The future of money and the way we see money is changing drastically. Wealth forecasters and futurists look into the crystal ball for Africa.



The past two decades have generated $160 trillion in ‘paper wealth’, according to McKinsey’s 2023 Wealth Report. However, growth has been sluggish and there has been rising inequalities. According to the report, Africa’s long-term economic growth has been slow. The continent is home to the world’s youngest and fastest-growing population, but its economic performance has not been in tandem. Although this may seem bleak, reports indicate that Africa could add $1.4 trillion to its economy, almost doubling the value added by services today, were it to match the productivity growth of Asia’s strongest services.



In looking at wealth holistically, mapping out the trends for 2024 tells us that currently, the continent holds investable wealth worth about $2.4 trillion, and according to the recently-published Africa Wealth Report 2023 by Henley &amp; Partners in collaboration with New World Wealth, the population of millionaires is expected to increase by 42% over the next 10 years. Speaking to experts in wealth management and advisory services as well as a futurist, there is some optimism in looking at trends that go beyond just the number. 



1. More Millennials, More Gen Zs, and More Women. Probably the biggest and most significant gear shift, but not new, will be with these different groups of individuals. According to RBC Wealth Management, globally, in 2015, women held 30% of all wealth controlled by individuals or families, and about 44% had grown their wealth independently as entrepreneurs. UBS’s Women’s Wealth 2030 tells a story of how women’s wealth has seen unprecedented growth over the last decade. Women now control 32% of the world’s wealth. This will rise at a compound annual growth rate of 5.7% to $97 trillion by 2024.



“In my opinion, perhaps the fastest-growing cohort of millionaires in the next several years is going to be women,” says Delphine Govender, owner and Chief Investment Officer at Perpetua Investment Managers.



According to Govender, after centuries of being structurally excluded and marginalized in the broader spectrum of wealth- creating activities, there is an exponential rise in economically- empowered women. This can be attributed to several factors but is centered on the tremendous global focus on gender parity in all aspects of society as norms are finally starting to shift. 



“This is being supported by directly targeted policy initiatives to promote gender equality. More specific factors include a material increase in women entrepreneurs and the increasing support of women-led enterprises. The entire focus of gender lens investing (a fast-growing area) seeks to specifically allocate capital to women- led businesses, whose value chain and products also benefit women,” Govender tells FORBES AFRICA. Andrew Möller, CEO at Citadel Investment Services, adds: “We are also finding what appeals quite strongly to women is they place a much higher value on trust, and building relationships, a opposed to let&#8217;s say their male counterparts who would chase more of the metric of return to performance.”



Furthermore, Govender is seeing more adolescent girls being mentored from a school-going age about their career paths and this is starting to light a fire at a young age about the potential these younger girls have as they contemplate adulthood.



This is something both Möller and global futurist Jack Uldrich agree on with the rise of wealth millennials.



“We will absolutely see the growth,” Uldrich says. “Just the sheer amount of wealth that will be first transferred to them as my parents’ generation dies off, as my generation dies off. And we bequeath it to younger people. But they are also rapidly ascending leadership positions, and in many places across the globe, many of these companies still do need people to do their jobs. I think we&#8217;ll see the millennials increase their wealth, and then they will get into leadership positions. But I would say they think about money and wealth differently than we did.”



“Millennials are much more cost- sensitive than a lot of your other guys,” Möller adds. “They are obviously much more digitally driven. Millennials have a much higher requirement for transparency. In terms of the structures, and interestingly enough, on the transfer of wealth, millennials are much more open to switching advisors.”



2.More Entrepreneurship. Notably, there are 52 African-born billionaires globally, and only 23 (44%) still live on African soil. Henley &amp; Partners have noted that this is a significant concern as many billionaires are entrepreneurs and company founders who therefore can create significant employment in their host countries. “Entrepreneurs typically make the best clients,” Möller chuckles. “Why? Because entrepreneurs know what they know. And they&#8217;ve gone and they&#8217;ve made the wealth but in a very specific area. I am happy to say that the future wealth is definitely entrepreneurs and I do think that a lot of wealth management firms will be sourcing their acquisition strategies from them. Entrepreneurs certainly have the biggest growth potential.”



Many reports show that a crucial part of this would be to create more relevant educational curricula, train employees to build the skills and knowledge Africa needs, link talent with job opportunities, and empower entrepreneurs to enhance the continent’s workforce and produce next-generation leaders.



“Indeed, African talent could become the continent’s largest export—and given shifts we are seeing in how work gets done, this talent may not need to leave the continent to fulfill this demand,” the Henley &amp; Partners report reads.



3.  More Investments = More Very-High-Net-Worth Individuals  (VHNWIs) + Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals (UHNWIs). As Africa is rich in human and natural resources, individuals are finding different opportunities in a multitude of sectors. As the years go on, Africa’s growth will increase, due to aspects such as the internet, smartphones, and even renewable energy, says Uldrich.



“I think we&#8217;re going to see, and we already are seeing with the number of satellites that are put in, more satellites that are being delivered; high-speed internet access everywhere in the globe and all across Africa. Most people, not everyone, already have smartphones and I think with the advances



in renewable energy [wealth], it’s going to get better because those three are going to lead to increased economic growth, which in turn will in fact manifest itself in wealth as we currently define it. So I would tell you I&#8217;m absolutely bullish on the long-term prospects for Africa.”



According to StatsSA, as of 2022, approximately 138,000 HNWIs lived in Africa, each with $1 million or more net assets, excluding government funds. Statista further added that the total private wealth in Africa amounted to $2.4 trillion in 2022.



The amount was accumulated by over 140,000 individuals, including millionaires, centimillionaires, and billionaires. Compared to 2021, the continent counted 2,000 more millionaires.



Möller says reports predict that in the next decade, the number of African millionaires is going to probably increase by 42% and that will be a number of approximately 195,000 ultra-high-net-worth participants.



“That&#8217;s what the forecasts are saying but when you put that overlay of what&#8217;s been happening in the global environment on top of this, the numbers forecast could be slightly different,” Möller adds.



“And by this, I mean, in 2021, there was a rapid growth of ultra-high-net-worth individuals in the world. That was on the back of unprecedented growth stimulus, there was a very low- interest rate environment, there was high liquidity at the time, and there were significant stock market gains that happened in the economic environment. “Whilst we certainly believe that is going to be a growth, we&#8217;re not quite sure that it&#8217;s going to be the growth of their 42%.” “Perhaps the most pressing aspect affecting Africans and South Africans is the quantum of their wealth that is invested offshore vs onshore,” Govender adds.



“This continues to be a significant source of debate. As liquidity in domestic public markets dries up, many local investors are starting to question the extent of their home bias.”



4.  AI May Redefine Wealth. Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly been finding a place in the world of work, so it should come as no surprise that it has found itself in the world of wealth.



Möller believes that the uptake of AI will actually be beneficial when it comes to wealth, particularly for wealth managers and their clients.



“As AI is starting to develop, this thing of digitization is gathering more momentum,” Möller says.



“It might sound perverse but I think digitization is going to make businesses more client-centric and the link between digitization and AI and client centricity is very simply going to open up the advisor&#8217;s diaries allowing them to simply focus on what they should be always doing and that is building relationships. It&#8217;s going to de-clutter.”



However, Uldrich believes that the world&#8217;s leading experts working on artificial intelligence are being a bit disingenuous in stating that it is going to transform the nature of work.



According to the forecaster, long-term, this may be true but short- to mid-term, there&#8217;s going to be a lot of displacement. This is why Uldrich believes that the way one defines wealth should likely change.



“Even in the age of AI,” Uldrich adds, “humans still have agency and we have to create our desired future… Most futurists I think are optimistic about the future, and they speak of an abundant future. But to tie back to wealth, I think what&#8217;s going to happen is for the most part, most people in the world will have all of their material needs met, but that will create a new problem.



“It will be sort of a spiritual vacuum. My point is I don&#8217;t think that we will define wealth simply in terms of dollars and material possessions, people will have those things and then they will say, ‘oh, what really matters?’. And I think we will see a major shift in how we define wealth.”



5. More Creatives. It doesn’t matter how much AI can do, the one sub-set of entrepreneurs, employees, brands, and businesses that will be safe, will be in the creative economy. “We&#8217;re going to see almost a new renaissance in [creativity],” Uldrich says. “Because artificial intelligence is really good at mimicking the human mind or intelligence, what it cannot do is imagine. It can give you the impression it is creating, but it&#8217;s not. All it&#8217;s doing is taking existing pieces and rearranging them and I would say that is a component of creativity and imagination. But we think with our heart, with our body, and that’s what AI can’t yet do.” 



Govender believes the creative economy is contributing meaningfully to growth in the number of millionaires and to some extent this is underpinning why we should expect more female millionaires. “Whether in fields of design, the arts, or entertainment, we are seeing the pursuit of a far more balanced economy as well as a greater value being broadly attached to the creative economy,” she says. “Social media has resulted in an entirely new slew of careers in terms of influencers and content creators – which is channeling income into the hands of many self-made individuals who no longer have to rely on corporates being their employers.



“While traditional careers such as medicine and law will continue to exist, the ascent of an increased number of well-rewarded careers within the creative domains means we now have many more industries and professions capable of producing wealthy individuals.”

Millennial man investing stock market analysis during trading cryptocurrency on laptop

What Wealth Will Look Like In 2024 (And The Years To Come)…

Name:&nbsp;Angela Mwanza



Firm:&nbsp;UBS Private Wealth Management



Location:&nbsp;New York, NY



AUM:&nbsp;$878 million



Forbes Rankings:&nbsp;Best-in-State Wealth Advisors, Top Women Wealth Advisors Best-In-State, America’s Top Women Wealth Advisors



Background:&nbsp;Angela Mwanza was born and raised in Zambia, where her family still lives. She eventually moved to Germany and learned the language there while pursuing a degree in Linguistics. While studying, Mwanza worked for a sports fashion sales company specializing in snowboarding. “I’m scared of heights and come from Africa so I had never snowboarded… but I self taught myself and still snowboard to this day!,” says Mwanza. In the late 90s, Mwanza decided it was time for a change of pace so she earned her MBA at Cornell University and then landed a job at JPMorgan Private Bank in 2000. When the financial crisis rolled around eight years later, she was working at Lehman Brothers, but was able to move to UBS in the midst of the downturn, where she has worked ever since.



Competitive Edge:&nbsp;Mwanza is highly focused on family finances and philanthropy in her practice, honing in on the purpose and values of each client in order to be intentional about all aspects of their wealth. “The pain points I kept hearing from clients all had to do with the complexities that wealth brings—and the number one thing people care about is their family,” says Mwanza. As a result she is “always thinking generationally”, engaging the next generation and facilitating discussions throughout the entire family. What’s more, many of her clients have a passion for making a positive change in the world, so a key part of her practice revolves around socially responsible and impact investments.



Biggest Challenge:&nbsp;When she first moved to the United States for business school, Mwanza had to build up her knowledge and expertises from scratch. “I was so out of my element and completely clueless at the time,” she recalls. “I had never heard of&nbsp;The Wall Street Journal!”



Investment Philosophy/Strategy:&nbsp;Mwanza takes a holistic approach to working with clients: “I can’t be a good advisor if I’m not speaking to their other advisors and attorneys,” she says. In terms of investing, she and her team are strong believers in long-term, risk-adjusted and tax-aware returns. “Most clients who are entrepreneurial tend to have a lot of risk outside of the portfolio we are managing—so we tend to be moderately conservative when thinking about their lifetime,” adds Mwanza.



Investment Outlook:&nbsp;“Markets like this with rising rates tend to favor value over growth, so we position more defensively from a tactical standpoint,” she says. “There’s a lot of unknowns but that’s something we just<a href="https://www.forbes.com/digital-assets/assets/just-just/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">just</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/digital-assets/assets/just-just/">-0.3%</a>&nbsp;have to be ready for and resilient about when it comes to client portfolios.” Mwanza and her team like alternative investments but shuns gold, which “doesn’t make sense” as a hedge to market volatility when Treasuries are yielding nearly 5%. “Our outlook is long term, so we’re not bothered by day to day volatility,” says Mwanza.



Best Advice:&nbsp;“It’s very important not to be emotionally invested—people get antsy and feel like they have to do something but that’s when most mistakes are made,” she says.



Favorite Hobby: Mwanza loves pushing her limits outside of work, too: “Don’t tell me I can’t do something,” she says. She has run six marathons (one in Boston, five in New York) and has scaled the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Mwanza also enjoys traveling with her husband, taking trips to see endangered species like rhinos in Asia or tortoises in the Galapagos.



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/"></a>By Sergei Klebnikov, Forbes Staff

Mighty Dream Forum Hosted By Pharrell Williams 2022 – Day 2

Zambia-Born UBS Advisor Loves Snowboarding And Impact Investing

<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Topline</h2>



No African countries feature on the list of top countries for centi-millionaires, according to a recent report from Henley &amp; Partners, the “global leader in residence and citizenship by investment”, but all is not lost. Four countries on the continent – Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and Mauritius – are tipped to be the fastest-growing markets for centi-millionaires over the next decade.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-facts">Key Facts</h2>



The Centi-Millionaire Report, released by Henley &amp; Partners, is the first global study of ultra-high-net-worth individuals who boast $100 million in investable assets. There were 25,490 centi-millionaires in the study.



The report “pulls back the curtain on” the lives and livelihoods of the super-rich, which destinations they call home, their spending habits, and their wealth management strategies.



The top 10 countries that house most of the centi-millionaires in the world are the United States (US), China, India, the United Kingdom (UK), Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Canada, Australia, and the Russian Federation.



The US accounts for an incredible 38% of global centi-millionaires, despite only constituting 4% of the world’s total human population, the report reads. However in Africa, South Africa is the top-ranked country with 92 centi-millionaires — it holds 27th position globally.



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:44% auto"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="842" height="866" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-26-at-15.19.21.png" alt="" class="wp-image-56695 size-full" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-26-at-15.19.21.png 842w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-26-at-15.19.21-292x300.png 292w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-26-at-15.19.21-768x790.png 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 842px) 100vw, 842px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“It is true there is still a long way to go to have as many billionaires or millionaires that you see in America, Asia or Europe. But now that there is this trend of an increased number of wealthy individuals on the continent, how can you make sure that it&#8217;s not only the governments that are working on developing our economies, but also the private sector?”<cite>-Ntoudi Mouyelo, Chief Investment Officer of the Kigali International Financial Centre (KIFC)</cite></blockquote>
</div></div>



The African perspective? We rounded up some sentiments.



Ntoudi Mouyelo, Chief Investment Officer of the Kigali International Financial Centre (KIFC), tells FORBES AFRICA that although Africa is not on the top global rankings yet for centi-millionaires, there has been an increasing number of wealthy individuals on the continent.



“One needs to look at where we stand in comparison to other countries or continents,” says Mouyelo. “And we need to look at the trends within Africa. And here we want to change that narrative to say that things are happening on the continent. What you should look at is ‘what is the number of billionaires and millionaires on the continent’, and ‘how has the growth been of their portfolios’. And what you will see is an increase.



“It is true there is still a long way to go to have as many billionaires or millionaires that you see in America, Asia or Europe. But now that there is this trend of an increased number of wealthy individuals on the continent, how can you make sure that it&#8217;s not only the governments that are working on developing our economies, but also the private sector?”



According to Dr Juerg Steffen, CEO of Henley &amp; Partners, the largest millionaire migration flows on record are predicted for next year — 125,000 high-net-worth individuals on the move as we enter the new post-Covid world, and against a backdrop of rising inflation and interest rates, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and the ever-present threat of climate change.



“Since the pandemic and the subsequent socioeconomic upheavals and geopolitical struggles, including a war in Europe, the importance of having optionality across multiple jurisdictions in terms of where you can relocate to and reside in is gaining traction,” Steffen says in the report. “And for those who can afford it, such as the centi-millionaires of the world, residence and citizenship by investment is the simplest, fastest, and most effective mechanism available to achieve optionality.”



