Billionaire Rob Hersov calls South Africa uninvestable

Rob Hersov told an audience of investors this week that South Africa’s illicit economy has made the country uninvestable, and used the same appearance to disclose three places he is putting his own capital.

The businessman spoke at BNC#9, the ninth BizNews conference, four years after the address that made his name in South African business circles. His message this time was harder and more qualified, according to the organisers’ account of the talk. The country is not fixed, the governing party has not gone, and the crisis runs deeper than most people acknowledge.

He argued that the greater danger is not collapse but normalisation, that South Africans are becoming accustomed to conditions they should refuse to accept. He pointed to organised crime, hijacked buildings and a corporate cash pile of R1.8 trillion sitting idle rather than being deployed into the economy.

The investments run against the diagnosis. Hersov said he is backing a venture on the West Coast, a development in the Cape Town area, and a young entrepreneur building what would be South Africa’s first prediction market. He identified the coming municipal elections as a potential turning point.

Neither Hersov nor BizNews disclosed the size of any of the three commitments.

The 2022 speech that established his public profile carried two words directed at the African National Congress and circulated widely on video. He announced his retirement from political activism at the sixth BizNews conference in Hermanus in 2024, then returned to public commentary within months and has since appeared regularly on the platform, discussing the government of national unity, the Democratic Alliance and the 2026 municipal elections.

Hersov is a third-generation member of one of South Africa’s larger industrial families. His grandfather Bob Hersov founded Anglovaal, among the biggest mining and industrial companies in Southern Africa, and his father Basil Hersov ran it from 1973 to 2001. The family sold the business in the late 1990s.

He was born in Johannesburg in October 1960 and is 65. He attended Michaelhouse, took a business science degree from the University of Cape Town in 1982, completed military service in the South African Defence Force, and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1989. He worked at Goldman Sachs and served as an assistant to Rupert Murdoch before starting his own ventures.

The business he is best known for building is aviation. Hersov founded Marquis Jets Europe in 1998 and sold it to NetJets, the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary, in 2004. He also founded the sports media company Sportal in the early 2000s and the luxury yacht venture YachtPlus.

His current interests centre on Africa and on capital markets. He founded Invest Africa in 2013 and chaired it, with members in New York, Washington, London, Dubai, Geneva and Johannesburg. He founded and chairs African Capital Investments and Adoreum Partners, and chairs African Gold Acquisition Corporation, a Cayman Islands special purpose acquisition company listed in New York that raised $360 million at its 2021 launch to buy gold assets.

He bought Fisantekraal Airport west of Durbanville in 2020 and renamed it Cape Winelands Airport, one of his more substantial South African commitments since returning after 31 years in the United Kingdom.

He has also moved toward media. Hersov said last year he intends to build a South African platform modelled on The Daily Wire, the American conservative outlet, to amplify libertarian and free-market voices, and he co-founded NewSouthAfrica.org, an initiative using blockchain to address infrastructure and governance problems.

The BizNews conference also heard from the political analyst Prince Mashele, who predicted the ANC would enter terminal decline by 2034.