Author: Irakli Rekhviashvili
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Lance Dickson: Turning outrage into consequence: the AI cluster built for South Africa’s next boycott
Listen here Lance Dickson kept having the same conversation. A failing council. A price hike nobody could explain. Everyone complained. Nothing changed. So he built Ryze instead, a self-funded civic action platform designed to convert that outrage into organised economic consequence. In his latest interview with Irakli, the founder unpacks the six-agent AI cluster running…
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Unlocking High-Yield Private Debt: The Jaltech Income Opportunities Fund
Listen here Join the leadership team at Jaltech for an exclusive overview of the new Jaltech Income Opportunities Fund – a spin-off from their highly successful Section 12J investment strategy. Designed to target structured debt funding for established, mid-sized South African businesses, this fund addresses an unserved niche left open by traditional banks while delivering…
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BN Daybreak: Zille on Joburg’s last chance; AI stock warnings; Cape gangs; Civic tech
Listen here In today’s BizNews Daybreak, Helen Zille warns Johannesburg faces its final chance to reverse municipal collapse. Heindrich Wyngaard explains why military presence alone cannot dismantle the Cape Flats’ deep-rooted gang economy. Lance Dickson introduces “Ryze,” a platform channeling public rage into organized civic action. Finally, Sean Peche cautions investors against rampant speculation within…
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Sean Peche: SpaceX, Tesla, Alphabet — where smart money goes while everyone chases AI
Listen here Sean Peche has spent 2026 doing the opposite of the crowd. While the market piles into AI, memory chips and Elon Musk’s every pivot, the Ranmore founder has been selling Tesla, walking away from SpaceX and quietly buying into Adobe and Tencent instead. In this conversation with Alec Hogg, the South African-born, UK-based…
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Parliament faces protest over lagging legislation for a provincial referendum: Heindrich Wyngaard
Listen here In this interview with Chris Steyn, Heindrich Wyngaard, the executive chairperson of Cape Forum, details plans for a protest outside the National Assembly next month over the long wait for appropriate legislation to enable a provincial referendum . “And we are also planning to be present at that Home Affairs Portfolio Committee meeting…
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Echoes through time: How technology is preserving art’s legacy
By Ivan Damon Have you ever wondered why some artists’ legacies endure – their works, a signature, a name, resonates across generations and timelines – while others fade into obscurity? While artistic merit undeniably plays a role, the answer may lie increasingly in the evolving landscape of art preservation and the innovative means of access,…
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Director’s Cut – Helen Zille: Time is running out for bankrupt Joburg to be saved
Listen here Helen Zille has swapped the Iron Lady tag for “DJ Gogo”, but the numbers she puts on the table are dead serious. In this conversation with Alec Hogg, she says Johannesburg only spent half of an eight billion rand infrastructure budget last year, warns that DA supporters staying home on election day could…
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BizNews Edge: Helen Zille – “Joburg’s expenditure on infrastructure is actually criminal”
Listen here Joburg is bankrupt, and Helen Zille says the city did it to itself. In her director’s cut interview, the DA’s mayoral candidate explains why half of Johannesburg’s infrastructure budget went unspent last year, how “wasted” ward votes are quietly handing the ANC an advantage, and what she really thinks about the Steenhuisen-Tony Leon…
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The Economist: OpenAI’s Hugging Face hack – why the AI containment problem just got a lot scarier
An unreleased OpenAI model did something no AI system was meant to do: it broke out of its sandbox, found its way onto the open internet and hacked Hugging Face, a $4.5 billion AI platform. No human attacker was involved. The model was hunting for shortcuts to a cybersecurity test it had been set, exploited…
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Mr Market sends Musk “don’t believe you” message after Tesla quarterlies
Tesla’s Q2 2026 earnings, released after the market close last night, exposed a growing gap between the famous Elon Musk narrative and hard numbers. Revenue hit a record $28.24 billion (up 26%) and deliveries reached 480,126 vehicles, yet operating income collapsed 57% to $398 million as profit margins inverted from 4.1% to 1.4%. Free cash…
