said after the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement.
This increase in emigration presents a significant problem for South Africa’s tax revenue, as the country already has a very small and overburdened tax base.
A handful of South Africans, who left the country at different points in their lives, have become extremely successful in the United States of America.
These few have founded companies that have generated billions of dollars in value. The careers of these South Africans and how they became successful in the US are outlined below.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk is the most recognisable South African who has become extremely successful in the US, known both for his impressive entrepreneurial ventures and for being a polarizing political figure.
He is famous for his pioneering role in electric vehicles through Tesla and his ambitious goal of human colonisation of Mars with SpaceX.
Musk was born in Pretoria on June 28, 1971, and is known for his intense management style, which contributed to his departure from PayPal.
He attended Bryanston High School before transferring to Pretoria Boys’ High School later in his education. After a short stint at the University of Pretoria, he moved to Canada, obtaining citizenship through his Canadian-born mother, Maye.
Musk later enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned bachelor’s degrees in economics and physics.
In 1995, he moved to California to attend Stanford University but left after two days, joining his brother Kimbal to co-found the online city guide company Zip2.
Zip2 was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. Later that year, Musk co-founded X.com, an online bank that merged with Confinity in 2000 to create PayPal.
Following eBay’s acquisition of PayPal for $1.5 billion, Musk invested $100 million from the sale into founding SpaceX in 2002.
In 2004, he became an early investor in Tesla, assuming the role of chairman, and later, in 2008, CEO and product architect.
These companies – SpaceX and Tesla – form the core of Musk’s wealth, propelling him to become the world’s richest person, with a net worth of $263.3 billion as of this writing.
David Sacks
David Sacks spent far less time in South Africa than Elon Musk and was not educated in the country, moving to Tennessee when he was five.
Born in Cape Town, Sacks also started his journey in Silicon Valley at PayPal.
Sacks also never had a great desire to become involved in the tech world. He simply did not want to work in a profession like his father, an endocrinologist.
He attended Memphis University School in Memphis, Tennessee. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in economics from Stanford University in 1994 and a Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago Law School in 1998.
Sacks went to work with Peter Thiel at Confinity in 1999 and became the company’s first product leader and then its COO.
Sacks built and ran many of the company’s key teams, including product management and design, sales and marketing, business development, international, customer service, fraud operations, and HR.
He transformed the product from sending money via Palm Pilots to a web-based money transfer system, introducing the business model that ultimately turned PayPal into a billion-dollar company.
Following the listing of PayPal on Nasdaq and its sale to eBay, Sacks, like Musk, used the proceeds to launch his own ventures.
In 2008, he founded Yammer, an enterprise collaboration company that was among the first to apply consumer growth tactics to the realm of enterprise software.
In July 2012, Microsoft acquired Yammer for $1.2 billion. With the funds from this sale, he co-founded Craft Ventures, a venture capital firm, in 2017.
As a partner at Craft, Sacks has invested in over 20 unicorn companies, including Affirm, Airbnb, ClickUp, Eventbrite, Facebook, Houzz, Lyft, OpenDoor, Palantir, Postmates, Reddit, Slack, SpaceX, Twitter, Uber, and Wish.
These investments have propelled his fortune to around $1.2 billion.
Roelof Botha
Another member of the PayPal Mafia, Roelof Botha, was headhunted by Elon Musk to join the company after finishing top of his class at Stanford.
Botha is the grandson of the late minister of foreign affairs, Roelof Frederik “Pik” Botha and grew up in Cape Town, attending Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck and the University of Cape Town.
After two years at McKinsey in Johannesburg, Botha enrolled at Stanford University for an MBA and finished top of his class. Job offers flooded in after that.
One immediately stood out. After rejecting two offers, Botha was introduced to Elon Musk by a mutual friend, after which the X.com founder convinced him to join the fledgling startup.
Botha rose to become PayPal’s CFO, and once he left, he said that Musk had not provided the board with a full picture of the company’s problems.
At 29, during the Dot-com Bubble, Botha oversaw the financial operations of a billion-dollar company and led it through its IPO in February 2000.
Botha received an offer to stay on at PayPal, but Sequoia’s Michael Mortiz offered him a chance to enter the venture capital world.
He has been immensely successful as an early-stage venture capitalist, growing Sequoia’s assets under management and his own wealth.
He led the firm’s early investments in YouTube, Instagram, and Square – netting the company hundreds of millions of dollars.
Botha now leads Sequoia Capital and sits on the boards of MongoDB, Evernote, Bird, Ethos, Natera, Square, Unity, and Xoom.
Rodney Sacks and Hilton Schlosberg
Rodney Sacks and Hilton Schlosberg created Monster Beverage Corporation out of a fruit juice company.
Sacks and Schlosberg were born in South Africa and were educated at the University of the Witwatersrand before emigrating to the US.
In 1990, a consortium led by Sacks and Schlosberg acquired Hansen Natural Corporation for $1.71 million.
After the acquisition, Sacks has been chairman and CEO of Hansen Natural Corporation, while Schlosberg served as president and COO.
Their big break came in 2002 when they launched Monster Energy. Within ten years, they increased revenue to $2 billion.
Monster Energy was so successful that Hansen Natural Corporation changed its name to Monster Beverage Corporation in 2012.
The Coca-Cola Company bought a 16.7% stake for $2.15 billion in Monster in 2015. This stake has since grown to 19.3% due to share buybacks by Monster.
Today, the company has numerous top brands, including Monster Energy, Burn, NOS, Full Throttle, Relentless, Mother, Reign, and Predator.
In February 2022, it added several craft beers and hard seltzers to its product portfolio by acquiring CANarchy Craft Brewery Collective.
Monster drinks are sold in 141 countries, and the company has a significant share of the $53 billion global energy drink market.
The company is now valued at $51.2 billion, with Sacks and Schlosberg being worth over $3 billion each.
Patrick Soon-Shiong
Patrick Soon-Shiong is a highly successful medical researcher and transplant surgeon who has used the money he received to invent the drug Abraxane to found his own company, NantWorks.
Soon-Shiong was born in Port Elizabeth, now Gqeberha, in 1952 to Chinese parents who fled their home country during WWII during the Japanese occupation.
Another Wits alumni, Soon-Shiong, graduated fourth in his MBBCh class and completed his medical internship at Johannesburg General.
After this, he emigrated to Canada to complete his Master’s degree in 1979 and won several awards for his research from the American College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Surgeons.
He moved to the United States to begin surgical training at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and became a board-certified surgeon in 1984.
While working as a surgeon, Soon-Shiong bought Fujisawa, which sold generic drugs in 1998 and used its revenue to develop Abraxane.
The success of the drug made the company an attractive purchase for more established pharmaceutical players. Soon-Shiong sold it to Celgene in 2010 for $2.9 billion of which $533 million went to the ex-South African.
Soon-Shiong went on to found NantWorks in September 2011, whose mission was “to converge ultra-low power semiconductor technology, supercomputing, high performance, secure advanced networks and augmented intelligence to transform how we work, play, and live.”
It owns a number of technology companies in the fields of healthcare, commerce, and digital entertainment, as well as a venture capital firm in the healthcare, education, science, and technology sectors.
Particular technologies include machine vision, object and voice recognition, low-power semiconductors, supercomputing, and networking technologies.
Soon-Shiong also owns the Los Angeles Times and has recently blocked it from endorsing a candidate in the US general election.
The billionaire has not forgotten about his home country, opening a new manufacturing facility and campus in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2022. Soon-Shiong and his entities are reported to be investing over R4 billion in Africa.
Soon-Shiong has a net worth of $7.1 billion at the time of writing.
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