“The reason why those countries have been listed, starting with Rwanda,” Mouyelo adds, “is because there is a dynamic economy that can leverage [off] a solid ground of legal fiscal framework with a growing number of skilled professionals to serve the economy.”



The Key Drivers Of Wealth



<ol class="wp-block-list"><li> Strong safety and security</li><li>Growth in key sectors</li><li>Strong competition in essential services -According to the report, as a case study, electricity utility Eskom in South Africa shows the risks of government-owned monopolies, especially in critical sectors such as power generation.</li><li>A well-developed and neutral news media -The report further elaborates that it is important that major news outlets in a country are neutral and objective. A well-developed financial media space is especially important as it helps to disseminate information to investors. European and North American countries score strongly here, as do Australia, India, Kenya, New Zealand, and South Africa.</li><li>Strong ownership rights &#8211; “Zimbabwe offers a case in point as to what could happen when ownership rights are stripped. Once assets are taken away, they tend to lose value as it is unlikely that investors would be willing to commit to buying them,” the report reads.</li><li>Highly developed banking system and stock market -Low tax rates: Mauritius, Singapore and the UAE are examples of the power that tax rates can have in encouraging business formation as these countries all boast low tax rates.</li></ol>



“We in Africa, are African, and there is always the [need] to tailor-make those standards to our reality,” Mouyelo comments. “So what you are seeing here is one, to understand what those key drivers are. And second, is to make them work for our local economies, because we have to speak the African language.



“We are not reinventing the wheel, there is a reason why there is a common denominator to all those countries that are successful today, wherever [the continents] they are based. And Africa will be following the same trend. The question is, what is our willingness to go through that path?”

Money

Where Are The Centi-Millionaires? Africa Has Some Catching Up To Do But Expectations Are On East Africa

AFRICAN STARTUPS ARE RAISING UNPRECEDENTED AMOUNTS AT RECORD SPEED. FOR NOW, THE CONTINENT IS THE ONLY REGION IN THE WORLD SEEING A RISE IN VENTURE CAPITAL FLOWS. PERSPECTIVES FROM WEST AFRICA.



AS FUNDING FOR STARTUPS FALLS ACROSS the globe, Africa it seems is undergoing a renaissance in this regard.



“We are seeing a time where funding for African startups rose to a massive $3.14 billion in the first six months of this year alone,” says Eric Idiahi, Co-Founder and Partner at Verod Capital, a leading West African private equity investor. “That is unprecedented and it really shows the interest in the continent!”



African entrepreneurs are raising money to solve pertinent socio-economic problems on the continent ranging from financial inclusion, providing access to healthcare for the underserved and vulnerable, and bridging the education gap.


<div class="wp-block-image is-style-default">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-11-at-08.57.35.png" alt="" class="wp-image-56553" width="474" height="320" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-11-at-08.57.35.png 838w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-11-at-08.57.35-300x203.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-11-at-08.57.35-768x519.png 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 474px) 100vw, 474px" /></figure></div>


“Africa investment firms and angel networks have started putting money into African companies,” says Dr Akintoye Akindele, yet another West African entrepreneur, who is the Founder of investment vehicle Platform Capital in Nigeria.



“It took African entrepreneurs almost 10 months to raise $1 billion in 2019. It took the same group eight months to raise $1 billion in 2020. It took them four months to raise $1 billion in 2021 and it has taken them less than six weeks to raise $1 billion in 2022. That means capital is coming in faster into deals and last year for the first time in our history, African investors invested more than European investors. This is a major milestone.”



Akindele is himself focused on inviting investors “to see Africa the right way”.



“This is because we know the narrative that exists about Africa and the negative questions we get asked.”



The thesis of Platform Capital is that it deploys long-term capital to startups whose center of gravity is Africa.



“Africans need long-term, nurturing and patient capital. Four to five years is too short in Nigeria for a business to turn capital around and grow and deliver profit to capital providers. I believe from my experience that five to six years does not create enough alignment,” says Akindele.



Based on their extensive research and experience investing in over 100 portfolio companies with a valuation north of $1.5 billion, Platform Capital invests in businesses that will become top in their sectors in 15 years. Akindele also believes his investments should be sector-agnostic.



“I believe in Africa, we should not be choosing what we cannot invest in&#8230; whether it’s energy, telecom, agriculture, infrastructure or value-added services like gaming, I believe consumers need their basic needs met and then on the back of that we can evolve.”



Akindele’s primary focus is those sectors fundamental to the development of Africa.



“We invest in key areas that Africa needs to catch up on&#8230;so things like technology infrastructure, agriculture or food value chains. They form our anchor sectors and that represents about 60% of our portfolio. Then, when you have people who have electricity, food and water, they then go into the next sector like finance as well as education or healthcare&#8230;Then our final sector is robotics, artificial intelligence, such as one of our companies that do smell cyborgs,” says Akindele.



The company he is referring to is Koniku, a synthetic biotech company that creates ‘smell cyborgs’ that can detect a range of compounds in the air in real-time, and which recently partnered with Airbus to launch biotech solutions for aviation.



The company has so far reportedly raised $49.2 million in four rounds and is part of a long line of African startups bucking the trend of venture capital (VC) investment worldwide.



According to Yaa Agyare-Dwomoh, a consultant with growth strategy consulting and research firm Frost &amp; Sullivan, African VCs reached $1.8 billion, up 150% compared to $730 million in the same period in 2021 and was subsequently, also the only region in the world to record three-digit growth in the first quarter of 2022.



As the biggest catch-up market, Africa’s advantage lies in its need for innovative solutions to leapfrog years of underdevelopment. For some pioneers like Oshiorenoya Agabi, the Nigerian-born scientist based in Silicon Valley and Founder and CEO of Koniku, that need for innovation has brought the continent to the age of biotech solutions.



The company, which was founded in 2017, is using technology to combine traditional computer cells with living biological neurons.



“We are creating a device capable of thinking in the biological sense like a human by creating neurons that are sensitive to particles and are able detect smell. By this method, the solution can be used for particle detection for aviation, military or agricultural application,”says Agabi.



Apart from biotech, the figures show that it is fintech that attracted the largest funding by sector by far, mostly spurred by the need to extend banking and financial services to millions of unbanked and underbanked Africans across the continent. “Fintech is now the most popular sector for investments in Africa. In 2021, fintech funding broke the $1 billion funding barrier and continued to receive the largest amount of funding on the continent, representing 54% of all venture funding deals. In 2022, the fintech sector was responsible for the biggest deals securing two-thirds of the total funding for Africa’s technology firms,” says Dwomoh.



And this trend looks set to continue.



“Despite the global trend of tech companies struggling to raise money, African VCs are still raising money at record speed,” adds Akindele.



An unexpected side effect of the coronavirus pandemic has been the need for inclusive development in areas that fundamentally impacts society. This new trend known as impact investment has also consequently been on the rise in the African VC space.



Impact investing is based on the notion that when money is managed effectively, it has the added benefit of positively impacting the lives of people as well as creating a return on investment.



Africa is home to the youngest population in the world, with a median age of less than 20 years, and 70% of the population under the age of 30. According to the Global Impact Investing Network 2020 survey, almost half of global impact investment capital goes to the African continent.



Raised to appreciate poverty and wealth at the same time, Akindele is also a firm advocate of his investments positively making an impact on his portfolio companies. Platform Capital writes cheques anywhere from $10,000 to $10 million with most of the companies in the portfolio growing by 500% in terms of money raised, according to Akindele. As an African advocate, each investment the firm makes has to have an impact that



is transformational to the continent and its people and most importantly, makes a profit.



The new influx of money into Africa is just an attestation of everything entrepreneurs like him have consistently been working towards.

Smiling colleagues in conference room at workplace

VENTURE CAPITAL IN WEST AFRICA: The Funding Surge

Despite the economic outlook in the region, the high-net-worth segment has been growing over the last decade, reaching a crescendo with the recent entrance of new foreign private banks and wealth management services into the regional market. FORBES AFRICA takes a look at these movements on how the wealthy and ultra-rich in East Africa are changing the way they manage their assets.&nbsp;



BY MARIE SHABAYA



OVER THE LAST decade, five East African nations have seen a net-positive growth in total wealth, according to figures from New World Wealth. Leading the pack are Rwanda (60%), Ethiopia (52%) and Uganda (50%). Delving deeper into this picture, Kenya, a growing economic hub for the region, has the highest per capita wealth in East Africa, and ranks eighth on the continent, at $1,700.



This makes a strong case for the new financial services now available to high-networth individuals (HNWIs) in the region. In fact, East Africa is now a growing market for wealth management services and experts. This is echoed by the changing trends in how this segment has been holding their wealth.



Traditionally, investment options for the wealthy and ultra-rich were concentrated predominantly in land, real estate (property and buildings) as well as cash. Over the last few years, there has been a marked shift with this capital being held in sovereign bonds or fixed income securities.



Why the shift? Charles Mwaniki, a business journalist who has been covering the regional financial markets for over a decade, notes that what we’re seeing now is the result of movements from the past decade, whose effects are now being compounded.



“The big shift I’ve seen is the move towards the professional management of wealth. 



Previously a lot of [wealthy] people were having to manage their own wealth in private family offices or as private individuals but over the last seven years, we were coming out of a period of plenty, between 2004 and 2015, when there was ample opportunity to make money,” he says.



The overall economic climate during this time was one of a financial boom, allowing for the expansion of the HNWI segment in the region 



“It was a two-fold thing. One, it introduced a lot of new money into the economy and a lot of people got wealthy or got money that was investible within that period. Secondly, the people who already had money were making it more easily. It was easy to multiply wealth. So, you didn’t need much help to make money; there were opportunities everywhere…in trade, in the stock market, in bonds. But, from around 2014-15, it suddenly became a lot more difficult to make money here.”



What followed was an extended period of decline in both the stock market and the banking sector. Beginning in 2016, banks restricted their lending to the private sector due to a legislative cap on commercial lending rates.



“Trade also became more difficult. People started realizing [that they] needed help to unlock opportunities, to see where the money is and that is where they increasingly turned to professionals, especially those who had made new money in the decade before. Suddenly, there were no opportunities in the stock market, they didn’t know how to invest offshore, they didn’t know how to play the property sector so they turned to professionals,” posits Mwaniki.



This has seen a rise in dedicated wealth management units in some of the more established banks and lenders in the region, with new entrants joining the market as recently as this year. Stanbic Bank Kenya, formerly known as CfC Stanbic, is one of the larger service providers in the region, providing a private bank offering to both individuals and corporate clients with at least $1 million in investible assets. New entrant, Old Mutual, from South Africa, opened its doors to highnet-worth clients with at least KES 10 million ($83,130) in investible assets in July this year while I&amp;M Capital, a fund manager, launched in mid-2021 and famously raised $5.8 million in its first six months, indicating the growing demand for such services in the region.



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile is-style-default"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="664" height="654" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-10-at-10.03.12.png" alt="" class="wp-image-56541 size-full" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-10-at-10.03.12.png 664w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-10-at-10.03.12-300x295.png 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 664px) 100vw, 664px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
“ PUTTING IT SIMPLY, MOVING CAPITAL OUTSIDE OF AFRICA CAN OFTEN MEAN DIRECT ACCESS TO CHEAPER DEBT FINANCING AND A GREATER ARRAY OF PERSONAL AND FINANCIAL SERVICES TO INVEST BACK INTO THE REGION OR CONTINENT. ” – JON DE JAGER, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF C|T GROUP UK
</div></div>



A majority of wealth in the region is family-led and organized by kin either in business structures or by ownership. This allows for wealth management efforts to be compounded over the generations, a model which has worked well in other markets. Tsitsi Mutendi, who consults for private family offices in the region draws a line between the services offered by the new private banks and the niche services required for those over a certain wealth threshold. 



“A family office is particularly created for ultra high-net-worth individuals and families. It makes sense to open a single family office, dedicated to one family and the management of its wealth and investments. It’s usually families that are worth a $100 million or more that can afford a single family office. Where you start off with your ‘Mom &amp; Pops’ store growing to bigger business, you can still have an accountant managing finances or a private bank managing income. When it gets to $100 million and above, in terms of net worth, a dedicated office has a better overview of what the asset holding looks like, what the available wealth in terms of finances looks like and what investments are being made. Family offices tend to hire investment managers as investments at this level tend to be larger.&#8221;



According to this year’s Africa Wealth Report, Nairobi is one of Africa’s wealthiest cities, anchoring the region with $48 billion in total private wealth with an estimated 5,400 HNWIs. Those over the $100 million net worth bracket, however, only number 12 with a healthy crop of multi-millionaires (net worth of over $10 million) at 260 individuals. Mombasa, Kenya’s coastal second city, plays host to 800 HNWIs with a combined wealth of $7 billion. Dar-es-Salaam, the Tanzanian capital and home to Africa’s preeminent billionaire, Mo Dewji, has the region’s second-largest HNWI community with 1,300 individuals holding a total of $24 billion in private wealth. The Ugandan capital, Kampala, which has seen marked growth in total wealth over the last decade is home to 900 HNWIs worth a cumulative $16 billion.



Many of these developments are being led by family wealth either through burgeoning businesses or the expansion of pre-existing wealth. Mutendi contends that this may be due to new perspectives on wealth building.



“We have a melting pot of different family businesses and different drivers to wealth [that is] being built. The movement of the world as well as the different generations and how [they] perceive wealth, manage wealth and [their] history within the wealth pocket [is a contributor]. The nouveau riche is usually centered on one demographic but it is one that is coming into wealth after many years of being disadvantaged with financial status. With funds moving out of the continent, you have different push and pull factors.”



These factors are the back-end of much of the wealth growth that we’re observing in the region.



According to the 2022 Africa Wealth Report, investment migration is fast becoming a popular option for the continent’s affluent families. In fact, it’s a proven wealth management and legacy planning tool with 19 of the G20 countries already implementing policies that encourage inward investment in exchange for citizenship or residence rights. Henley &amp; Partners, a London-based investment migration consultancy who authored the report, noted that they saw an 18% rise in inquiries about these programs from African clients in 2021.



Jon de Jager, Managing Director of C|T Group UK, an advisory firm working with African HNWIs, explains that the movement of capital goes beyond wealth migration and has been a prominent trend.



“There has been a trend of East Africa capital being consolidated outside of the continent although, equally, there has been significantly more wealth generated within the region. Jurisdictions outside Africa have historically been a more attractive base from which 



HNWIs can invest internationally across developed economy capital markets. Putting it simply, moving capital outside of Africa can often mean direct access to cheaper debt financing and a greater array of personal and financial services to invest back into the region or continent,” he says.



However, access to these foreign financial markets isn’t always guaranteed for African investors. Enhanced due diligence checks, Know-Your-Customer (KYC) standards among other regulations often bar HNWIs from the continent from transitioning to some of these offshore locations. Whilst this has happened in the past, now it is more difficult to achieve due to regulatory requirements.



“There is often a fundamental lack of understanding of the East African region, and of Africa as a whole. HNWIs originating from the continent of Africa are often classified in the same bucket and lazy assumptions can be made as to their source of wealth or political connections, for example. We have worked very hard the last few years in establishing a credible and detailed fact pattern for individuals looking to move their capital into different markets. It is often assumed that documents are lacking for the region to meet enhanced KYC requirements, but that is not the case. What many African HNWIs need is an opportunity to explain, transparently, the facts behind their background and business history,” notes de Jager.



Scrutiny aside, HNWI capital from the region is still finding its way to more stable settings, offshore.



“Dubai in particular has recently become a popular destination on a global basis, not just from Africa. This has partly been for protection; while Kenya has no doubt become a major economic hub, and I believe will gain further momentum as such, there has been some political instability that can trigger capital flight.



Another market that we see movement to is Singapore. It is perceived by many as a stable and fast-growing economy in Asia and we are seeing this trend not just from businesses in East Africa. Singapore does offer tax advantages to offshore non-resident companies and as a result is becoming the gateway to Asia’s banking and investment markets,” notes de Jager.



However, capital flight is not the only trend we’re seeing within this segment. A movement towards reinvestment in the region, and continent, may be due to a rise in locally-based wealth management services and offerings. While growth of this market has been slow, it does signal hope for HWNIs looking to consolidate their wealth within African economies.