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Anthea Jeffery: SA wants offshore oil, but government’s own rules will scare investors to Namibia
South Africa has just 13 days of fuel in reserve, and the government wants to fix that by unlocking offshore oil and gas worth potentially decades of domestic supply. But the new Upstream Petroleum Resources Development Act asks investors to hand over 20% to the state plus 10% to black South Africans, against Namibia’s far…
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BN Portfolio: Alphabet’s $200bn bet revealed last night: Why Pichai is spending like crazy
Alphabet just posted its twelfth straight quarter of double-digit growth, with group revenue up 24% and Google Cloud surging 82% and its backlog now $514bn. Yet the stock fell 4% after CFO Anat Ashkenazi raised 2026 capex guidance to around $195–205bn and warned that 2027 spending would rise further still. CEO Sundar Pichai calls the…
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BN Daybreak: Helen Zille on Mashaba; Tech earnings; AI hacking; Iraj Abedian on the Iran conflict
Listen here In today’s BizNews Daybreak, we cover overnight tech earnings with mixed results from Alphabet, Tesla, IBM, and Texas Instruments. Economist Dr. Iraj Abedian weighs in on the global fallout of the Middle East conflict, while SA engineer Peli Collins discusses his new space startup, Beyond Reach Labs. Meanwhile, OpenAI admits its AI model…
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Director’s Cut – Dr Iraj Abedian: Hormuz stand-off could cost SA more than pain at the petrol pump
Seven months into the Iran war, economist Iraj Abedian tells Alec Hogg that Donald Trump has lost more than the battle for the Strait of Hormuz: he’s lost America’s standing as the world’s dominant power. Abedian explains why the narrow waterway carries a third of global oil, why the mullahs are more afraid of each…
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Pele Collins: From SpaceX to Y-Combinator: Unlocking the giant origami structures of orbit
Listen here Pele Collins went from leading the SpaceX parachute engineering team that brought American astronauts safely home to co-founding a Y Combinator-backed deep tech startup, Beyond Reach Labs. In his latest interview with Irakli, the proudly South African engineer reveals how his team is tackling the ultimate pick-and-shovel play for the next era of…
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Deputy finance minister Masondo faces removal as PIC board chair amid governance crisis
South Africa’s R3.6 trillion Public Investment Corporation is in open crisis. Deputy Finance Minister David Masondo, who chairs the PIC board, faces a shareholder vote on his removal at a July 27 meeting called by Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana, with six non-executive directors, including four in one day, having already resigned. The rupture stems from…
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Returning to South Africa? 7 common tax mistakes to avoid
A practical guide for South Africans returning home, with a focus on income tax, Capital Gains Tax and SARS reporting obligations. For many South Africans living in the UK, the decision to return home is driven by family, lifestyle, cost of living, weather, children or retirement planning. But while the personal reasons may be straightforward,…
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Returning to South Africa? 7 common tax mistakes to avoid
A practical guide for South Africans returning home, with a focus on income tax, Capital Gains Tax and SARS reporting obligations. For many South Africans living in the UK, the decision to return home is driven by family, lifestyle, cost of living, weather, children or retirement planning. But while the personal reasons may be straightforward,…
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Ilan Preskovsky: Wikipedia’s Israel and Zionism pages are ideologically captured
Ilan Preskovsky argues that Wikipedia’s entries on Zionism and Gaza have been shaped by a small, organised group of editors pushing an anti-Israel framing, citing investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg’s research into the platform’s editing culture. It’s relevant to South African readers because the piece explicitly names the ANC’s genocide case against Israel at the International…
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FT’s Edward Luce: The world now trusts China more than America
A global trust survey has found that most countries now rate China above America, a shift FT columnist Edward Luce traces back to Biden’s support for Israel’s Gaza response and accelerated by Trump’s tariffs, his Iran war, and his rollback of green energy incentives. For South Africa, a BRICS member and major US trading partner…