South African tech billionaire who gave his domestic worker and gardener a R1 million bonus

South African tech entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, the first African to travel to space, sold his company for R3.5 billion in 1999 and gave every employee, including cleaners and gardeners, a R1 million bonus.

Shuttleworth was born on 18 September 1973 in the small town of Welkom, South Africa, before moving to Cape Town, where he spent most of his childhood.

He attended Western Province Preparatory School and later Bishops College, the high school where he was head boy in 1991.

He attended the University of Cape Town after matric, where he completed a Bachelor of Business Science in Finance and Information Systems.

Shuttleworth founded his first technology company, Thawte Consulting, in 1995 while he was still studying at university. He was operating from his parents’ garage.

Thawte Consulting found success after it shifted its focus to Internet security for e-commerce. It became the first company to produce a fully secure e-commerce web server outside the United States.

In 1999, Shuttleworth sold Thawte to global domain name registry service provider VeriSign for $575 million (R3.5 billion at the time), making him one of the world’s youngest billionaires at 26.

He made national headlines in 2002 when he travelled to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz mission in what would be one of the world’s first space tourism deals.

Shuttleworth was the second person to become a space tourist with Space Adventures and the first to undergo training and work aboard the ISS.

He trained and qualified as a Russian cosmonaut after a full year of preparation, which included learning Russian and spending seven months in Star City, Russia, before making the trip to orbit.

While aboard the ISS, Shuttleworth assisted in conducting experiments, including the first test worldwide to assess the impact of zero gravity on the development of stem cells and embryos.

Another experiment saw Shuttleworth and researchers attempt to crystallise HIV proteins in weightlessness, hoping to obtain a more accurate view of the virus’s structure.

Pictures of Shuttleworth floating in zero gravity, holding the South African flag aloft, became an iconic image, emblematic of the early 2000s period in the country.

R1 million Christmas bonuses

Shuttleworth demonstrated unprecedented generosity after selling his company, Thawte Consulting, by awarding each of his 57 employees a R1 million Christmas bonus.

All staff members, including two office cleaners and a gardener, received the bonus. The act reflected his belief that every employee, regardless of role, contributed equally to his company’s success.

BusinessTech previously reported that the bonuses had a profound impact on the recipients’ lives. For many, it meant financial security for the first time.

Following the sale of Thawte, Shuttleworth established Here Be Dragons Venture Capital in 2000 to support new and emerging startups.

He also established the Shuttleworth Foundation, a non-profit that supported African innovation in education.

He then founded Canonical, the company behind the open-source operating system Ubuntu, which became a popular, widely used Linux operating system on PCs worldwide.

Ubuntu became the leading Linux distribution, focusing on accessible, freely available cloud computing, IoT, and enterprise solutions.

With Canonical, Shuttleworth said he wanted to give back to the open source software community because of his life-changing experiences building Thawte, hence the name of the system.

In recent years, Shuttleworth turned his attention to environmental conservation and sustainable tourism. He currently lives in London, UK, and maintains a presence on the Isle of Man, holding dual South African and British citizenship.

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More images of Mark Shuttleworth

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