“There is still domination from foreign entities or agents and representatives of larger institutions that have come to the continent that are encouraging family businesses or offices to invest offshore. At the same time, our wealth advisory industry is growing at a snail’s pace. Our institutions are opening up more to setting up family office offerings and private wealth offerings over and above private banking.



It’s the right start, over the past five years there has been a move towards more customised offerings and collaborations with institutions that can offer their clientele prestige banking that goes over and above what is available on the continent,” explains Tsitsi Mutendi who has been working in various African wealth markets.



Jon de Jager, agrees, noting that while offshore markets offer a buffer from prevailing instabilities in African economies, HNWIs from the region are seeking to return their capital to their home jurisdictions as long as conditions permit.



“There is an appetite as well as a continual desire to reinvest in Kenya, East Africa and generally across the continent. Especially now, due to the global demand of natural resources, we have seen a significant drive to reinvest in Africa. At the same time, it is noteworthy that six African start-ups were listed among the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers of 2022. Just as we have seen with M-Pesa, these start-ups are solution-driven and are leading the way in solving issues such cyber security, climate change and food security. In this context, I am positive that this will attract investment in Africa.”



What is important for the region’s wealthy demographic is choice. Given the myriad push and pull factors at play on the continent from economic to political instability, HNWIs often seek options that safeguard their hardwon multigenerational wealth or new avenues that enable them to build newly acquired money.



This is true for all investors, African or otherwise, so flight to economic safe havens is a natural strategy for this segment.



“It is natural for a successful entrepreneur to expand their horizons on an international stage by adding other geographies to their investments, in or outside of Africa, just as it is for a HNWI from Europe, for example, to invest in Africa. Establishing a presence outside of the continent for this purpose is necessary and efficient. Restrictive policy interventions are unlikely to facilitate growth within the region while persistent allegations of corruption or kleptocratic behaviours will always put off investors. Social factors, like high rates of crime, also come into play; issues like this simply add to reasons to move elsewhere in search of returns. Innovation is certainly attractive in terms of investing in Africa, but these must be supported by good governance and strong rule of law in establishing a stable environment in which to operate,” insists de Jager.



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile is-style-default" style="grid-template-columns:44% auto"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="698" height="870" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-10-at-10.01.23.png" alt="" class="wp-image-56540 size-full" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-10-at-10.01.23.png 698w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-10-at-10.01.23-241x300.png 241w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 698px) 100vw, 698px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
“ THE NOUVEAU RICHE IS USUALLY CENTERED ON ONE DEMOGRAPHIC BUT IT IS ONE THAT IS COMING INTO WEALTH AFTER MANY YEARS OF BEING DISADVANTAGED WITH FINANCIAL STATUS. WITH FUNDS MOVING OUT OF THE CONTINENT, YOU HAVE DIFFERENT PUSH AND PULL FACTORS. ” &#8211; TSITSI MUTENDI
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Already, estimates indicate that wealth on the African continent is set to increase by 38% in the coming decade and this may be due to factors already at work within the continent’s markets. A key point, to capture this growth for the long-term, is ensuring that younger generations are equipped to take over the management of wealth sooner rather than later. According to Mutendi, at the family office or business level, this means having strong family governance structures that are flexible enough to incorporate the incoming generation, and their ideas, as they build.



“Africa’s got so much potential, there is still a vast amount of wealth that is coming from the continent and is going outside of the continent. So, there is so much possibility for families building wealth. They just have to continue cultivating innovation, especially the next generation…they are the ones that will build on the wealth that is currently being created,” she says. This is particularly important for East African families, says Mwaniki who has picked up on new patterns through his observation of the regional financial markets, noting that the younger generations are the ones leading the charge in new investment trends. “These are fairly young, wealthy people. Some of [their wealth] has been here but has been held by their parents. Once they inherit land they dispose of it because they don’t see themselves managing a farm, for example. So they invest in NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), cryptocurrencies or bonds. They are looking for options that will generate regular and high returns. Land you can hold but if you don’t have another source of income, it’s an idle asset. They are turning more and more to incomebearing instruments,” he says. When all is said and done, wealth creation remains a positive development across the continent. Kenya, the regional leader in continental rankings, is one of the ‘Big 5’ markets that account for more than half of total wealth in Africa.



The steady growth of HNWIs here will undoubtedly signal expansion in neighboring jurisdictions, encouraging more robust regulations and stable economic environments for their capital; wealth migration, notwithstanding, remains a mitigating factor.

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What East Africa’s Tide Of WEALTH Looks Like

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MAKING CENTS OF INVESTMENT: The Professionals Behind Wealth Preservation In South Africa

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Highest-Paid Tennis Players 2021: Federer, Serena And Nadal Win Even When They Can’t Take The Court

When Victor Terry answered a call from State Farm CEO Michael Tipsord and chief administrator Mary Schmidt in June, he wasn’t expecting the news he received. “To hear them say, ‘Victor, we want to make you our first chief diversity officer,’ was really a moment that’s hard to describe,” says Terry, then an area vice president. “We had already experienced the murder of George Floyd and everything that unfolded Memorial Day weekend, but I didn’t see that coming.”



Perhaps he should have: A seat in the C-suite signals a company’s commitment to the area the role represents. In appointing Terry as CDO, State Farm did just that for diversity and inclusion. But it wasn’t the only organization to mint a new chief diversity officer this past year.



According to an&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/whos-reaching-c-suite-2020-16-roles-have-momentum-george-anders/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">analysis of nearly 100,000 U.S. C-suite appointments</a>&nbsp;by LinkedIn, while overall C-level hiring declined 18% year-over-year, some roles, such as that of diversity chief, saw great growth. CDO appointments increased at a rate of 84% as a proportion of total C-suite hires in 2020 as compared to 2019—more than any other C-level role—with Terry, as well as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.sonymusic.com/sonymusic/sony-music-group-appoints-tiffany-r-warren-executive-vice-president-chief-diversity-and-inclusion-officer/#:~:text=New%20York%2C%20October%2014%2C%202020,Chief%20Diversity%20and%20Inclusion%20Officer" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sony Music’s Tiffany R. Warren</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.pressroom.ups.com/pressroom/ContentDetailsViewer.page?ConceptType=PressReleases&amp;id=1607452098783-458" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">UPS’ Charlene Thomas</a>, being among those tapped to serve as their companies’ firsts.



Recent years have seen C-suites expand to encompass titles beyond the traditional CFO, CMO, COO and, of course, CEO. And while some newcomers have been sector-specific—think, <a href="https://investors.virgingalactic.com/news/news-details/2020/Virgin-Galactic-Announces-Michael-Colglazier-as-Chief-Executive-Officer-in-Preparation-for-Commercial-Service/default.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Virgin Galactic’s chief space officer</a>, Michael Colglazier, named in July—most mirror the state of business and, more broadly, the world. “We’re going through a crisis, but at the same time, C-suites and boards are saying, ‘We need to reset,’” says Radhika Papandreou, senior client partner at Korn Ferry. “They need to make sure they have the right talent to not only recover, but to use the recovery as an opportunity to innovate.” And so it’s no wonder so many chief diversity officers made their debuts in 2020 amid the national reckoning on racial injustice.



For Terry, who had spent the better part of his 23 years with the insurer driving diversity and inclusion through its African American employee resource group, his appointment meant formalizing the organization’s efforts, facilitating company-wide conversations about race and creating a D&amp;I governance council. “This group is charged with refining and shaping our enterprise strategy,” Terry says. “While I have the formal title, and it’s something where I have a high degree of ownership and accountability, the truth of the matter is for any diversity and inclusion initiative to be successful, it has to live in the business, it has to be integrated into everything that we do.”



Diversity officers aren’t the only chiefs who have been in demand as a result of the events of 2020. When the coronavirus pandemic forced countless companies to embrace remote work overnight, chief revenue officers found themselves more reliant than ever before on marketing and technology to maintain healthy bottom lines. Some corporations consolidated these functions under the role of chief growth officer.&nbsp;



“You can have such a rigid split that it’s hard for everyone to cooperate and work together, to build the kinds of projects that are multi-teamed,” says George Anders, senior editor at large at LinkedIn and author of the study. “Having a chief growth officer provides a way that someone can look over the walls and see how all the pieces fit together.”



Chief growth officers were hired at a rate of 46% in 2020—second only to CDOs—after several years of steadily gaining steam, with such <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-found-57-routes-c-suite-youre-problem-fixer-step-right-anders/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">appointments increasing 42%</a> from 2015 to 2019. Gap and eBay were among those organizations to tap their first CGOs, naming <a href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201124005379/en/Gap-Inc.-Appoints-New-Chief-Growth-Officer-and-New-President-and-CEO-of-Banana-Republic" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Asheesh Saksena</a> and <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ebay-names-julie-loeger-global-chief-growth-officer-301183002.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Julie Loeger</a> in November and December. Meanwhile, Mars Wrigley expanded the responsibilities associated with its existing global growth officer role upon promoting <a href="https://www.mars.com/news-and-stories/press-releases/mars-wrigley-introduces-new-chief-growth-officer" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cathryn Sleight</a> to the job in July.



sumer behaviors and tastes have changed amid Covid-19, having all of these areas under one umbrella has paid dividends, chief among them partnerships with food delivery services DoorDash and goPuff, and the acquisitions of Kind and Nature’s Bakery.



But that’s not to say Sleight works in a silo. In fact, she often finds herself collaborating with one of her more traditional counterparts: the CFO. “We need to make sure that the programs we put in place have strong ROIs and are delivering the right level of growth to ensure we capture our fair share of the profit pools,” she says. “Working things through together, you get much better solutions.”



If the state of the C-suite is a reflection of the state of the world, it should come as no surprise that chief medical officer appointments increased in 2020. While it certainly isn’t a new position—or at least not in hospitals and healthcare companies, where it’s long been commonplace—and its growth rate wasn’t as high as that of CDOs and CGOs—LinkedIn pegs it at 4%—the coronavirus pandemic has spurred its expansion into new industries. PepsiCo and Tyson tapped <a href="https://www.pepsico.com/news/press-release/pepsico-appoints-dr.-pietro-antonio-tataranni-as-chief-medical-officer" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dr. Pietro Antonio Tataranni</a> and <a href="https://ir.tyson.com/news/news-details/2020/Tyson-Foods-Launches-New-Nationwide-COVID-Monitoring-Strategy-Expands-Health-Staff/default.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dr. Claudia Coplein</a> for their newly created chief medical officer roles in November and December, and <a href="https://www.royalcaribbeanpresscenter.com/press-release/1459/royal-caribbean-group-names-dr-calvin-johnson-global-head-public-health-and-chief-medical-officer/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Royal Caribbean hired Dr. Calvin Johnson</a> as its first CMO and global head of public health in July.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“I don’t think these were knee-jerk reactions to what we’ve gone through. Some of this had already been thought about in board and C-suites—the pandemic accelerated the decisions.”-Radhika Papandreou, senior client partner, Korn Ferry</blockquote>



“Truth be told, if you’d asked me a few months earlier, I would not have believed you,” says Dr. Johnson of his appointment. “In a word, it was the pandemic. It literally stopped Royal in its tracks.”



The travel and hospitality industry has been hard hit by Covid-19, and cruise companies, including Royal Caribbean, were among the first to feel its effect, their common spaces and close quarters ideal settings for outbreaks. While Royal Caribbean did have healthcare infrastructure in place, as well as individuals to oversee it on a part-time basis, it didn’t have a dedicated leader, let alone one who had the ear of the CEO.



“A lot of C-level titles are created when companies have a crisis,” Anders says. “In 2019, we saw a lot of tech companies creating chief people officers. That happened to coincide with a sense that some tech companies were having a hard time getting the human side of their companies right.”



Like all medical chiefs, Dr. Johnson is responsible for delivering care to patients, in his case passengers and crew. He oversees more than 60 medical sites on ships sailing all around the world. During a global public health crisis, this means being in constant communication with his fellow executives. “Normal crew movement, which before wouldn’t necessarily have to have medical or public health involvement, now does because it involves ensuring the crew coming on board isn’t coming on with the virus. It is testing, screening and educating, from a prevention perspective,” Dr. Johnson says. “For crew rotating off, it’s ensuring they’re not taking the virus off and into the community.”



Would Royal Caribbean have needed a chief medical officer had it not been for Covid-19? It’s hard to say. But as reactive as the appointment—and that of this year’s other C-suite recruits—may have been, it’s not likely to result in a transient tenure. “I don’t think these were knee-jerk reactions to what we’ve gone through,” says Papandreou. “Some of this had already been thought about inboard and C-suites—the pandemic accelerated the decisions.”



-by Vicky Valet, Forbes Staff

Businesswoman looks across city at sunrise

The New C-Suite: How 2020 Shaped Corporate America’s Executive Ranks

Our tech guru rounds up the coolest tools for 2021 and beyond. 



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-1-lifesmart-magic-mirror">1. LIFESMART MAGIC MIRROR</h4>



<div class="wp-block-image is-style-default"><figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/LifeSmart-Magic-Mirror-1024x894.png" alt="" class="wp-image-49412" width="508" height="443" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/LifeSmart-Magic-Mirror-1024x894.png 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/LifeSmart-Magic-Mirror-300x262.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/LifeSmart-Magic-Mirror-768x671.png 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/LifeSmart-Magic-Mirror-1536x1342.png 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/LifeSmart-Magic-Mirror-600x524.png 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/LifeSmart-Magic-Mirror.png 2000w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 508px) 100vw, 508px" /></figure></div>



The Magic Mirror merges fashion with technology. It can be mounted at a central location like the entrance to the home, the bedroom or the bathroom. It has smart features that let you control supported home appliances, similar to a smart speaker. It features an auto-wake-up function, health management, voice control, entertainment functions, and has a built-in camera. The Magic Mirror is Android-powered and runs on a MediaTek chip with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of memory. You simply scan a QR code to set up and select personal preferences. 



R29,995 ($1,915) from Mikrotech.co.za



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-2-samsung-galaxy-z-fold-2">2. SAMSUNG GALAXY Z FOLD 2</h4>



The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 is the gadget to own for early adopters. Samsung’s newest folding screen device is an incredible piece of tech, boasting an ultra-thin glass top over last year’s plastic one. The Infinity-O display, 120Hz refresh rate and multi-tasking capabilities make it a pleasure to use. Add to it a triple lens camera, 5G support, a massive fast-charging battery and what more could you want? If this is the future of mobile, we’re excited.



R46,995 ($3,000) from Samsung stores.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-3-ipad-air-64gb-cellular">3. IPAD AIR (64GB CELLULAR)</h4>



The new iPad Air takes Work From Anywhere to another level. Weighing just under 500g, it runs on Apple’s fastest A14 Bionic chip and is more powerful than most PCs. Plus, the pencil and keyboard accessories give you flexibility on what you can do or how creative you get to be. It has a 10.9-inch display, narrow bezels and 12MP camera; ideally suited for today’s environment as a result of the global pandemic. Work or play, it has an excellent battery life. This sleek tablet now comes in pastel hues like blue, green and pink, in addition to silver and grey. 



R14,999 ($958) at the iStore.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-4-ring-video-doorbell-3">4. RING VIDEO DOORBELL 3</h4>



Amazon’s popular Ring Video Doorbell 3 is now available in South Africa for the first time. For added peace of mind, it has motion detection and live view, above its two-way talk system. It features a 1080p full HD camera, enhanced dual-band 2.4-5Ghz WiFi connectivity and Alexa support. It works with the user-friendly Ring app, accessible from a mobile device. The adjustable Near Zone feature detects motion within 1.5m to 4.5m from the front door. Privacy features support areas that can be excluded from the camera’s field of view and the ability to turn off video or audio recording.



