Most Powerful

• #1 Alfred Milner
  South AfricaUnited Kingdom Colonial AdministrationPolitical World Wars and Midcentury Conquest & TributeState Power Power: 100
  Alfred Milner (born 1854) is a british colonial administrator associated with United Kingdom and South Africa. Alfred Milner is best known for administrating British policy in South Africa and promoting imperial integration. This profile belongs to the site’s study of colonial administration and state power, where influence depends on controlling systems rather than possessing money alone. Across this era, wealth and command were less about possession alone than about controlling the systems through which other people had to move.
• #2 Jan Smuts
  South AfricaUnited Kingdom Colonial AdministrationMilitaryPolitical World Wars and Midcentury Conquest & TributeState Power Power: 100
  Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870–1950) was a South African soldier-statesman whose career linked the consolidation of white minority rule in southern Africa to the wider structures of British imperial power and the international order that followed two world wars. He moved from guerrilla commander in the South African War to cabinet architect of the Union of South Africa, and later served twice as prime minister. In wartime he held senior military responsibilities and acted as a trusted adviser inside imperial decision-making, while in peace he pursued a vision of international cooperation that helped shape the League of Nations and later the United Nations.Smuts exercised influence less through personal wealth than through the institutional instruments of government: party organization, cabinet control over defense and internal security, and the legitimacy that came from being seen in London as a reliable imperial partner. His reputation abroad rested on strategic moderation and a gift for drafting constitutional language. At home, his record was shaped by coercive state building and the racial hierarchy embedded in the Union’s political system, a tension that has made his legacy both durable and contested.
• #3 Jan van Riebeeck
  Dutch EmpireSouth Africa Colonial AdministrationPoliticalResources Early Modern Conquest & TributeState Power Power: 100
  Jan van Riebeeck (1619 – 1677) was a Dutch colonial administrator and officer of the Dutch East India Company who served as Commander of the Cape from 1652 to 1662. He established a fortified refreshment station at Table Bay intended to provision company fleets traveling between Europe and Asia. The station quickly became a settlement. Under his command the company laid out gardens and farms, granted land to free burghers, regulated trade in livestock, and enforced a growing frontier of European occupation that reshaped local economies and accelerated conflicts with Khoikhoi communities. The administrative routines built during his decade at the Cape provided an institutional base for the later Cape Colony and for a long settler expansion across southern Africa.
• #4 Lord Kitchener
  EgyptSouth AfricaUnited Kingdom MilitaryMilitary CommandPolitical World Wars and Midcentury Military CommandState Power Power: 100
  Lord Kitchener (1850 – 1916) was a British field marshal and imperial administrator whose career moved between colonial campaigns and the highest level of wartime government. He became widely known for commanding campaigns in Africa and for organizing British military expansion at the beginning of the First World War. His public image, reinforced by recruitment propaganda, embodied the expectation that empire could mobilize resources and manpower on demand, even as the realities of industrial war strained that assumption.Kitchener’s importance lay in his ability to convert political authority into military organization. He supervised campaigns that depended on railways, supply depots, and administrative control of territory, and as Secretary of State for War he helped create the mass volunteer armies that Britain fielded on the Western Front. His career ended abruptly in 1916 when he died at sea after the cruiser HMS Hampshire struck a mine, turning him into a symbol of wartime sacrifice and a focal point for both admiration and criticism.
• #5 Nelson Mandela
  South Africa Imperial SovereigntyPolitical Cold War and Globalization State Power Power: 100
  Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013) was President of South Africa associated with South Africa. Nelson Mandela is known for leading South Africa’s transition from apartheid to majority rule. Imperial sovereignty concentrates power in the authority to make law, command institutions, raise revenue, and direct coercive force. Even in constrained systems, executive power can reshape policy, alliances, and national priorities.
• #6 Paul Kruger
  South Africa Colonial AdministrationPolitical Industrial Conquest & TributeState Power Power: 100
  Paul Kruger (1825 – 1904), formally Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, was a Boer political leader and president of the South African Republic (Transvaal) whose career became closely associated with the struggle between settler republican autonomy and British imperial expansion in southern Africa. He rose from frontier warfare and local leadership into national office and became a symbol of resistance to British control, particularly during the crisis that led to the South African War at the end of the nineteenth century.Kruger’s power was rooted in state authority and in the political identity of a settler community that valued independence, land rights, and religiously inflected civic life. The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in the 1880s transformed the republic’s economic position and intensified international pressure. Kruger’s government faced the challenge of managing foreign capital and a large immigrant workforce while maintaining political control for established citizens. The resulting conflict over voting rights, taxation, policing, and sovereignty became a pathway into war with Britain.Colonial administration and imperial sovereignty often intersect in southern Africa’s late nineteenth-century politics, where treaties, rail lines, mining concessions, and armed forces shaped what autonomy meant in practice. Kruger operated in a setting where revenue streams from minerals and customs could strengthen a small state, but where those same resources attracted external intervention. His presidency illustrates how institutional control over law, franchise, and concessions can become a central mechanism of power.
