The South African who sold his tech company for R3.5 billion and went to space

Mark Shuttleworth became a dollar millionaire in 1999 when he sold his Internet security company Thawte Consulting to Verisign for $575 million — R3.5 billion at the time.

Setting aside a budget of $20 million, Shuttleworth travelled to Russia to negotiate one of the world’s first “space tourism” deals.

In a past interview with Business Insider, Shuttleworth explained that he negotiated and signed separate contracts with everyone involved in the process of getting him to space.

“I bought a spacesuit before I had a clear path to being able to use it,” he said.

“One contract I signed was so I could be tested by the scientific institution that tested cosmonauts,” said Shuttleworth.

“Only at the very end did I do a deal with the group that could actually get me there.”

That company was Space Adventures, which had arranged for American space engineer and investment manager Dennis Tito to travel up to the International Space Station (ISS) on a Russian Soyuz mission in 2001.

At 61 years old, Tito became the world’s first commercial space traveller. A year later, Shuttleworth was the second — and the first African in space.

Although both were labelled space tourists, Tito and Shuttleworth were required to work aboard the ISS.

Shuttleworth also trained and qualified as a Russian cosmonaut. This comprised a full year of training, which included learning Russian and spending seven months in Star City, Russia.

He conducted several experiments during his 10-day space flight.

One experiment was the first in the world to assess the impact of zero gravity on the development of stem cells and embryos.

Another was to determine the effect of microgravity on the cardiovascular system and muscles.

A third was an attempt to crystallise HIV proteins in weightlessness, hoping that, when X-rayed, they would give an accurate view of the virus structure.

There was some debate over Shuttleworth’s status as the first African in space, as there is an argument to be made for the Cameroonian-born Frenchman Patrick Baudry.

However, Baudry’s official biographies always refer to him as the second French citizen in space. He also served in the French military as a fighter pilot and participated in space missions under the French flag.

Shuttleworth, on the other hand, flew under (and with) a South African flag.

It is perhaps most correct to refer to Baudry as the first African-born astronaut, while Shuttleworth was the first citizen of an independent African nation in space.

Shuttleworth was born on 18 September 1973 in Welkom and grew up in Cape Town.

His fascination with technology began as a child when he discovered computer games.

Upon completing high school, he considered careers in particle physics, software engineering, and biotechnology before choosing a degree in business science specialising in finance from the University of Cape Town.

While studying at UCT, Shuttleworth discovered the Internet — then in its very early stages.

During his final year at UCT in 1995, he founded Thawte Consulting as an Internet consulting business.

The World Wide Web was just taking off thanks to the success of the Mosaic web browser and Netscape Navigator.

Thawte’s focus quickly shifted to providing security certificates for encrypted communications online.

According to Shuttleworth, Thawte became the first company to produce a full-security e-commerce web server that was commercially available outside the United States.

All this while operating from his parent’s garage.

Thawte had an advantage over its American competitors, which were blocked from providing strong encryption outside the United States by regulations.

Shuttleworth said he focused on that gap in the market to enable strong security for web transactions.

This brought him to the world of public key infrastructure and caught the attention of Netscape’s security group, creating an opportunity for Thawte to be a global certificate authority for the web.

By the time it was acquired by Verisign, Thawte had become the fastest-growing Internet certificate authority (CA), and was the leading CA outside of the US.

With his windfall, Shuttleworth established a venture capital company called HBD — a reference to the phrase “Here Be Dragons” used to describe uncharted territory on early maps.

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

In 2004, two years after his trip to space, Shuttleworth founded Canonical — the company behind the Ubuntu operating system.

Canonical was established to provide commercial support for open source projects.

Shuttleworth said he wanted to give back to the open source software community because he received so much value from it while building Thawte.

Canonical’s first major project was a desktop operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution. They called it Ubuntu and named each version after an animal.

The first version of Ubuntu, released in October 2004, was named Warty Warthog. The most recent version, released in April 2024, is called Noble Numbat.

Ubuntu soon became the world’s most popular Linux distribution.

Google Trends data shows that it remains the most searched-for term among people who search for “Linux” in 2024.