R3,999 ($255) from Takealot.com



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-5-smeg-d-g-espresso-machine">5. SMEG D&amp;G ESPRESSO MACHINE</h4>



<div class="wp-block-image is-style-default"><figure class="alignright size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Smeg-DG-Espresso-1024x955.png" alt="" class="wp-image-49414" width="377" height="351" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Smeg-DG-Espresso-1024x955.png 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Smeg-DG-Espresso-300x280.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Smeg-DG-Espresso-768x716.png 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Smeg-DG-Espresso-1536x1432.png 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Smeg-DG-Espresso-600x559.png 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Smeg-DG-Espresso.png 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 377px) 100vw, 377px" /></figure></div>



The Smeg Dolce &amp; Gabanna manual espresso machine is for serious coffee-lovers who also appreciate a touch of luxury. This retro statement piece with its Sicilian-inspired geometric pattern deserves a special spot in the kitchen. It has a removable 1L tank, adjustable coffee temperature and supports three cup sizes (Ristretto, Espresso and Lungi) with a milk froth function. Other features include an anti-drip system, descaling indicator and adjustable stand-by times between nine minutes to three hours. The 1350W espresso machine is made in Italy. 



R24,699 ($1,576) from Yuppiechef.com



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-6-jekyll-hide-montana-backpack">6. JEKYLL &amp; HIDE MONTANA BACKPACK</h4>



<div class="wp-block-image is-style-default"><figure class="alignleft size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Jekyll-Hyde-Backpack-784x1024.png" alt="" class="wp-image-49411" width="336" height="438" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Jekyll-Hyde-Backpack-784x1024.png 784w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Jekyll-Hyde-Backpack-230x300.png 230w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Jekyll-Hyde-Backpack-768x1003.png 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Jekyll-Hyde-Backpack-1176x1536.png 1176w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Jekyll-Hyde-Backpack-300x392.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Jekyll-Hyde-Backpack-600x784.png 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Jekyll-Hyde-Backpack.png 1400w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 336px) 100vw, 336px" /></figure></div>



The Montana overnight business backpack from Jekyll &amp; Hide is stylish and durable, made from full-grain leather available in a beautiful colt shade. The layout is organized with compartments for a laptop, tablet, travel documents, business cards, cables, pens, etc. Its dimensions are 31 x 15 x 45cm and have secure fastening straps; a front zipped pocket, and a secure RFID slot to protect bank cards and passports from identity theft. The main zipped pocket has dedicated 15” laptop and tablet slots. As an overnighter, the middle compartment accommodates a change of clothes or shoes.



R6,999 ($447) at JekyllandHide.co.za



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-7-under-armour-hovr-machina">7. UNDER ARMOUR HOVR MACHINA</h4>



<div class="wp-block-image is-style-default"><figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/UA-Hovr-Machina-1024x633.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-49415" width="380" height="234" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/UA-Hovr-Machina-1024x633.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/UA-Hovr-Machina-300x186.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/UA-Hovr-Machina-768x475.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/UA-Hovr-Machina-1536x950.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/UA-Hovr-Machina-2048x1267.jpg 2048w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/UA-Hovr-Machina-600x371.jpg 600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 380px) 100vw, 380px" /></figure></div>



If lockdown had you turn to fitness, check out Under Armour’s Hovr Machina running shoes. The Bluetooth-powered sneaker connects to a smartphone app to provide stats like step count, cadence, stride length, foot strike angle, etc. It also acts as a real-time running coach with personalized guidance, and how to better manage the risk of injury while improving performance. The Hovr Machina provides a ‘zero gravity feel’ through its responsive carbon-plated propulsion soles and has the right amount of cushioning. It’s comfortable to wear when not training and suitable for marathons and long distances. Available in sizes for men and women in various shades.



R2,999 ($191) at UnderArmour.co.za



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-8-sony-playstation-5">8. SONY PLAYSTATION 5</h4>



Sony’s much-anticipated next-generation gaming console has landed in time for the holiday season. The PlayStation 5’s futuristic design has gained a lot of attention since its reveal but given the uptake in gaming during lockdown globally, it’s a no-brainer. There will be two variants available, one with an optical drive and one without. The PS5 supports graphics up to 4K, a high-speed 825GB SSD, and 3D audio on its wireless controller. Exclusive titles at launch include Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Sackboy A Big Adventure, and Horizon Forbidden West. Digital Edition:



R9,999 ($638) and Blu-Ray: R11,999 ($766) via Raru.co.za



Dollar prices are approximates as per the exchange rate at the time of going to press.



 &#8211;BY NAFISA AKABOR

Black Friday

Luxury Gift Guide: A Mirror With Memory?

The newest superstar investor has leveraged a zealous belief in innovation into a $29 billion-in-assets firm and a $250 million net worth. Among her predictions: Elon Musk&#8217;s car company is vastly undervalued.



Tesla shares were limping along around $200 in May 2019, about where they had traded five years earlier, when Elon Musk’s biggest Wall Street booster tried a gutsy experiment. Cathie Wood and her Ark Investment Management were already well-known for their way-out-there predictions that Tesla would build a fleet of robo-taxis worth $1 trillion and that its shares would soar 20- or 30-fold by 2023. Now she stirred the pot again by publishing online Ark’s new bull’s-case valuation of $1.4 trillion, implying a share price above $6,000, complete with every Excel calculation and assumption behind those estimates. 



Criticism came fast and furious. Tesla short seller Jim Chanos, famed for uncovering Enron’s fraud, took Wood to task over Ark’s forecasts of Tesla’s gross margins. “[W]hat Ark has produced is a forward pricing for Tesla, not a valuation,’’ sniffed valuation expert Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University. The model, he noted, didn’t include a discounted cash-flow analysis and carried incomplete forecasts on the costs Tesla would incur to scale its vehicle production. That $1 trillion value Ark was placing on Tesla’s nonexistent robo-taxi fleet? “Strikes me as more fairy tale than valuation,’’ Damodaran opined.&nbsp;



Sixteen months later, Tesla shares—after a five-for-one August stock split—were trading at $400. In other words, they’d risen tenfold, driven up by speculation and excitement over Musk’s autonomous-driving and battery technologies and Tesla’s stronger-than-expected financial performance. Musk’s car company is now worth five times more than Ford and General Motors combined, and Wood has made a fortune. The nitpicking skeptics, she believes, have missed the big picture: As electric cars go increasingly mainstream, production efficiencies and advances in batteries and other technologies will cut what it costs to make them. And as sticker prices fall, demand will surge, including from businesses like ride-sharing companies. In September, Musk promised a $25,000 car within three years.&nbsp;



Meanwhile, Wood, 64, is perfectly happy to have a chorus of critics: “It almost makes me feel comfortable, to be honest, because it means if we’re right, then the rewards will be pretty enormous.”&nbsp;



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



<h1 class="has-text-align-center wp-block-heading">Loaded on the Ark</h1>



Cathie Wood’s ETFs bet on big ideas and industry disruptors. Here are some of her top holdings.



<figure class="wp-block-table is-style-stripes"><table><tbody><tr><td>ETF</td><td>Stock</td><td>1-Year Gain</td><td>Bullish Case</td></tr><tr><td>ARKK (Innovation)</td><td>Invitae Corp.</td><td>109%</td><td>Genetic-testing innovators could cut health-care costs.</td></tr><tr><td>ARKW (Next-gen internet)</td><td>Roku</td><td>68%</td><td>Consumer operating system for streaming media. </td></tr><tr><td>ARKQ (Robotics) </td><td>Proto Labs </td><td>26%</td><td>3D printer lowering costs in industries like aerospace. </td></tr><tr><td>ARKG (Genomics)</td><td>CRISPR Therapeutics</td><td>81%</td><td>Gene editor developing treatments for cancer and diabetes. </td></tr><tr><td>ARKF(Fintech)</td><td>Square </td><td>185%</td><td>The payment processor is becoming a digital bank. </td></tr></tbody></table></figure>



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



Wood’s comfort with going her own way has helped her turn Ark into one of the fastest-growing and top-performing investment firms in the world. Its flagship $8.6 billion Ark Innovation Fund is up a staggering 75% in 2020 and has returned an annual average of 36% over the past five years, nearly triple that of the S&amp;P 500.&nbsp;



While most star stock pickers treat their work like state secrets, Wood makes Ark’s research freely available online and posts real-time logs of her firm’s trades. Instead of hiring MBAs, she prefers to bring onboard young analysts with backgrounds in subjects like molecular biology or computer engineering, figuring they’re more likely to spot the next trend. Even the structure of Ark, an acronym for Active Research Knowledge, is original. Wood manages seven portfolios designed to capitalize on breakthroughs in robotics, energy storage, DNA sequencing and financial and blockchain technology, and makes them available to investors, particularly Millennials trading on Robinhood, as tax-efficient exchange-traded funds.&nbsp;



Its Tesla position and a pandemic that has accelerated adoption of the technologies embedded in the 35 to 55 companies in each Ark ETF have helped its assets nearly triple in 2020, to $29 billion. “Coronavirus has catapulted our innovative platforms into high gear because they solve problems,” Wood says. “Innovation solves problems.”&nbsp;



Forbes&nbsp;conservatively values Ark at $500 million, or about 2% of assets under management, roughly the same multiple as publicly traded T. Rowe Price commands. Wood’s 50%-plus ownership gives her a net worth of $250 million, good for the No. 80 spot on&nbsp;Forbes’&nbsp;sixth annual list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women.&nbsp;



It’s easy to dismiss Wood as the face of a stock-market bubble created by the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policies. But she has survived her share of both bubbles and bear markets. While an economics student at the University of Southern California, she studied under supply-side guru Arthur Laffer and apprenticed from 1977 to 1980 at Los Angeles fund giant Capital Group, watching as interest rates approaching 20% crushed the economy and the market. After graduating in 1981, she joined Jennison Associates, now an equity investment arm of Prudential, as an economist in New York. There she made an early call that inflation and interest rates had peaked. That garnered eye rolls from her superiors, but Wood was right—and the experience inculcated in her an appreciation for the potentially big upside of going against consensus. 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote has-text-align-center is-style-large is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">As the pandemic took hold, Cathie Wood loaded up on tech stocks that she correctly predicted would lead the recovery—and bought herself a house in ritzy Hilton Head, South Carolina, from which to work.</blockquote>



Frustrated with her career path at Jennison and wanting to research individual companies, one Friday Wood up and quit. Her mentor at the firm persuaded her to return the following Monday and moved her into equity research. She covered nascent wireless telecom companies in the late 1980s and early ’90s, getting a ground-floor view of the huge economic and societal changes coming as cellphones grew ubiquitous. In 2001, she moved to New York–based AllianceBernstein as chief investment officer for thematic portfolios. But the 2008 financial crisis ushered in an era in which active managers underperformed the S&amp;P 500 and trillions flooded into low-cost index funds. Wood decided a fresh approach was needed. In 2012, she proposed putting actively managed portfolios of innovative companies inside an ETF structure. The idea got nowhere at AllianceBernstein.&nbsp;



Two years later, she launched Ark in New York. Success wasn’t immediate. In the firm’s first two years, its flagship fund placed in the bottom quartile of its peer group, according to Morningstar. By the end of 2016, Wood had attracted just $307 million in assets, and Ark’s 0.75% management fee wasn’t covering overhead. To keep going, she dug deep in her savings, sold minority stakes and struck partnerships with larger firms to build distribution. Japan’s Nikko Asset Management and the mutual fund firm American Beacon now own 39% of the company. Almost 10% is owned by the firm’s two dozen employees.



In 2017, Ark took off, buoyed by surging prices for stocks like Netflix, Salesforce, DNA sequencer Illumina, digital-payments processor Square and digital health provider Athenahealth. Assets rose tenfold, and Ark began to build its brand on the back of bold predictions, an active Twitter presence and the free research it put online. (It also attracted notice for a cryptocurrency fund available only to accredited investors; Wood started buying Bitcoin, which she calls an “insurance policy” against inflation, in 2015 at $250 a coin.) &nbsp;



Wood takes a top-down approach to building portfolios, first identifying disruptions by any means possible, including crowdsourcing—she even opens the firm’s Friday afternoon research meetings to outsiders, who can call in via Lifesize. Economics is central. Wood is most bullish on innovations if she believes their costs will decline over time, creating real demand. When scoring potential holdings, Ark looks at corporate culture and management execution on growth initiatives. Only at the end of the process does Wood value a company, refusing to buy anything she doesn’t expect will rise by 15% annually over five years, Ark’s minimum expected holding period. 



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



The tumult of 2020 has been good for Ark. In March, when the pandemic emerged and stocks plunged, Wood correctly predicted fast-growing tech companies would lead the world (and financial markets) to recovery. She concentrated Ark portfolios in Tesla and other top picks including education-software company 2U and real estate platform Zillow. Then, in late summer, when Tesla soared, she trimmed her holdings and built a large position in the battered shares of Slack.



With all successful innovations, of course, come copycats. Gimmicky themed ETFs have proliferated in everything from pets to sports gambling to work-from-home. Fund giants Dimensional Fund Advisors, Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price have all recently launched their own slates of actively managed ETFs.&nbsp;



An optimist by nature, Wood nonetheless offers some unsettling predictions for the next five years. She expects a broad swath of large industries—banking, energy, transportation, health care—to be disrupted by technological change, with many workers displaced. The result, she believes, is that economic growth, inflation and broad market indexes will all fall persistently short of expectations, providing an opportunity for active managers to pick the innovative winners that will continue to drive market-cap gains.



“I think the benchmarks and the indexes are going to go through a terrible period. We’re already seeing it,” she says. “We believe they are being increasingly populated by value traps.”&nbsp;



Does she think the market is now in a bubble? Nope. Uncertainty over the pandemic and the election (Wood supports President Trump “unabashedly”) means money has been flowing out of stocks and into the safety of bonds, she notes. “The fact that people are fearful now that we’re back at the S&amp;P 500 trading at 25 times earnings tells me that we are not in a bubble at all.” 



-By Antoine Gara, Forbes Staff

Key Speakers At The Sooner Than You Think Technology Conference

How Cathie Wood Beat Wall Street By Betting Tesla Is Worth More Than $1 Trillion

Apple hit a new milestone on Wednesday, becoming the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach a market capitalization of over $2 trillion and doubling in valuation over the last two years.



KEY FACTS



The iPhone maker’s stock is up almost 55% so far in 2020, and shares have rallied more than 106% since the market hit a low point amid the coronavirus recession on March 23 (compared to the benchmark S&amp;P 500’s gain of 51% over that period).



Now trading at nearly $470 per share, Apple’s stock is at an all-time high, and Wall Street analysts are still quite bullish that it can continue to rally: 61% give it a “buy” rating and 27% a “hold” rating, according to Bloomberg data.



Apple’s market cap now eclipses that of other U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft ($1.7 trillion), Amazon ($1.6 trillion), Google parent Alphabet ($1.1 trillion) and Facebook ($761 billion).



Apple was also the first U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market cap, which it did just over two years ago, on August 2, 2018.



On July 31, 2020, after reporting strong&nbsp;<a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/07/apple-reports-third-quarter-results/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">third-quarter earnings</a>, Apple surpassed Saudi state oil giant Aramco to become the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.



While Saudi Aramco&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/12/saudi-aramco-hits-2-trillion-market-cap-on-second-day-of-trading.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">surpassed a $2 trillion valuation</a>&nbsp;in December 2019, plunging oil prices amid the coronavirus pandemic have since hurt its stock.



SURPRISING FACT



At $2 trillion, Apple’s market value is now&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/charliebilello/status/1296095582533148674?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">higher than the GDP</a>&nbsp;of numerous developed countries, including Italy, Brazil, Canada, Russia and South Korea, to name a few.



WHAT TO WATCH FOR



Apple shares are about to get more affordable for investors, too. The company will finalize its four-for-one stock split at the end of August, which means a single share will be worth around $117. While the value of the company will remain the same, there will now be more shares available trading at lower prices.



KEY BACKGROUND



Apple has thrived during the pandemic, as many people were forced to stay at home. The company has benefited from work-from-home trends and strong online sales; It posted record third-quarter earnings in late July, with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/07/apple-reports-third-quarter-results/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">nearly $60 billion in revenue</a>, not to mention double-digit growth in its products and services segments.



