How to be a billionaire
Lessons from the life of T. Ananda Krishnan
Blessed Christmas, everyone. The wicked work all the time. This was sitting in my drafts so I guess why not publish this for a Friday read.
Also in case you missed Monday’s issue 👇🏾
Playbook is the section where I tackle bureaucracy, politics and business. It’s out Mondays, and part of a rejig of the newsletter as I countdown to 2025. And Monday’s newsletter covered defence, communications, govtech and the prime minister’s office.
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When T. Ananda Krishnan died, a number of folk came out in adulation for the tycoon. What I felt missing was a critical context to the makings of a billionaire, what more a non-Malay1, at a time when the country was trying to raise towering Malays, the capital class then PM Mahathir Mohamad wanted to desperately create.
By the time I covered business around 2019, Ananda cemented his reputation as a reclusive tycoon. His businesses were just meh, in that they existed, they were significantly large by Malaysian standards but they weren’t sexy.
Word of his children not taking up the reins was consensus, putting the late tycoon in the same boat as Teh Hong Piow, the Public Bank magnate whose children, too, didn’t take up the business after their father’s death.
All that I got from my seniors was that Ananda was a man of mystery, a “shadow”. He still had an interest in his home country but spent most of his time abroad, be it France or Switzerland (where he died) or London, the kampung of elite Malaysians.
Maybe because it’s customary for us to not speak ill of the dead that perhaps there was and still is a proper analysis on the tycoon. Even one of the better tributes out there, by The Edge’s contributing editor M Shanmugam veered into feting territory.
But it’s worth revisiting some of the lessons that helped make Ananda a mainstay on major billionaire indices and how far that applies today. Who knows? Maybe some of you want to be billionaires next year, too, so it might come in handy.