• #7 Koos Bekker
  ChinaInternationalNetherlandsSouth Africa MediaTechnologicalTechnology Platform Control 21st Century Monopoly ControlTechnology Platforms Power: 87
  Koos Bekker is a South African media executive and investor best known for transforming Naspers from a regional media company into a global technology investment group. He belongs in technology platform control because his power did not come from inventing a single consumer platform, but from identifying, financing, and restructuring ownership around platforms whose network effects later became enormous. His career shows how control in the internet age can come from capital allocation as much as from product design.Bekker’s significance rests above all on the Naspers investment in Tencent, one of the most successful corporate bets in modern history. That investment changed not only the company’s balance sheet but its institutional identity. Naspers became a gateway through which South African capital, and later Prosus investors, participated in the rise of a Chinese platform giant. Few executives so clearly demonstrate how strategic equity ownership can translate into global influence.He is historically important because he helped pioneer a bridge model between legacy media capital and platform-era wealth. Under Bekker, a company rooted in newspapers and pay television repositioned itself around digital scale, international portfolio logic, and internet-platform value creation. That makes him a crucial figure in the story of how older media institutions adapted to the age of network power.
• #8 Johann Rupert
  South AfricaSwitzerland FinancialIndustrialIndustrial Capital Control 21st Century Finance and WealthIndustrial Capital Power: 72
  Johann Rupert (born 1950) is a South African businessman associated with the global luxury industry through his leadership of Compagnie Financière Richemont and related investment holdings. Richemont owns or controls major watch, jewelry, and luxury goods brands, and Rupert has been identified in business reporting as a central figure in the governance structure that gives his family substantial voting influence. In luxury markets where heritage and scarcity translate into premium margins, portfolio control allows a small number of executives and owners to shape global consumer demand for high-status goods. citeturn1search0turn1news35 Rupert’s influence reflects industrial capital control operating through brand ownership and distribution discipline rather than through heavy manufacturing. Watches and jewelry still depend on craft and supply chains, but the decisive power lies in controlling trademarks, retail channels, and the capital allocation that determines which houses expand, which are repositioned, and how scarcity is managed. The governance architecture, including dual-class voting rights, becomes part of the mechanism: it stabilizes control, resists hostile takeovers, and allows strategy to be set by a tight group even when outside shareholders hold large economic stakes. citeturn1news35turn1search3
• #9 Elon Musk
  InternationalSouth AfricaUnited States IndustrialTechnologicalTechnology Platform Control 21st Century Technology Platforms Power: 71
  Elon Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur whose influence spans electric vehicles, commercial space launch, satellite communications, artificial intelligence, and social-media distribution. Few living business figures combine as many forms of modern power in one person. Musk commands attention not only because he is wealthy, but because the companies associated with him operate in sectors that shape infrastructure, capital markets, public discourse, and state contracting. He belongs in technology platform control because several of his most important businesses govern systems through which others move: vehicle software ecosystems, launch capacity, satellite internet, and digital communication platforms.Musk’s importance lies in empire coordination. Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, xAI, and X do not form a traditional conglomerate in legal form, yet they reinforce one another through brand, personnel, data, investor enthusiasm, and the founder’s own publicity machine. His career illustrates how modern founder power can exceed the boundaries of any one company. A Musk-linked venture is interpreted partly through the gravitational field created by the rest.He is also historically significant because he transformed the public role of the industrial founder. Earlier tycoons often remained somewhat separate from mass communication. Musk instead became a constant media presence and direct broadcaster, using attention itself as an operational asset. That fusion of industrial, financial, and communicative power makes him one of the clearest representatives of the platform age.
• #10 Paul Le Roux
  PhilippinesSouth AfricaUnited StatesZimbabwe CriminalCriminal Enterprise Cold War and Globalization Illicit Networks Power: 62
  Paul Le Roux (born 1972) is a Zimbabwe-born programmer and criminal organizer whose career revealed how digital expertise, offshore finance, and old-fashioned coercion could be fused into a modern transnational crime empire. He first accumulated major wealth through online prescription-drug operations and related technology infrastructure, then expanded into narcotics trafficking, arms transactions, precious-metals smuggling, timber extraction, and murder-for-hire schemes across multiple countries. Le Roux is historically significant because his organization did not resemble a traditional territorial mafia. It operated more like a private clandestine corporation, with encrypted communications, compartmentalized teams, shell companies, and outsourced violence. His 2012 arrest in a U.S. sting and later cooperation with authorities exposed a criminal model in which software skill and global logistics became force multipliers for organized crime.
• #11 Ernest Oppenheimer
  South Africa IndustrialResource Extraction Control Industrial Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Ernest Oppenheimer (born 1880) is a mining executive associated with South Africa. Ernest Oppenheimer is best known for building mining-finance structures around diamonds and gold and shaping De Beers control. This profile belongs to the site’s study of resource extraction control and finance and wealth, where influence depends on controlling systems rather than possessing money alone. In the industrial age, command moved through factories, rail, shipping, fuel, banking, and the ability to scale production more efficiently than rivals.