FURTHER READING



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/08/13/competition-from-apple-wont-derail-peloton-analysts-say/">Could Competition From Apple Derail Peloton? Not So Fast, Analysts Say</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/07/24/apple-microsoft-amazon-google-and-facebook-make-up-a-record-chunk-of-the-sp-500-heres-why-that-might-be-dangerous/">Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google And Facebook Make Up A Record Chunk Of The S&amp;P 500. Here’s Why That Might Be Dangerous</a> (Forbes)



-Sergei Klebnikov, Forbes Staff

DOUNIAMAG-US-IT-APPLE-NEWS-FEED

Apple Becomes First U.S. Company Worth More Than $2 Trillion

From makeup mogul Kylie Jenner to Hong Kong real estate heir Jonathan Kwok, these 10 billionaires are worth $15.9 billion combined.



Of the 2,095 billionaires in the world, only ten are 30 or younger. Together, this precocious bunch is worth $15.9 billion. They span the globe, hailing from the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland and Norway.



Despite the global markets falling in response to the COVID-19 pandemic,&nbsp;three&nbsp;people under 30 made the list for the first time this year.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/pedro-de-godoy-bueno/#10a957165124">Pedro de Godoy Bueno</a>, age 29, inherited assets from his billionaire father, Edson de Godoy Bueno, who died in 2017. Pedro’s fortune rose in the past year to an estimated $1.1 billion as stock of Brazilian laboratory services firm Diagnósticos da América SA tripled. The second new entrant is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/lisa-draexlmaier/#6d899607309c">Lisa Draexlmaier</a>, age 29, who owns and is co-CEO (with her father Fritz) of the holding company for German auto parts maker&nbsp;Fritz Draexlmaier Co &amp; KG.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/elisabeth-furtwaengler/#5de9ffd82fe3">Elizabeth Furtwaenger</a>, 28, is now worth $1.2 billion after her father Hubert Burda gave her a 37.4% stake in the family’s media empire.



Just three of this elite cohort are <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2019/04/08/in-defense-of-kylie-jenner-are-any-of-the-worlds-billionaires-entirely-selfmade/#7260729477b7">self-made</a> billionaires: Snap cofounder CEO <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/evan-spiegel/#494a4370529c">Evan Spiegel</a>, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/john-collison/#67ba93f644f3">John Collison</a> of payments startup Stripe and, yes, makeup mogul <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/kylie-jenner/">Kylie Jenner</a>. In November, she inked a deal to sell a 51% stake in Kylie Cosmetics to beauty giant Coty Inc. for $600 million. Jenner recently donated $1 million to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, the hospital where she gave birth to daughter Stormi in 2018, to buy personal protective equipment such as masks and face shields.



Collison, born and raised in Limerick, Ireland, but now living in San Francisco, is the richest billionaire under 30, with a fortune of $3.2 billion. The value of his stake in privately held Stripe has nearly tripled in the past two years thanks to three nine-figure funding rounds. The most recent, a $250 million Series G in September, put Stripe’s valuation at $35 billion.



The seven others under 30 all inherited their wealth.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/jonathan-kwok/#69b1a5157aef">Jonathan Kwok</a>, 28, first became a billionaire in his own right after his father, Hong Kong property mogul Walter Kwok, passed away in 2018.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/alexandra-andresen/#7b2b64d9682a">Alexandra Andresen</a>, now 23, has been a billionaire since she was 19 thanks to her stake in Ferd, the Norwegian investment company her father still runs.



Here are the 10 youngest members of the 2020 Billionaires list, starting with the youngest. Net worths were calculated using stock prices and exchange rates from March 18, 2020:



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e86a4380483f0000607a9d8/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="1-LeftNumber960"/></figure>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">KYLIE JENNER</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">AGE:&nbsp;22</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">NET WORTH:&nbsp;$1 BILLION</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">SOURCE OF WEALTH: COSMETICS</h3>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/960x0.png" alt="" class="wp-image-44356" width="699" height="393" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/960x0.png 960w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/960x0-300x169.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/960x0-600x338.png 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/960x0-768x432.png 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 699px) 100vw, 699px" /><figcaption>Image by JAMEL TOPPIN FOR FORBES</figcaption></figure>



The celebrity-turned-makeup-mogul is the world’s youngest self-made billionaire ever. In November, she inked a deal to sell a 51% stake in Kylie Cosmetics to beauty giant Coty Inc. for $600 million.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e86a44aa1a0ef00060520d0/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="2-LeftNumber960"/></figure>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">ALEXANDRA ANDRESEN</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">AGE:&nbsp;23</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">NET WORTH:&nbsp;$1.1 BILLION</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;INVESTMENT FIRM</h3>



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e86a45ea8396000070e786b/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="3-LeftNumber960"/></figure>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">KATHARINA ANDRESEN</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">AGE:&nbsp;24</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">NET WORTH:&nbsp;$1.1 BILLION</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;INVESTMENT FIRM</h3>



The Norwegian sisters each inherited 42% of the family-owned investment company Ferd in 2007. Their father Johan still runs Ferd and controls 70% of the voting rights via a dual-class share structure.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e86a47010005200067dea9a/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="4-LeftNumber960"/></figure>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">GUSTAV MAGNAR WITZOE</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">AGE:&nbsp;26</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">NET WORTH:&nbsp;$2.3 BILLION</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;FISH FARMING</h3>



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/gustav-magnar-witzoe/#287bc32e1fc0">Witzoe</a> owns nearly half of Salmar ASA, one of the world’s largest salmon producers, which is still run by his father. The Norwegian heir has dabbled in modeling as well as tech and real estate investing.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e86a484a8396000070e786e/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="5-LeftNumber960"/></figure>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">ELIZABETH FURTWAENGER</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">AGE:&nbsp;28</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">NET WORTH:&nbsp;$1.2 BILLION</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;PUBLISHING</h3>



Furtwaenger and her older brother Jacob were each given a 37.4% stake in the family’s German media company by their father, Hubert Burda, who is no longer a billionaire. Burda Media’s titles include the German editions of&nbsp;Elle&nbsp;and&nbsp;Playboy.&nbsp;Furtwaenger and her brother Jacob serve on the board of directors.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e86a4951ef5ae000679d5a1/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="6-LeftNumber960"/></figure>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">JONATHAN KWOK</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">AGE:&nbsp;28</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">NET WORTH:&nbsp;$2 BILLION</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;REAL ESTATE</h3>



Kwok, along with his older brother Geoffrey, inherited their late father Walter Kwok’s stake in Sun Hung Kai Properties, Hong Kong’s largest developer, in 2018. Shares of Hong Kong-listed SHKP have declined nearly 18% since the coronavirus outbreak at the start of the year.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e86a4a510005200067dea9d/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="7-LeftNumber960"/></figure>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">JOHN COLLISON</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">AGE:&nbsp;29</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">NET WORTH:&nbsp;$3.2 BILLION</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;STRIPE</h3>



Stripe, the payments company founded by John and his older brother Patrick, raised $250 million from investors at a $35 billion valuation in September 2019. John, born and raised near Limerick, Ireland, now lives in San Francisco, where Stripe is headquartered.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="960" height="960" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/960x0-1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-44357" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/960x0-1.png 960w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/960x0-1-300x300.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/960x0-1-100x100.png 100w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/960x0-1-600x600.png 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/960x0-1-150x150.png 150w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/960x0-1-768x768.png 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/960x0-1-80x80.png 80w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 960px) 100vw, 960px" /><figcaption>Image by JAMEL TOPPIN FOR FORBES</figcaption></figure>



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e86a4b5a1a0ef00060520d3/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="8-LeftNumber960"/></figure>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">EVAN SPIEGEL</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">AGE:&nbsp;29</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">NET WORTH:&nbsp;$1.9 BILLION</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;SNAP</h3>



The Snapchat cofounder is one of the youngest CEOs of a publicly-traded company in the world. After rallying in 2019, Snap stock is down 50% since the start of the year. Spiegel, who was born in the U.S., quietly became a dual American-French citizen in 2018, according to reports in the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/hightech/exclusif-comment-le-pdg-de-snapchat-est-devenu-francais-1156728" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">French press</a>.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e886a4ab0a4e4000746bc7e/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="Evan Spiegel"/><figcaption>Image by MICHAEL GRECO</figcaption></figure>



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e86a4c51ef5ae000679d5a4/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="9-LeftNumber960"/></figure>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">PEDRO DE GODOY BUENO</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">AGE:&nbsp;29</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">NET WORTH:&nbsp;$1.1 BILLION</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;DIAGNOSTIC SERVICES</h3>



A newcomer to the billionaire ranks, Pedro is the son of the late Edson de Godoy Bueno (d. 2017), once Brazil’s richest healthcare billionaire. Bueno is the CEO and largest shareholder of laboratory services firm Diagnósticos da América SA, which has seen its shares nearly triple over the past year.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e86a4d4a1a0ef00060520d6/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="10-LeftNumber960"/></figure>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">LISA DRAEXLMAIER</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">AGE:&nbsp;29</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">NET WORTH:&nbsp;$1 BILLION</h3>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">SOURCE OF WEALTH:&nbsp;AUTO PARTS</h3>



Draexlmaier and her father, Fritz, are co-CEOs of Fritz Draexlmaier Holdings GmbH, the holding company of the autoparts maker of the same name. Lisa, now the sole owner, joins the billionaires’ list for the first time.



Editor&#8217;s note: This post has been updated to include Elizabeth Furtwaenger.



&#8211;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/">Hayley C. Cuccinello</a>, Forbes Staff, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/worlds-billionaires">Billionaires</a>

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Meet The World’s 10 Youngest Billionaires In 2020

Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos lost his title as the richest man in the world during after-hours trading on Thursday, after his ecommerce behemoth reported lackluster third-quarter earnings.&nbsp;



Amazon shares fell 7% in after-hours trading, knocking Bezos’ fortune down to $103.9 billion. That puts him at number two among the world’s richest. The new number one: Microsoft cofounder and fellow Washington state resident Bill Gates, who is worth $105.7 billion.&nbsp;



Bezos became the richest man in the world in 2018 and the first centibillionaire to ever appear on the The Forbes 400 that year with a net worth of $160 billion, ending Gates’ 24-year run as number one. 



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But the Amazon chief executive&#8217;s net worth drop isn’t entirely due to the decline in Amazon shares. Bezos transferred a quarter of his Amazon stake to his ex-wife MacKenzie Bezos as part of their divorce settlement, which was finalized earlier this year. MacKenzie Bezos is worth $32.7 billion, and among the top twenty wealthiest people in the world.&nbsp;



On Thursday afternoon, Amazon reported a 26% drop in net income in its third quarter, its first profit decline since 2017.&nbsp; In after-hours trading, Amazon dropped nearly 9% to $1,624 per share in the 20 minutes after the market closed. It has since rebounded slightly, hovering at $1,657 per share at 7:30 p.m. ET



The company said it is investing heavily in logistics and delivery infrastructure, with the goal of making one-day shipping the norm for Amazon Prime members. 



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The company disclosed during its second quarter earnings call in July that it had spent “a little bit” more than the estimated $800 million that it has previously said it would invest in one-day shipping infrastructure. 



The company declined to disclose how much it had spent on one-day shipping in the third quarter. But chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky did disclose Thursday that the company plans to spend $1.5 billion in the fourth quarter, presumably to finance the one-day shipping initiative. 



Gates, meanwhile, has been out of Microsoft since 2014 when he stepped down as chairman of the storied company, though he remains a board member. He has sold or given away the majority of his Microsoft stake and diversified his wealth over time. He is now the co-chairman of the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private charitable foundation in the world.&nbsp;



Bill Gates debuted on Forbes’ first ever billionaire list in 1987 with a net worth of $1.25 billion. Bezos first joined The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans in 1998, one year after Amazon went public, with a net worth of $1.6 billion. 



-Angel Au-Yeung; Forbes

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Jeff Bezos Is No Longer The Richest Person In The World After Amazon Stock Plunges

This has been a year of record-setting in billionaire philanthropy. In September, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, owners of POM Wonderful and Fiji Water, pledged $750 million to the California Institute of Technology for environmental sustainability research. 



In June, Blackstone cofounder Stephen Schwarzman donated $189 million to the University of Oxford—the largest single gift to the school since the Renaissance—to fund its work on humanities. The same month, Broadcom billionaire Henry Samueli pledged $100 million to UCLA’s engineering school, the largest gift ever to the department. 



Forbes tracks gifts and pledges like these as part of our ongoing coverage of charitable giving by the country’s richest people.



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For the second year in a row, Forbes tracked the philanthropic giving of the richest 400 individuals in the U.S. and gave each member of The Forbes 400 list a philanthropy score. The score ranged from 1 to 5,  with 5 being the most philanthropic. List members for whom we could find no charitable giving information received an N.A. (not available).



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5da485de6763cb000608aa94/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="Philanthropy Forbes 400"/><figcaption>FORBES</figcaption></figure>



Though the number of the biggest givers—those who scored a 5—stayed flat in 2019, those who received scores of 4 and 3 increased compared with a year ago. 



The changes reflect two things: The country’s richest have gotten somewhat more generous, and Forbes had more information to work with this year. Some billionaires were willing to share information on charitable giving for the 2019 list who didn’t in 2018. As a result, four dozen people got higher scores this year than a year ago. 



This year, Warren Buffett led the list of top givers with $38.8 billion in lifetime giving, which is 32% of his net worth, and earned the top score of 5. 



He was followed by last year’s biggest giver, Bill Gates, who has donated $38.5 billion so far. Two people who scored a 5 last year—Paul Allen and David Koch—passed away. 



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Billionaires like DreamWorks Pictures founder David Geffen and WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton moved up to the top score after each scored a 4 last year. According to the latest tax filings, Geffen gave $38 million to his foundation in 2017, which brought his lifetime giving to about $1 billion. 



Acton and his wife Tegan, on the other hand, have been expanding their philanthropic network, Wildcard Giving, which they founded in 2014 after Acton sold WhatsApp to Facebook. The couple has given away more than $1 billion to charitable causes.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5da48621cd594c000620fe51/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="2019 Forbes 400 Giving"/><figcaption>FORBES</figcaption></figure>



Forty-one billionaires, including Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings and software billionaire Philip “Terry” Ragon, got higher scores this year than last year. Some, like Stephen Schwarzman, earned a higher score thanks to giving in the past year. 



Others scored higher because we were able to find more information about their lifetime giving, through new public documents or details provided to us by Forbes 400 members or their spokespeople. In September, a Los Angeles Times report revealed that B. 



Wayne Hughes, cofounder of self-storage behemoth Public Storage, had anonymously donated about $400 million to the University of Southern California in his lifetime. Hughes, who scored a 2 last year, jumped up to a 4.



Private equity tycoon Robert F. Smith’s pledge in May to wipe out the student debt of the entire 2019 graduating class of Morehouse College generated lots of headlines but did not end up changing his score because the gift wasn’t big enough to move him up a notch. In many cases, fortunes grew faster than lifetime philanthropic giving. 



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To come up with the information on which we based our score,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;reporters looked at tax filings for charitable foundations, annual statements, SEC filings and news about new gifts.&nbsp;When possible, we interviewed Forbes 400 members and executives from their foundations. Some Forbes 400 members said they have chosen to donate anonymously, citing religious or privacy concerns.&nbsp;



Our score is based on total lifetime giving and what percent of their fortune members had given away. We weighted these two factors equally. Some individuals were then bumped up or down based on several other factors, including whether they had signed the Giving Pledge, whether they had pledged significant donations, how personally involved they were in their charitable giving, and how quickly and effectively their private foundations distributed dollars. We didn’t count pledges or announced gifts that have yet to be paid out, but we took commitment to philanthropy—or lack thereof—into account.



Forbes has been tracking the wealth of the richest Americans since 1982. “Some of [the members] told us to drop dead,” James Michaels, veteran editor of Forbes, told the New York Times in a 1982 story about the list’s debut. “They said they wanted no part of it, that they’d sue us. 



This happens in reporting.” At times, our reporting on philanthropic giving received a similar response. “The new philanthropy ranking is fundamentally flawed, in that it is biased in favor of those who make their gifts widely known, and against donors who choose to make their charitable contributions anonymously,” one current Forbes 400 member (who did not wish to be named) wrote to us last year.



