Category: News
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Tim O’Reilly: Elon Musk is building a brand of capitalism Adam Smith would hate
Elon Musk, born in Pretoria and long associated with his South African roots, has built an empire that inverts the very system meant to restrain it. In this essay for The Economist, Irish-born American author, publisher and entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly argues that Musk’s SpaceX listing gave him roughly 85% of voting power while stripping investors…
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BN Daybreak: US Strikes on Iran; Teen mall bomb plot; Springbok ticket anger hit SA
Listen here As fresh American strikes on Iran trigger sirens in Bahrain, global traders are left asking whether the world’s most vital oil chokepoint is still open for business. Congressman Greg Stanton warns of surging fuel prices and a war with no clear endgame, new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh heads to Capitol Hill to face…
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How diversified is your portfolio actually?
By Lloyd Uren* When investors sit down with us to review their portfolios, one word comes up more than any other: diversification. They point to a global fund here, a local equity tracker there, and feel reassured that their money is spread across different markets and asset classes. That reassurance is understandable. In many cases,…
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Third force claims in the anti-immigrant protests: Conspiracy theory or calculated propaganda?
When cabinet ministers Mamoloko Kubayi and Ronald Lamola suggested Israel and allied states were behind South Africa’s anti-immigrant protests, they revived a familiar tactic: deflection. Political scientist Kenneth Moeng Kgwadi traces a pattern stretching from Mbeki’s economic policies to the 2008 xenophobic violence, the Zuma-era scandals and Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala controversy – moments where the…
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Mailbox: Could SAPS’ secure radio rollout hold more untold secrets?
Hello Alec, As the Madlanga Commission continues my memory is activated. This is in relation to a business associate of mine who originally worked for Motorola SA, where I met him and worked for him worked for a while. When Motorola disinvested in the mid 80’s I started my own company both in SA and…
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Doli incapax no more? The Ballito mall bomb and SA’s case for rethinking child justice
The Economist’s article republished below asks who counts as capable of evil, tracking a global trend of lawmakers lowering the age of criminal responsibility in response to shocking child-perpetrated crimes. South Africa has its own case in point: a radicalised 15-year-old planted a viable bomb in a packed Ballito mall food court, glorifying Columbine on…
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A world-first: the bond that pays out when nature wins
Listen here In this BizNews interview, Irakli Rekhviashvili sits down with the three people behind FirstRand’s R2.5 billion Cape Water Performance-Based Bond, the first time a commercial bank anywhere in the world has tied a bond’s payout to nature. The Nature Conservancy’s Louise Stafford traces it to 2018, when Cape Town’s dams were weeks from…
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Why we should all invest more like Crows: Piet Viljoen on the danger of chasing shiny things
This excellent piece is drawn from star money manager Piet Viljoen’s weekly newsletter to his clients. Using crows – cautious by nature despite their reputation for loving shiny objects – as his central metaphor, Viljoen walks through five recent market manias (China, Covid vaccine makers, GLP-1 drugs, Rheinmetall, and memory stocks) where investors piled into…
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A tremor, not a shift: What the 30 June anti-migrant push actually changed
An anti-immigration movement set 30 June 2026 as its deadline for undocumented foreigners to leave South Africa, triggering the largest such mobilisation since 2008. More than 900 arrests, 120 marches and roughly 25,000 departures followed. But against a foreign population of 2.4 million, the exodus was a tremor, not a resolution. Pretoria answered with enforcement,…
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The NdB Sunday Show – Willem Els: The deadly recipe of the Ballito bomb boy…
Listen here In this edition of NdB Sunday Show with Chris Steyn, explosives expert Willem Els of the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) reveals just how deadly a bomb-making recipe was used by the 15-year-old boy who wanted to commit mass killing at a Ballito mall. “what was really alarming for me when I look…
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Marika Sboros: Inside SA’s Ozempic copycat case exposing “Fat Drug” free-for-all
This is the second piece published through BizNews’s Commissioning Fund – a mechanism that lets us pay top-tier writers properly for the time and scrutiny a story like this demands. Unfortunately, the brutal economics of online publishing prevent articles like this from being done. Investigative journalist Marika Sboros, best known for her books and expose’s…
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SA rugby’s ticket strategy prices Bok fans out of stadiums — and puts grassroots rugby at risk
Listen here Springbok ticket prices have soared, suites have been taken over under “clean stadium” rules, and loyal supporters are being squeezed out. BizNews Rugby’s boots-on-the-ground reporter, Rory Steyn, speaks to representatives from legendary Joburg rugby clubs and bitter rivals Pirates and Wanderers, as well as chartered accountant and former Sun International CEO, David Coutts-Trotter,…
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Duarte da Silva: The world has run out of new gold. South Africa never mined its last 48,000 tonnes.