• #12 Harry Oppenheimer
  South Africa FinancialIndustrialResource Extraction Control Cold War and Globalization Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Harry Oppenheimer (born 1908) is a mining executive associated with South Africa. Harry Oppenheimer is best known for leading major mining interests and sustaining diamond and minerals influence in the 20th century. This profile belongs to the site’s study of resource extraction control and finance and wealth, where influence depends on controlling systems rather than possessing money alone. In the modern and globalized world, concentrated influence is often exercised through finance, media, regulation, infrastructure, corporate governance, and cross-border market access.
• #13 Ivan Glasenberg
  South AfricaSwitzerland IndustrialResource Extraction Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Ivan Glasenberg (born 1957) is the South African-born former chief executive of Glencore and one of the defining figures in modern commodity trading. More than most resource magnates, Glasenberg built power by controlling flows rather than simply deposits. Under his leadership, Glencore evolved from a famously secretive trader into a publicly listed trader-miner whose reach extended from coal, copper, and zinc to oil marketing, logistics, and industrial assets across continents. His rise shows how fortunes in raw materials can be built as much through information, arbitrage, and supply-chain command as through direct extraction.
• #14 Nicky Oppenheimer
  BotswanaSouth AfricaUnited Kingdom FinancialIndustrialResource Extraction Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Nicky Oppenheimer (born 1945) is a South African mining heir, investor, and former chairman of De Beers whose family name was synonymous with the modern diamond trade for generations. His importance lies in having presided over the late phase of one of the most influential resource dynasties of the twentieth century and then converting that inherited mining fortune into a broader investment and conservation portfolio after the family exited De Beers.He belongs in resource extraction control because the Oppenheimer family’s historic power was rooted in command over diamond production, marketing, stock management, and the political economy around southern African mining. Diamonds are not simply another commodity. Their value depends on scarcity, distribution control, branding, and disciplined management of supply. The Oppenheimer system helped turn that logic into one of the most successful wealth structures in the modern resource world.Nicky Oppenheimer came to prominence not as the founder of the dynasty but as its late custodian. Under him, De Beers remained a symbol of concentrated influence in mining and luxury markets even as antitrust pressure, new producers, changing consumer behavior, and corporate restructuring eroded the older model. His later decision to sell the family’s De Beers stake to Anglo American in 2011 closed a historic chapter in South African and global mining history.His profile matters because it shows how resource dynasties persist, adapt, and finally transform. Oppenheimer represents the passage from extractive family command into post-extraction capital stewardship. In his career one can see both the afterlife of imperial-era mining fortunes and the changing limits of the old commodity-cartel style of power.
• #15 Patrice Motsepe
  AfricaInternationalSouth Africa IndustrialResource Extraction Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Patrice Motsepe (born 1962) is a South African mining entrepreneur and investor best known for building African Rainbow Minerals into one of the country’s most important diversified resource groups. His significance lies in the way he used post-apartheid openings, black economic empowerment structures, and astute acquisition timing to create a major mining fortune spanning gold, platinum group metals, ferrous minerals, manganese, coal, and related industrial interests.He belongs in resource extraction control because his wealth was built through ownership of mineral assets and the rights, licenses, infrastructure, and corporate partnerships that make those assets economically useful. In South Africa’s political economy, mining remains deeply entangled with state policy, labor, race, and elite formation. Motsepe’s career cannot be separated from that institutional environment. He emerged as one of the most successful figures in a generation of black business leaders who gained prominence as the old mining order was partially reconfigured.Motsepe is also important because he bridged several worlds at once. He is a lawyer by training, a miner by fortune, a corporate dealmaker by temperament, and a public figure whose influence extends into philanthropy and football governance. That combination has made him more than a commodity-cycle beneficiary. He became a symbol of post-apartheid elite mobility, even as the system that enabled his rise remained uneven and contested.His profile matters because it illuminates how resource wealth changes character when a new political order seeks to redistribute access without dismantling the underlying extractive economy. Motsepe did not reject mining capitalism. He mastered its new rules. In doing so, he became one of the most visible examples of how mineral control, policy alignment, and financial patience can generate durable power in modern Africa.
• #16 Marius Kloppers
  AustraliaSouth Africa Resource Extraction ControlResources Cold War and Globalization Finance and Wealth Power: 23
  Marius Kloppers (born 1962) is a mining executive associated with South Africa and Australia. Marius Kloppers is best known for leading large-scale diversified mining operations tied to global steel, energy, and infrastructure demand. This profile belongs to the site’s study of resource extraction control and finance and wealth, where influence depends on controlling systems rather than possessing money alone. In the modern and globalized world, concentrated influence is often exercised through finance, media, regulation, infrastructure, corporate governance, and cross-border market access.