-Deniz Çam; Forbes

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These Are The Biggest Givers On The Forbes 400

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Mastercard: Diligent About Digital In Africa

Sorry, Ph.D.s! Dean Stoecker’s analytics software, Alteryx, can turn almost anyone into a data scientist. And it’s turned him into a billionaire



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



Sun Tzu&nbsp;meets software in mid-August at downtown Denver’s Crawford Hotel. The floors are terrazzo. The chandeliers are accented with gold. And Dean Stoecker, the CEO of data-science firm Alteryx, has summoned his executives for the annual strategy session he calls Bing Fa, after the Mandarin title of&nbsp;The Art of War. “Sun Tzu was all about how you conserve resources,” says Stoecker, 62. “How do you win a war without going into battle?”



Stoecker knows something about conserving resources. He cofounded Alteryx in 1997, when the data-science industry scarcely existed, and spent a decade growing the firm to a measly $10 million in annual revenue. “We had to wait for the market to catch up,” he says. As he waited, he kept the business lean, hiring slowly and forgoing outside investment until 2011. Then, as “big data” began eating the world, he raised $163 million before taking Alteryx public in 2017. The stock is up nearly 900% since, and&nbsp;Stoecker&nbsp;is worth an estimated $1.2 billion.&nbsp;



“People ask me, ‘Did you ever think it would get this big?’” he says. “And I say, ‘Yeah, I just never thought it would take this long.’ ”



Alteryx makes data science easy. Its simple, click-and-drop design lets anyone, from recent grads to emeritus chairmen, turn raw numbers into charts and graphics. It goes far beyond Excel. Plug in some numbers, select the desired operation—say data cleansing or linear regression—and presto.&nbsp;



There are applications in every industry. Coca-Cola uses Alteryx to help restaurants predict how much soda to order. Airlines use it to hedge the price of jet fuel. Banks use it to model derivatives. Data analysis “is the one skill that every human being has to have if they’re going to survive in this next generation,” says Stoecker. “More so than balancing a checkbook.”



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5d659930673aa300083c3db8/0x800.jpg?cropX1=0&amp;cropX2=1535&amp;cropY1=578&amp;cropY2=2497" alt="Libby-adams-alteryx"/><figcaption>Libby Duane Adams, cofounder and chief customer officer of Alteryx.ETHAN PINES</figcaption></figure>



Alteryx’s numbers support that forecast. The&nbsp;company, based in Irvine, California, generated $28 million in profit on $254 million in revenue in 2018, and Stoecker expects to hit $1 billion in annual sales by 2022.&nbsp;



Stoecker grew up the son of a tinkerer. His father built liquid nitrogen tanks for NASA before quitting his job to sell “pre-cut” vacation homes in Colorado. He made them himself. “It was literally just him nine months of the year, and he would cut wood for 50 buildings,” Stoecker recalls. As a teenager he joined his father, and by the time he arrived at the University of Colorado Boulder to study economics, he was able to pay his own way.



After graduating in 1979, Stoecker earned his M.B.A. from Pepperdine, then took a sales job in 1990 at Donnelley Marketing Information Services, a data company in Connecticut. There he met Libby Duane Adams, who worked in the firm’s Stamford office. Seven years later, the pair&nbsp;founded&nbsp;a data company of their own, which they cumbersomely named Spatial Re-Engineering Consultants. (A third cofounder, Ned Harding, joined around the same time; Stoecker, who came up with the idea, took the lion’s share of the equity.) &nbsp;



SRC’s first customer, a junk mail company in Orange County, paid $125,000 to better target its coupons. “We were building big-data analytic cloud solutions back in 1998,” says Stoecker, when many businesses were barely online and terms like “cloud computing” were years away.&nbsp;



SRC was profitable from the outset. “We didn’t spend ahead of revenue. We didn’t hire ahead of revenue,” says Adams, sitting in a remodeled 1962 Volkswagen bus at Alteryx headquarters, theoretically a symbol of the company’s journey. “We never calculated burn rates. That was a big topic in the whole dot-com era. We were not running the business like a dot-com.”&nbsp;



<figure><iframe src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fe.infogram.com%2F491907ed-e75b-47b9-94b2-bfff7857f39d%3Fsrc%3Dembed&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Finfogram.com%2Falteryx-1hkv2nqgn5zp2x3&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Finfogram-thumbs-1024.s3.amazonaws.com%2F2e76153a-b2a0-41b3-895e-78c830a443e4.jpg&amp;key=3ce26dc7e3454db5820ba084d28b4935&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=infogram"></iframe></figure>



In 2006, as part of a pivot away from one-off consulting gigs, SRC released software to let customers do the number-crunching themselves. They named the software Alteryx, a nerdy joke for changing two variables simultaneously: “Alter Y, X.” Stoecker made Alteryx the company name, too, in 2010.&nbsp;



The market was still small. To grow revenue, “we just kept raising the price of our platform,” Stoecker says. In the beginning, Alteryx sold its subscription-based software for $7,500 per user; by 2013 it was charging $55,000. The next year, as Stoecker felt demand growing, he slashed prices to $4,000. Volume made up for the lower rate. Today Alteryx has 5,300 customers. “We immediately went from averaging eight, nine or ten [new clients] a quarter to north of 250,” he says.



Although data mining and data analytics is a&nbsp;long-established&nbsp;field, encompassing a slew of startups as well as giants like Oracle and IBM, “we see almost no direct competition,” Stoecker&nbsp;insists.



“It’s a pretty wide-open field,” says Marshall Senk, a senior research analyst at Compass Point Research &amp; Trading. “The choice is you buy a suite from Alteryx or you go buy 15 different products and try to figure out how to get them to work together.”



Inside Alteryx’s offices, Stoecker pauses in front of a time line depicting his first 22 years in business. “The good stuff hasn’t even occurred yet,” he says. “I’m going to need a way bigger wall.”



Cover Photograph by Ethan Pines for Forbes.



-Noah Kirsch; Forbes

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Business Intelligence For Dummies

Woman in cafe shopping online with laptop

The Forbes Guide to Credit Cards

A bankable leading man is still one of Hollywood’s surest bets, even if your name isn’t Leonardo DiCaprio. While the lucrative twenty-twenty deal ($20 million upfront and 20% of gross profit) doled out to the likes of Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise may be more or less gone, Hollywood still has its big-money brands, those actors who can promise an audience so big that they command not only an eight-figure salary to show up on set but also a decent chunk of a film’s nebulous “pool”—or the money left over after some but not all of the bills are paid. 



Dwayne Johnson, also known as the Rock, tops the Forbes list of the world’s ten highest-paid actors, collecting $89.4 million between June 1, 2018, and June 1, 2019.



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“It has to be audience first. What does the audience want, and what is the best scenario that we can create that will send them home happy?” Johnson told Forbes in 2018.



It seems he makes the audience happy. Johnson has landed a pay formula as close to the famed twenty-twenty deal of yore as any star can get these days. He’ll collect an upfront salary of up to $23.5 million—his highest quote yet—for the forthcoming Jumanji: The Next Level. 



He also commands up to 15% of the pool from high-grossing franchise movies, including Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, which had a worldwide box office of $962.1 million. And he is paid $700,000 per episode for HBO’s Ballers and seven figures in royalties for his line of clothing, shoes and headphones with Under Armour.



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While Johnson’s deal is the biggest in the business right now, he’s not the only one with a lucrative deal. Robert Downey Jr. gets $20 million upfront and nearly 8% of the pool for his role as Iron Man, and that amounted to about $55 million for his work in&nbsp;Avengers: Endgame, which grossed $2.796 billion at the box office.&nbsp;



That gross was so big that it secured spots on this year’s top-earner list for Chris Hemsworth, Bradley Cooper and Paul Rudd, in addition to Downey; together, they earned $284 million, with most of that coming from the franchise.&nbsp;



“Celebrities such as Downey and (Scarlett) Johansson currently have extreme leverage to demand enormous compensation packages from studios investing hundreds of millions of dollars in making tent-pole films, such as The Avengers series,” entertainment lawyer David Chidekel of Early Sullivan Wright Gizer &amp; McRae told Forbes. 



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Cooper is the rare actor who can thank a bet on himself for his 2019 ranking. The actor earned only about 10% of his $57 million payday for voicing Rocket Raccoon in Avengers. 



Seventy percent came from A Star Is Born, the smaller musical drama that he directed, produced, cowrote and starred in with Lady Gaga. The movie was a passion project for Cooper, and he forfeited any upfront salary to go into the film and Gaga’s salary. It paid off—the movie, which had a production budget of only $36 million, grossed $435 million worldwide, leaving Cooper with an estimated $40 million. 



The full list is below. Earnings estimates are based on data from Nielsen, ComScore, Box Office Mojo and IMDB, as well as interviews with industry insiders. All figures are pretax; fees for agents, managers and lawyers (generally 10%, 15% and 5%, respectively) are not deducted.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">The World’s Highest-Paid Actors Of 2019</h4>



10. Will Smith



Earnings: $35 million



9. Paul Rudd



Earnings: $41 million



8. Chris Evans



Earnings: $43.5 million



6. Adam Sandler (tie)



Earnings: $57 million



6. Bradley Cooper (tie)



Earnings: $57 million



5. Jackie Chan



Earnings: $58 million



4. Akshay Kumar



Earnings: $65 million



3. Robert Downey Jr.



Earnings: $66 million



2. Chris Hemsworth



Earnings: $76.4 million



1. Dwayne Johnson



-Madeline Berg; Forbes

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The Highest-Paid Actors 2019: Dwayne Johnson, Bradley Cooper And Chris Hemsworth

Gripping a lukewarm Heineken, Jim Gaffigan hunches his six-foot-one frame over a peeling table in the green room of the An Grianán Theatre in Letterkenny, Ireland. Summer nights are never terribly hot in these parts, but this one is warm enough to need some air conditioning, which the theater almost never uses. It’s hardly a glamorous moment. But then again, glamour isn’t really his thing.



“There’s nothing sexy about Jim Gaffigan,” he says, sweat dotting his brow. “I’m not young. I don’t have a full head of hair. I’m out of shape. I don’t talk about having dinner with Kanye.”



Fortunately for him, he is funny. Just ask the more than 300,000 people in 15 countries who’ve paid an average of $56 to see his latest routine. For the 53-year-old father of five, it’s been a grueling schedule: more than 75 cities in the past year, including whistle-stops like Letterkenny, a northern community of 20,000 that was once lauded as the Republic’s “tidiest town.”



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They may not offer much sizzle, but places like this are the lifeblood of Gaffigan’s business. He has raked in $30 million this year, putting him at No. 3 on&nbsp;Forbes’ list of the highest-earning stand-up comedians. Half of that was earned by putting “butts in seats.” 



The rest comes from spreading his punch lines far and wide. And in this business, if those jokes are funny enough—and your reach wide enough—you can fill a lot of seats with a lot of butts. With the right distribution deal, those jokes can deliver exponential returns. But that’s where it gets a bit tricky.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“In the entertainment industry, every house is made of ice and it’s melting,” Gaffigan says. “So you’d better be building a new house.” &nbsp;</blockquote>



Gaffigan’s been building. In 2016, he agreed to partner with Netflix, the industry’s dominant force and home to original specials from all but one of the comedians on&nbsp;Forbes’ ranking. Last year he cut loose from the kingmaker and placed a bigger bet on himself, pairing up with Comedy Dynamics, an independent producer, to release his next special everywhere&nbsp;but&nbsp;Netflix.&nbsp;



Gaffigan will star in the first original stand-up special on Amazon, which is going after the streaming giant with a push into comedy.&nbsp;Quality Time&nbsp;goes live today, and it can be shopped on the open streaming market when its exclusive run with Amazon Prime Video is up in two years. And that market is only expanding.



Gaffigan has learned a bit about home building in the entertainment industry. He cut his teeth on the club circuit in the early 1990s, when HBO was the primary destination for stand-up specials and Comedy Central was a fledgling cable network. 



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In 2000, he landed what was then the holy grail of comedy success—a broadcast sitcom—which was the source of the fortunes the creators of&nbsp;Seinfeld&nbsp;and&nbsp;Roseanne&nbsp;minted once they had enough seasons on the air and could sell the series into syndication.



Gaffigan’s shot proved to be short-lived, but six years later he scored a second chance and headlined a Comedy Central special called&nbsp;Beyond the Pale. This time it paid dividends, landing him his first theater show a month later. The butts were now coming to the seats, and while his rise was live, in person, with microphone in hand, his breakout was digital.



At the time, YouTube was changing the rules of the game, providing comedians a global platform with unprecedented distribution. Then Twitter emerged, giving comedy bookers a real-time assessment of who was attracting audiences. 



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Then came the debut of streaming on Netflix, which latched onto comedy as a cheap and effective way to lure subscribers, while some, notably the now disgraced Louis C.K., used streaming to control their own distribution, making their shows available for fans to purchase directly.



“It was a technological wave that crashed over the stand-up world,” says Wayne Federman, a comedian and professor of the history of stand-up at the University of Southern California. “And we’re still all trying to figure out what’s going on.”



Gaffigan’s first original Netflix special aired in 2017, long after the company had reshaped the industry. It was a promising place to be: Aziz Ansari and Ali Wong were propelled into superstar status through their Netflix specials, while household names like&nbsp;Dave Chappelle&nbsp;and&nbsp;Jerry Seinfeld&nbsp;reportedly cashed in with $60 million (Chappelle) and $100 million (Seinfeld) paydays in exchange for long-term, multi-program deals. Gaffigan’s first special,&nbsp;Cinco, sold for a more modest seven-figure sum.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5d56bc6f95808800097cfe79/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="Jim Gaffigan stand up comedy specials for Netflix and Amazon Original"/><figcaption>COURTESY</figcaption></figure>



It was more than just a check; it was access to a potential audience of nearly 94 million. Although Netflix’s subscriber base has grown since then, so has its stand-up library. The platform now shops nearly four times the number of original stand-up specials than when&nbsp;Cinco&nbsp;debuted. 



That makes it harder to stand out in the scroll. Plus, the streamer often holds onto specials in perpetuity, including&nbsp;Cinco. The up-front money is nice, but there is no ability to earn on the back end.&nbsp;



Gaffigan used his next special, 2018’s&nbsp;Noble Ape, which was directed and cowritten by his wife, Jeannie Gaffigan, to test the waters. Comedy Dynamics bought the rights and made it available everywhere Netflix wasn’t. It had a theatrical release and could be purchased and rented on multiple services, including&nbsp; iTunes, YouTube and Walmart’s VUDU. 



Later, there were short streaming windows on Comedy Central and Amazon Prime. According to Comedy Dynamics CEO Brian Volk-Weiss, it was even syndicated to planes and cruise ships. The up-front payment to Gaffigan from Comedy Dynamics was lower than at Netflix, but the wide distribution allowed him to earn on the back end, bringing in a total of $10 million, according to&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;estimates.



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And new services are on the way from Apple,&nbsp;WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal and&nbsp;Disney, any one of which could choose to pursue cheap-to-produce and popular stand-up specials.&nbsp;



Because of this widening field, stand-up specials may have more life (and revenue) in them, and that could be good for comedians looking to gamble on their success with deals that offer back-end participation. “We have titles in our library that are making more in year 12 than they made in year one,” says Volk-Weiss, whose company also owns specials by Bob Saget, Iliza Shlesinger and Janeane Garofalo.



Still, leaving Netflix means walking away from a partner that has now established itself as a formidable entertainment company. Netflix has some 180 original hour-long stand-up specials and is singularly focused on exploiting content around the world. Gaffigan, though, is content to keep the bet on himself.