Global gold discovery has stalled: no major find anywhere in 2023 or 2024, the first time on record, while producers’ reserves shrink and the pipeline empties. In this Gold Papers instalment, Dr Duarte da Silva argues the world’s response has overlooked the obvious candidate — South Africa’s abandoned Witwatersrand residual, estimated at 48,100 tonnes, comparable…
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Election’24’s missing ballots: What nearly half a million unexplained votes reveal ahead of 2029
Two years after South Africa’s landmark 2024 election, independent researcher Masixole Njengele says the IEC’s own data doesn’t reconcile. Using the Commission’s published station-level results across all three ballot types, Njengele calculates a “floor” deficit of 468,273 ballots that cannot be explained under the IEC’s rules — rising to 929,801 once out-of-district voting is factored…
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No plaster can heal South Africa’s anti-immigration wound
South Africa’s recent anti-immigration marches, and the fear and violence that followed, have damaged the country’s standing across Africa and beyond, write Solly Moeng and Tshepo Matseba. They argue this isn’t a communications problem to be spun away, but a governance one: the state must reassert control over immigration enforcement, crack down on the corruption…
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FMD: Farmers can now vaccinate their own herds — Andrew Morphew unpacks what’s changed
For months, South African farmers argued they were being locked out of the fight against foot-and-mouth disease, forced to watch while red tape slowed vaccination to a crawl. This week, that changed. Free State Agriculture, SAAI and Sakeliga settled their court case with the state, opening a regulated private route for farmers to import and…
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Adrian Wooldridge: Norway v England may be close on the pitch — off it, there’s no contest.
As England gears up to face Norway on the pitch in the 2026 FIFA World Cup quarter-finals, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Adrian Wooldridge argues the real mismatch is economic. Norway kept majority state stakes in its oil, telecoms and banking sectors, taxed resource profits heavily, and built a $2-trillion sovereign wealth fund — while Britain privatised…
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Justice Malala: SA’s anti-migrant violence exposes Africa’s bigger failure
Political columnist Justice Malala calls South Africa’s recent anti-migrant attacks reprehensible and reputationally damaging, risking major investments like MTN and Shoprite across the continent. In this piece for Bloomberg Opinion, he argues outrage at South Africa can’t be the whole story. Malala points to Zimbabwe’s Mnangagwa extending his rule past 2030 and Uganda’s Muhoozi Kainerugaba…
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BN Daybreak: Jailed South African spy; SA Education reform; Wall Street’s SpaceX verdict
Listen here A former Air Force brigadier is behind bars in the United States, Jasmine Opperman warns the real failure lies in how the State Security Agency handled her. Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube hits back at claims her department is a mess as the DA looks to 2029, while traders pile into Micron and…
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Director’s Cut – DA Minister Siviwe Gwarube: The truth about SA education
Siviwe Gwarube says South Africa’s education system needs long-term reform, not quick political wins. The Basic Education Minister discusses her first two years in office, tackling textbook procurement concerns, eliminating unsafe pit toilets identified in 2018, strengthening early childhood development, and navigating provincial delivery challenges. She argues the real measure of success lies in improving…