“In the entertainment industry, every house is made of ice and it’s melting. So you’d better be building a new house.&#8221;



In the stuffy backstage room in Letterkenny, Gaffigan reviews some of the new material he tried out on stage. A joke about Ireland’s nonsensical roads killed it. He stumbled with a bit about the English. The classics played well—“My dad never went to a parent-teacher conference; my dad didn’t know I went to school.”&nbsp;&nbsp;



And he’s well aware that Amazon’s core mission is to sell stuff, even though it&nbsp;has won critical acclaim&nbsp;for shows like&nbsp;The&nbsp;Marvelous Mrs. Maisel&nbsp;and&nbsp;Transparent. With plans to deliver three more specials over the next five years, he’s got time to see just how good a partner the retailer might be. Along the way, he may decide it’s time to find a new neighborhood.



“The reason I went to Amazon is to expand my audience,” he says. “I don’t know what they’re gonna do and I don’t fully understand their marketing might. I might be pleasantly surprised. I mean, it’s a huge corporation. They could probably make more selling socks.”



-Ariel Shapiro; Forbes

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Comedian Jim Gaffigan Rakes In $30 Million By Ditching Netflix And Betting On Himself

South African Comedian Trevor Noah Is The Fourth Highest Paid Comedian In The World. Here&#8217;s how he did it.



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



With earnings of a staggering $28 million Trevor Noah has become the
fourth highest paid comedian in the world.



According to Forbes the Daily Show host, “earned
the bulk of his income this year through stand-up, making him eligible for our
list”.



Forbes’ methodology is using all earnings estimated from June 1, 2018 to June 1, 2019. 



<a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/arts/2019/08/14/burna-boy-the-african-giants-debuts-on-the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Burna Boy’s The African Giant Debuts On The Daily Show With Trevor Noah (opens in a new tab)">Burna Boy’s The African Giant Debuts On The Daily Show With Trevor Noah</a>



“Figures are pretax; fees for agents, managers and lawyers are not
deducted. Earnings estimates are based on data from Pollstar Pro as well as
interviews with industry insiders,” they said.



He is signed to host the Daily Show until 2022.



On the show, Noah usually sits down with the biggest headline-grabbers
in politics and entertainment.



Noah also covers the biggest news stories in politics, pop culture and
more.



Recently he trended after devising a viral conspiracy theory that
President Donald Trump is targeting first lady Melania Trump with his
immigration policies.



<figure class="wp-block-embed-twitter wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">Is Donald Trump trying to deport Melania? <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DontDeportMelania?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#DontDeportMelania</a> <a href="https://t.co/aWoNOErfbV">pic.twitter.com/aWoNOErfbV</a>&mdash; The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) <a href="https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1161811745792544770?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 15, 2019</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



The Daily Show with Trevor Noah currently has over 5,3 million
subscribers on YouTube alone and has had 1,9 billion views.



But apart from the show, the South African born comedian made more than
70 stops across the world and had his second Netflix special last fall.



His book Born A Crime, published in 2016, is still ranked as No.1 on the New York Times’ bestseller list for paperback nonfiction.



Africans across the globe celebrated Noah’s listing on social media with
some expressing how inspired they are by him.



<figure class="wp-block-embed-twitter wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true"><a href="https://twitter.com/Trevornoah?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Trevornoah</a> is officially the 4th highest paid Comedian in the world, and he’s African &#8230; Oh lord, if this doesn’t inspire me .. I don’t know what will.. do you know he can sponsor himself to do an East African comedy tour .. and even pay the organizers of the shows 😂😂😂&mdash; Patrick Salvado 👑 (@idringp) <a href="https://twitter.com/idringp/status/1163733016382005249?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 20, 2019</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



<figure class="wp-block-embed-twitter wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">Izinja Madoda!!! Crazy shit!!! Inspiring!!! <a href="https://t.co/kPw44muRLp">https://t.co/kPw44muRLp</a>&mdash; Don Billiato (@casspernyovest) <a href="https://twitter.com/casspernyovest/status/1163521956156772352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 19, 2019</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



<figure class="wp-block-embed-twitter wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">This is really a big deal! We are proud of you <a href="https://twitter.com/Trevornoah?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Trevornoah</a>&mdash; yourpartycupsng (@yourpartycups) <a href="https://twitter.com/yourpartycups/status/1163716145863626753?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 20, 2019</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



On the Forbes list, Noah follows after Jim Gaffigan earning $30 million,
Jerry Seinfeld earning $41 million and Kevin Hart being the highest earner with
$59 million.



On the top ten list the only woman on the list is Amy Schumer at the
seventh spot with $21 million.

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Trevor Noah Is Laughing All The Way To The Bank

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos sold over 530,000 Amazon shares in the first two days of August for $990 million. After taxes, he will net an estimated $750 million in cash from the sales.&nbsp;



The sales on August 1 and 2 followed $1.4 billion (after-tax) worth of Amazon stock he sold&nbsp;in the final three days of July.&nbsp;



As the richest man on earth, Bezos is now worth an estimated $110.1 billion, using Monday’s closing share price for Amazon.



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A spokesman for Amazon has not commented on the purpose for Bezos’ last stock sales. The leading theory is that it is to fund Blue Origin, a space exploration company that Bezos founded in September 2000. Bezos told journalists at a space exploration conference in 2017 that he was funding Blue Origin by selling some of his Amazon shares.



According to documents filed on Monday afternoon with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the world’s richest man sold over 530,000 shares of Amazon when the stock price was around $1,900 a share. On Monday, the stock closed at $1,765 a share.



-Angel Au-Yeung; Forbes Africa



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Jeff Bezos Unloads Another $990 Million Worth Of Amazon Shares In Early August

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Feisty And Fearless Pioneers  Thandi Ndlovu & Nonkululeko Gobodo

On Wednesday evening, hours after the stock markets had closed, Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos filed paperwork with the Securities Exchange Commission which showed he had sold $1.8 billion worth of Amazon shares over the final three days of July. After taxes, he will net about $1.4 billion.



Bezos sold slightly more than 900,000 shares of Amazon between July 29 and July 31, when the e-commerce behometh’s stock price was around $1,900 a share. His net worth is now $115 billion, using Wednesday&#8217;s closing share price.



The last time that Bezos sold Amazon shares was in October 2018. 



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The new filings also show that Bezos has given his ex-wife MacKenzie 25% of his Amazon stake, or 19.7 million shares. In April, as the couple announced they were getting divorced, Mackenzie tweeted that Jeff would keep 75% of his Amazon stake. 



Jeff Bezos will continue to exercise voting control over the 19.7 million shares of Amazon he transferred to his wife, according to an SEC filing in April. Her Amazon shares are worth nearly $36.8 billion, making her the third richest woman in the world.  



Jeff Bezos has sold large chunks of Amazon stock before, but this appears to be the largest sale, measured in dollars. Bezos sold Amazon stock worth $1.7 billion in 2017 in two separate transactions in May and November of that year. It was reported that Bezos planned to sell $1 billion worth of stock every year to fund Blue Origin, his space exploration company. 



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A spokesman for Amazon has not responded to requests for comment regarding the purpose of Bezos’ latest stock sale.



Bezos has done little in terms of philanthropy so far. In September 2018, he announced the Bezos Day One Fund, a $2 billion pledge for two causes: helping homeless families find shelter and creating Montessori-inspired preschools in the U.S. 



-Angel Au-Yeung; Forbes



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Jeff Bezos Sells About $1.8 Billion Worth Of Amazon Shares In Three Days

The development of liquefied natural gas (LNG) could help transform the South African economy, spur re-industrialisation, reduce the country’s over-reliance on coal-fired power stations, and contribute to increased regional trade.



South Africa has in recent years run into electricity shortages, forcing the country’s utility to&nbsp;burn expensive diesel&nbsp;to keep the lights on. A major polluter, the country also relies on coal to generate almost 90% of electricity. 



On top of this, South Africa has&nbsp;lost&nbsp;its manufacturing competitive edge, which was built on relatively cheap electricity and behind protective trade walls. Electricity prices have increased substantially over the past decade to pay for the power utility Eskom’s two new coal-fired power stations.



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Liquefied natural gas could change South Africa’s fortunes. And government recognises this. Policy developments in recent years have factored in an increasingly greater role for liquefied natural gas in the country’s energy mix and the overall economy, both as a clean alternative energy source and as a spur to industrial development.



The&nbsp;southern African region, specifically Mozambique which already has a pipeline to South Africa, could be the major supplier of gas to South Africa.



In my recent&nbsp;research&nbsp;I argue that to develop a liquefied natural gas sector South Africa could re-purpose existing institutions, namely those relating to the country’s established liquid fuels industry.



The research traced the evolution of gas developments in the country from 1998 to 2018. It found a close interaction between the electric and the liquid fuels sectors. At present gas contributes about 3% to the country’s primary energy mix, but there are indications that it will feature more prominently over the next decade.



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There are&nbsp;number of reasons&nbsp;for pursuing gas. They include:



<ul class="wp-block-list"><li>energy diversification and security to reduce the country’s dependence on coal for electricity;</li><li>reduction of Green House Gas emissions;</li><li>provision of flexibility to the introduction of renewable generation into the electricity grid; and</li><li>facilitating the development of provincial industrial hubs and regional trade within the Southern African Development Community.</li></ul>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Three phases of gas development</h4>



South Africa’s history with gas can be delineated into three periods. Firstly, from 1998-2005, South Africa significantly reformed its energy sector. This included the&nbsp;1998&nbsp;white paper on energy, which recognised natural gas as an option to diversify the country’s energy mix. In 2001 the&nbsp;Gas Act&nbsp;was implemented, facilitating the development of gas infrastructure in the country through pipelines and the regulatory framework.



Significantly, in 2004, a pipeline between Mozambique and South Africa began pumping gas. Sasol, a dominant player in the country’s liquid fuels industry, was behind the 865 km gas pipeline. While the majority of gas transported through the pipeline goes to Sasol, the pipeline has nonetheless created demand to around 370 industrial and commercial customers via 530 off-take points.



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The second phase covers 2006 &#8211; 2012. This is when gas started to feature more strongly in South Africa’s energy policy. A few turning points occurred. One was the substantial&nbsp;shale gas potential&nbsp;reported by the United States energy information agency. This encouraged policy makers to include gas into the energy mix. Second, natural gas discoveries in&nbsp;Mozambique&nbsp;and Tanzania raised the potential for regional trade.



Thirdly, South Africa experienced an electricity crisis, culminating in blackouts in 2008. In response, the state power utility Eskom turned to the costly diesel&nbsp;Open Cycle Gas Turbines. But this was hugely expensive and Eskom burnt through its operating budgets to ensure a steady supply of electricity.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Global trends: the main driver</h4>



During the third phase, from 2013 to 2018, gas development started to gain momentum driven by major global trends. These include the trend toward&nbsp;liquefaction of gas&nbsp;which enabled transportation of gas to places where pipelines weren’t possible.



Secondly, gas prices began changing from long-term to short-term contracts. This opened up the trading of gas to a competitive, spot market. As a result, new buyers have been attracted into the sector.



Thus, by 2015, the Department of Energy had announced the Gas Independent Power Producers Procurement Programme (Gas I4P) with a procurement of 3.7 GW electricity generation.



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By August 2018 the country’s draft integrated resources plan had gas playing a significant role in future electricity generation. The indications were that gas would contribute as much as 15% of the installed capacity&nbsp;mix by 2030. This seems to suggest that energy policy makers believe gas to power has the necessary fit, form and compatibility with the electricity system.



Another factor that’s driven interest in gas is the belief that it could be the country’s next commodity resource, as the country’s mining future is in decline. Some actors in the oil and gas community are pushing for the country’s mining skills to be used in the gas sector. This is informed by the view that the exploration and drilling skills used in the gas fields are similar to those used in mining.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">The future</h4>



South Africa’s existing institutional infrastructure can be used to develop the liquefied natural gas industry. That won’t be an easy task. There are major efforts required to amend the Gas Act, the Ports Act, Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act, and the Electricity Regulations Act, in order to accommodate the LNG initiative.



Gas can also play an important role in the restructuring of the electricity system. As there are trend towards transactive energy, where utilities moves towards customer centric demand, in that grids become less passive and deterministic, and more active and stochastic. Here gas could play a crucial role, as it has features which are flexible and modular enabling a decentralised system. Lastly, there are opportunities for gas as potential feed-stock in industrial processes, which requires strategic reassessment of existing industries.



-Marie Blanche Ting; Doctoral researcher, University of Sussex



-The Conversation 



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How Liquefied Natural Gas Could Change South Africa’s Fortunes

Patrick Odier of Swiss wealth management firm Lombard Odier on why Africa offers immeasurable possibilities for investors, particularly those not risk-averse.



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



Climate change events such as floods, drought and cyclones
have had a cataclysmic effect on the lives of Africans and their economies,
with many having to rebuild with little to no resources, placing more strain on
economies that are already over-burdened. 



But are there ways to forecast these events so people are
better able to weather the storm? Wealth management firm Lombard Odier thinks
it has what it takes to minimize risk on the continent, and they have the years
of experience to back it up. 



“We are a 223-year-old company. In the financial industry,
it means we have probably learned how to weather turbulences and financial
market crises – we’ve survived 40 already,” Patrick Odier, chair of the board
of directors at Lombard Odier, says. 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“We have made South Africa central to our strategy. I think South Africa has a long history with entrepreneurship. This idea of organizing wealth, planning and optimizing the responsibilities between the members of the families – all that belongs to it.”</blockquote>



With that said, the bank still holds firm to its roots of
running a lean organization where the idea is not to grow in quantity, but
rather in quality.



“We cannot be everywhere. We don’t want to be, we’re not a
giant. We are private. It makes it a bit different from other organizations
where the concerns are more operational… we are purely a service-oriented
company,” Odier says. 



With a client-based outlook where the bank focuses on
investment advisory, execution and fiduciary services, each client is handled
based on their unique circumstances, but what does this mean for Africa?



“We are trying to look at the African continent with a very open eye, to look at how we can add value to those potential clients or families who may want to organize their estates and perhaps, diversify their risks. I think agriculture, together with new technologies, will represent new opportunities.” 



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Odier says the interests of the firm are based on enhancing
and not disrupting banking ecosystems that exist in the African environment. 



“While Lombard Odier occupies over 2,500 people, we are
still of a modest size as a financial institution. So we really want to focus
on our existing client base and not disperse ourselves too much. We are not in
the business of buying infrastructure banks and trying to take over. We are not
in the business of competing with the local banks. We believe in teaming up, or
perhaps diversifying the offering. I think when it comes to investing, we can
be very useful to this market 



“We believe the best institutions to serve the local market
are the local ones. We are here to bring something else, which is basically,
what is not offered here,” he says.



However, the continent, like any other, has challenges unique to it and thus, require nuances in resolving. It should not be discounted that, although Africa has made gains in catching up to the rest of the globe, a vast majority of its nations are still developing.&nbsp; 



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“The world in general is changing. You see it in everything in your life. You see it in the way you consume, the way you expect your employers to treat you and the way you think of prices. Unfortunately, you’ve seen it the way water becomes scarcer in some periods, you see also how difficult it is to produce electricity correctly, in some respects, and you see it in how climate change is affecting your life. 



 “All those elements are part of mega-trends we believe as a firm we could try to interpret quicker and better than some. We are transforming the way we invest to invest more sustainably. In South Africa, we want to be a leader in bringing this approach to investing in resources. 



“Some say you have to have luxury to think this way, I say
not doing it will create much bigger risks than doing it,” Odier says.&nbsp;

Patrick

Private Wealth: Banking On Climate Change In Africa

tyler

The World’s 100 Highest-Paid Celebrities

While a growing number of influencers are dictating what
brands sell, beauty entrepreneur Jackie Aina is of the view they have the duty
to use their platforms responsibly.&nbsp;&nbsp; 



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



Mixing up the inspirational with informative, the
thought-provoking with tongue-in-cheek, and sarcasm with calling out brands for
not being inclusive, Jackie Aina is influencing the beauty industry one product
at a time. 



With over three million YouTube followers and 1.2 million on
Instagram, Aina is one of the stand-out digital influencers cashing in on
online followings to broadcast messages to millennials, lifestyle brands and
billion-dollar cosmetic conglomerates. 



Although Aina does all of this with a dose of humor, the journey to YouTube stardom started some 10 years ago for the 31-year-old beauty entrepreneur, when she was desperately searching for a way to escape loneliness and unfulfillment. 



READ MORE | <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Her Brush With Business (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2019/03/27/her-brush-with-business/" target="_blank">Her Brush With Business</a>



“I had gone on to marry the guy who inspired me to join the
military. We were stationed in Hawaii and we were very unhappily married. I
didn’t have a job and YouTube was buzzing in 2009. We had a lot of Asian faces
who were really the faces of beauty on YouTube and I didn’t really see anyone
like me. So, my best friend, literally every day, said ‘why don’t you put your
makeup looks on YouTube’ and I always said no.”



Her friend’s unrelenting pursuit finally paid off.&nbsp; 



“So, one day, I decided I wasn’t doing anything, and being
bored and not being fulfilled emotionally and I didn’t have a lot of positive
things going on for me at the time, so that left me a lot of time to consume
content and then I started creating it.



&nbsp;“I truly tapped into
something that I needed at the time mentally and that was great. People didn’t
know me but they would just gas me up; they were so nice and would always give
me positive encouragement which I really needed at the time,” Aina says.



That was a lifetime ago. These days, the Los Angeles-born influencer, who was called&nbsp; ‘beauty influencer of the year’ by Women’s Wear Daily last year, is short-listed among the top beauty influencers in the United States, with lucrative brand collaborations behind her. 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">Most notably is her collaboration with the Estée Lauder-owned brand, Too Faced, as part of the Born This Way foundation range, which she helped to create. </blockquote>



Celebrities and influencers are increasingly being paid
several thousands of dollars per tweet or Instagram post to promote products,
services and even social causes. 



With most millennials avoiding posts that look like
sponsored ads, brands are now increasingly interested in ads that appear
organic. And that is where influencers come in. 



Remuneration for such posts is usually decided after
considering factors like number of followers, popularity, engagement, frequency
of posts, as well as the format of the post. 



Furthermore, influencer accounts with&nbsp; massive follower counts can leverage their
social media clout to showcase brands to their followers and perhaps, most
importantly, use their brand voice to fight against injustice in the industry,
something Aina is passionate about.



“A lot of years on YouTube were spent seeing comments from
people who say things. It is easy to sit and complain but what are you doing to
change the industry?” 



In response, Aina decided to use her platform to fight for
the change she wanted to see in the industry. She holds other influencers
accountable for offensive remarks and joins controversial and tough discussions
about issues like colorism in the beauty industry. And brands are starting to
listen. 



It was her outspoken voice in the beauty space that caught the attention of the beauty conglomerate, Too Faced, which short-listed Aina to help expand its foundation range and ensure the makeup undertones would also compliment women of color.



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“That was a testament to brands actually listening. Just
because you think someone is not watching, doesn’t mean they are not watching.
They are definitely watching. Sometimes all you really need is that one
opportunity and that can be leveraged over and over again,” Aina says.



As brands increasingly turn away from traditional marketing,
towards social influencers, young, connected digital natives like Aina, will
continue to play an important role in the success of beauty brands for the
foreseeable trend-obsessed digital future.

Jackie

Making Up For Millions

One of the world&#8217;s ultimate taste-makers, Bernard Arnault entered an ultra-rarefied club this week. As of Thursday June 20, he was worth just over $100 billion, making him one of three people in the world with 12-figure fortunes. 



He joins Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, worth an estimated $157.5 billion, and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, worth an estimated $103.1 billion. Bezos, who first passed $100 billion in 2017, will soon give a slice of that fortune away. 



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He and his wife, MacKenzie, are in the process of finalizing their divorce. The couple announced in early April that she will receive a quarter of his Amazon stake, currently valued at more than $37 billion. Gates reached $100 billion in April, thanks to strong earnings from Microsoft.



Arnault’s luxury goods group, LVMH Moët Hennessy–Louis Vuitton, has been having a great year. In April, it announced record first quarter sales and profits on top of a strong 2018. Its shares are up more than 40% so far in 2019, boosting Arnault’s fortune by more than $20 billion.With his family, he owns 46% of LVMH and serves as both its chairman and CEO.



<figure><iframe src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fe.infogram.com%2F_%2FcyePeUtIgfbGOdwz1CPc%3Fsrc%3Dembed&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Finfogram.com%2F1pmr7xxm5jyg3mh39xvvl3xn2wtzry9mrgq&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Finfogram-thumbs-1024.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fbc5d4970-ab4d-4903-8f35-e47d52abb137.jpg&amp;key=3ce26dc7e3454db5820ba084d28b4935&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=infogram"></iframe></figure>



The growth comes as high-end buyers around the world continue to pick up luxury goods and spirits, despite fears that demand, particularly in China, would slow down. Thirty-five years after Arnault first got into luxury goods with the purchase of Christian Dior, he continues to refresh LVMH by finding ways to appeal to a new generation of customers while retaining the traditional values and high quality that have defined its brands. 



That includes innovative partnerships like the two with Rihanna — Fenty Beauty and Fenty fashion house — as well as recent deals such as the acquisition of Belmond, which operates luxury hotels, trains and even safaris.



“People do not understand that success stems from the cohabitation of two contradictory spirits: the artist&#8217;s vision and the logic of worldwide marketing,&#8221; Arnault told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;in 1997. &#8220;It&#8217;s a very complex process.&#8221;



Forbes first wrote about Arnault in 1991 when he was worth $200 million. He has since been featured several times and has appeared on our cover. He made his debut in our Billionaires ranks in 1997. Some readers may know his story well but it’s one worth retelling.



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A native of France&#8217;s cold, flat industrial north, Arnault was a star student at France&#8217;s prestigious Ecole Polytechnique. The son of a construction tycoon, Arnault spent three years in the U.S. in the early 1980s trying to establish a branch of his family’s real estate business, Ferinel, as a developer of Florida vacation properties. 



After three years he returned home. But he learned a valued lesson in America, according to a 1997 Forbes <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1997/0602/5911080a.html" target="_blank">profile on Arnault</a>. Before leaving, he sold his Mediterranean-style home facing Long Island Sound in New Rochelle, N.Y. to American tycoon John Kluge, owner of the mansion next door. Kluge tore it down because it blocked his view.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">&#8220;It was just incredible!&#8221; Arnault told Forbes. &#8220;It was a very nice place, but two days after he bought it, he tore my house down! It&#8217;s so very&#8230;American.&#8221; Lesson learned: &#8220;When something has to be done,&#8221; says Arnault, &#8220;do it! In France we are full of good ideas, but we rarely put them into practice.&#8221;</blockquote>



He returned back to France ready to make some moves. In 1984, Arnault put up $15 million of his family’s money to rescue bankrupt textile empire Boussac (Lazard put up the rest). Among Boussac’s mixed bag assets was money-losing fashion house Christian Dior. 



That became the first of many Arnault acquisitions and the cornerstone of his massive luxury goods empire. Over the years, LVMH snapped up such brands such as Louis Vuitton, Givenchy and Sephora. Today LVMH has nearly $53 billion in sales from 70 brands and 4,590 retail stores.   



-Luisa Kroll; Forbes Staff

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Luxury Goods Titan Bernard Arnault Becomes World’s Third $100 Billion Man

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The World’s Highest-Paid Soccer Players 2019: Messi, Ronaldo And Neymar Dominate The Sporting World

“Got that dinero on my mind,” Beyoncé and Jay-Z wrote on the third track of their surprise album&nbsp;Everything is Love, which came out last June.&nbsp;A year later, it’s clear that the couple wasn’t just taking poetic license: With Jay-Z’s<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2019/06/03/jay-z-billionaire-worth/#12477d163a5f" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&nbsp;newly minted</a>&nbsp;status as a billionaire and Beyoncé’s place on<a href="https://www.forbes.com/self-made-women/list/#tab:overall" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&nbsp;Forbes’ richest self-made women list</a>, the music moguls are one of America’s wealthiest couples.



It’s been a banner year for the married couple, whose combined net worth now totals an estimated $1.4 billion. Jay-Z, whose steadily growing portfolio of businesses includes liquor, art, real estate and stakes in companies like Uber, is the first hip-hop artist to become a billionaire. 



Meanwhile Beyoncé , whose fortune increased to an estimated $400 million from $355 million last year thanks to continued touring and an album release, ranks No. 51 on Forbes 2019 list of America’s most successful self-made women (up two places from last year).



READ MORE | <a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2019/06/05/from-beyonce-knowles-carter-to-kim-kardashian-west-americas-richest-self-made-women-under-40/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="From Beyoncé Knowles-Carter to Kim Kardashian West, America’s Richest Self-Made Women Under 40 (opens in a new tab)">From Beyoncé Knowles-Carter to Kim Kardashian West, America’s Richest Self-Made Women Under 40</a>



Their combined net worth of $1.4 billion makes the music moguls one of the 10 most successful husband-and-wife teams in the country, and certainly the most recognizable. &nbsp;Unlike many other couples who founded businesses together, they both struck it rich with complementary but separate businesses. Beyoncé’s wealth comes mostly from earnings from touring, music sales and merchandise. 



Her husband, on the other hand, amassed most of his wealth from his ownership of Armand de Brignac champagne, investments, his cognac partnership with Bacardi and his own music career, among other sources. Both Beyoncé and Jay-Z have stakes in music streaming service Tidal.



Other entrepreneurial husband-and-wife teams might not be as famous, but their businesses are well known. Do Won and Jin Sook Chang came from South Korea in 1981 in search of better opportunities. “At the time [people in] South Korea weren’t living as well,” Do Won told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/gracechung/2016/10/05/exclusive-interview-with-one-of-americas-most-successful-immigrants-forever-21s-do-won-chang/#b1bfeea42ab0" target="_blank">in 2016</a>. 



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He worked three jobs as a dishwasher, gas station attendant and office cleaner while she worked in a hair salon. They saved up and in 1984 opened a clothing store. Today they co-own and run Forever 21, a clothing empire with over 815 stores &nbsp;and $4 billion in sales. Their combined net worth is $3 billion.



Another couple, the Cherngs, found success together through food. Andrew Cherng opened a Chinese restaurant with his father in 1973. His wife Peggy, who had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and held positions at 3M and the U.S. Navy,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/peggy-cherng/?list=self-made-women#66ed56262c04" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">gave it all up</a>&nbsp;to help her husband expand the one restaurant into a Chinese fast-food chain. That chain, Panda Express, along with several other fast casual chains the couple owns stakes in, have brought the Cherngs’ combined net worth to $3.4 billion.



Sometimes the strength of a husband-wife partnership comes from their ability to support one another. This was the<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://www.forbesindia.com/article/cross-border/the-ozmens-galactic-gamble/50973/1" target="_blank">&nbsp;case</a>&nbsp;for Eren Ozmen and her husband Fatih, the president and CEO team behind aerospace giant Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNC). 



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Before they were a couple, Fatih encouraged Eren to pursue an M.B.A. (the couple originally met at Ankara University in Turkey before separately immigrating to the U.S.). 



Once they were married, Eren put her business school training to good use by helping automate the financial reports at Fatih&#8217;s employer, a then-struggling SNC. Eventually, the couple decided to buy the company and took the business from the verge of bankruptcy to a top military contractor.



While building a vast fortune is rare for couples running businesses together, it has been a winning formula for some women: Nearly one fourth of those on&nbsp;Forbes’ 2019 self-made women list achieved their fortunes through businesses they cofounded with their husbands (though some now are widows or have since divorced).



Below are the 10 wealthiest self-made husband and wife teams in the nation:



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">1. Tom &amp; Judy Love</h4>



Net worth:&nbsp;$5.9 Billion



Tom and Judy Love leased their first gas station in Watonga, Oklahoma, with a $5,000 loan from Tom’s parents. Now Love’s Travel Stops &amp; Country Stores has more than 430 locations in 41 states.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/949970772/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="LACMA 2018 Collectors Committee Gala"/><figcaption>Stewart and Lynda Resnick cofounded The Wonderful Company, which owns Fiji Water and mandarin Halos.&nbsp;STEFANIE KEENAN/GETTY IMAGES FOR LACMA</figcaption></figure></div>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">2. &nbsp;Lynda &amp; Stewart Resnick</h4>



Net worth:&nbsp;$5.6 Billion



The couple are the force behind snack and drink conglomerate the Wonderful Co., known for Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice, Halos mandarin oranges and Fiji water. The couple is also known for philanthropy, giving millions of dollars to educational causes and earning the #29 spot on Forbes&#8217;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/top-givers/#7d030d4566ff" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">list&nbsp;</a>of top givers.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/488125078/960x0.jpg?cropX1=200&amp;cropX2=1800&amp;cropY1=166&amp;cropY2=1500" alt="Diane Von Furstenberg - Front Row - Spring 2016 New York Fashion Week"/><figcaption>Barry Diller (left) and Diane von Furstenberg run their own businesses in separate industries.DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY IMAGES</figcaption></figure></div>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">3. Diane von Furstenberg &amp; Barry Diller</h4>



Net worth: $4 billion



Diller is founder, senior executive and chairman at internet and media conglomerate IAC,. His wife Von Furstenberg is the designer and founder of the eponymous fashion label. Diller owns one third of DVF, while Von Furstenberg and her two children from a previous marriage own the rest. &nbsp;



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5cfad39534a5c4000847c924/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="The Cherngs At Panda Express"/><figcaption>Peggy and Andrew Cherng own and run $3.5 billion (sales) Chinese fast-food chain Panda Express. (Photo by Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images)GETTY</figcaption></figure></div>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">4. Peggy &amp; Andrew Cherng</h4>



Net Worth:&nbsp;$3.4



In addition to fast-food chain Panda Express, the Cherngs also own stakes in Urbane Cafe, Just Salad, Uncle Tetsu, Pieology and Ippudo.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">5. Jin Sook &amp; Do Won Chang</h4>



Net Worth:&nbsp;$3 billion



The Changs’ clothing retailing business is all in the family—the couple’s nieces work at the company as do their daughters, who launched Forever 21’s beauty brand Riley Rose.



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter"><img decoding="async" src="https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/42328010/960x0.jpg?fit=scale" alt="PENCE SPACE SYMPOSIUM"/><figcaption>U.S. Vice President Mike Pence (center) joins Sierra Nevada co-founders Eren and Fatih Ozmen at the 34th Space Symposium.&nbsp;MATHEW STAVER/© 2018 BLOOMBERG FINANCE LP</figcaption></figure></div>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">6. Eren &amp; Fatih Ozmen</h4>



Net Worth:&nbsp;$2.8 billion



The Ozmens built their defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corp. through a series of some 20 acquisitions. Describing their strategy, Eren told&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesdigitalcovers/2018/07/11/meet-the-unknown-immigrant-billionaire-betting-her-fortune-to-take-on-musk-in-space/#6fac017c5f0d" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Forbes&nbsp;</a>&nbsp;last year: &nbsp;“Our guys go hunting, and they bring me this giant bear and say, ‘Now you do the skinning and clean it up.’ ”



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">7.Neerja Sethi &amp; Bharat Desai</h4>



Net worth:&nbsp;$2.4 billion



Sethi and Desai cofounded IT consulting and outsourcing firm Syntel out of their Troy, Michigan, apartment in 1980. In October 2018, French IT company Atos SE bought Syntel for $3.4 billion.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">8. Weili Dai &amp; Sehat Sutardja</h4>



Net Worth:&nbsp;$2 billion



The couple headed semiconductor company Marvell Technology for 11 years until they were forced out as a result of an internal accounting investigation in 2016. Neither was found guilty of any fraudulent activity. The couple has diversified their investments into real estate and technology.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">9. Kit Crawford &amp; Gary Erickson</h4>



Net Worth:&nbsp;$1.8 billion



The couple behind Clif Bar met at Erickson’s bakery, where Crawford was working part-time. They each have a 40% stake in the company.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">10. Beyoncé &amp; Jay-Z</h4>



&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Net Worth:&nbsp;$1.4 billion



The musicians have shown distinct business savvy, giving users of Tidal, the music streaming service the couple partially owns, exclusive access to their albums.



-Catherine Perloff; Forbes Staff

Category: Wealth