How Egyptian billionaire lost €500 million in a split-second of anger

The admission, made during the programme Billion Journey, rippled quickly through financial and media circles across the Middle East and beyond. Its significance lies not merely in the staggering sum involved, but in who is saying it and why it matters. This is not a cautionary tale from a business-school lecture hall. It is a real confession from a man whose net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has hovered around USD 9–10 billion in recent years — a man who has negotiated multi-billion-dollar telecom deals across three continents and built one of Africa’s most diversified corporate empires.

According to Sawiris, he had already held a 10% stake in an unnamed company when a dispute with someone connected to the investment triggered a visceral reaction. Acting on impulse — and without the diligence that has otherwise defined his career — he doubled down, acquiring an additional 10% stake. The timing could not have been worse. A broader global market downturn arrived almost simultaneously, and the position haemorrhaged its entire value. The €500 million, he said simply, was gone.

When emotion overrides economics

The episode exposes a psychological vulnerability that plagues investors at every level of wealth: the collision of ego, emotion and capital. Behavioural economists have long documented the phenomenon. Loss aversion theory, pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, suggests that the pain of losing a given amount feels roughly twice as intense as the pleasure of gaining the same sum. When anger enters the equation, that imbalance compounds — the rational brain is effectively switched off, and the investor acts not to optimise returns, but to assert dominance or prove a point to someone who has caused offence. In Sawiris’s own telling, the additional stake purchase was not driven by a bullish thesis or a revised valuation model. It was driven by displeasure with a person. The market, as it has done to overconfident investors throughout history, was entirely indifferent.

Sawiris acknowledged this without defensiveness, a posture that itself speaks to his seasoning as a businessman. He also noted that anger was not his only vulnerability. Overconfidence, he admitted, had at various points in his career caused him to bypass the careful calculations on which durable wealth is built. “Calm judgement and careful calculations are essential for success in investment,” he said — a line that, while straightforward, carries more weight coming from a man who has made and lost hundreds of millions of dollars across emerging markets, telecom privatisations, gold mining and real estate.

A career built on comebacks

The loss, however enormous in absolute terms, did not break him. And that is perhaps the more instructive part of the story. Sawiris’s career has been defined by recoveries as much as by victories. In 2010, he sold major telecommunications assets — including a controlling stake in Orascom Telecom Holding and Italy’s Wind Telecomunicazioni — to Russia’s VimpelCom in a deal worth USD 6.4 billion, banking around USD 300 million in cash and a 20% stake in the enlarged group. By 2012, follow-on transactions had added more than USD 4 billion to his fortune. He has since survived a bruising arbitration with the Algerian government over his Djezzy mobile network, which he eventually lost at the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, having originally claimed USD 4 billion in damages. He has outlasted the collapse of the Euronews investment — he bought a majority stake in the Paris-based multilingual broadcaster in 2015 and began divesting in 2021 — and navigated a disputed seizure of his Syrian assets at the hands of associates of the Assad family.

The pattern is consistent: Sawiris absorbs punishment that would end lesser careers and recalibrates. His current net worth, according to Bloomberg, places him among Africa’s 10 wealthiest individuals, with approximately USD 9.83 billion in assets as of late 2025. That figure itself reflects significant gold exposure — Sawiris disclosed in the same television interview that roughly 70% of his wealth is held in gold, primarily through his mining investment firm La Mancha Resources, which holds significant stakes in Endeavour Mining, a major Africa-focused gold producer, and Evolution Mining in Australia. The remainder is spread across real estate, technology, hospitality and other ventures.

The man behind the money

What distinguishes Sawiris’s account from the typical billionaire mea culpa is the texture of the self-portrait he paints around it. He is not performing humility for the cameras. He recounts, for instance, an episode in which he paid a Cairo taxi driver a sum described as far exceeding the normal fare. When the driver protested that it was too much, Sawiris replied: “Keep it for the future.” The anecdote functions in his narrative as evidence not of generosity as performance, but of a disposition shaped by upbringing. He was raised, he says, in a household — the family of late patriarch and Orascom founder Onsi Sawiris — that prized moderation and contentment over the conspicuous accumulation of wealth. That, he argues, is what has kept him “close to ordinary people” despite becoming one of the richest men on the continent.

He also made clear that he does not measure himself the way wealth rankings measure him. His benchmark is not his position on Forbes or Bloomberg lists — he dismisses those with the practised ease of a man who has spent time near the top of both. His metric, instead, is the enterprise value of the companies he builds and the durability of the businesses he creates. “I have never regretted a decision or a deal that did not go through,” he said. Given the volume of negotiations he has conducted over more than four decades in global business, that is either a remarkable emotional discipline or a remarkable capacity for reframing. Possibly both.

Sawiris also confirmed what has long been known in Egyptian business circles: he earned his first billion through Orascom, the family conglomerate his father founded and which Naguib helped transform from a construction business into one of the Middle East and Africa’s most diversified corporate groups spanning telecoms, construction, media, tourism and mining. The Orascom story remains one of the most significant private-sector success stories in emerging-market history — a family-run enterprise that grew to operate across more than a dozen countries and compete for assets in markets as varied as North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq and the Caribbean.

The lesson €500 million bought

For the investor watching from London, New York, Dubai or Nairobi, Sawiris’s confession carries a lesson that no amount of financial modelling can fully encode. Markets are not neutral arbiters of value in the short term — they are arenas where human psychology, geopolitical events, liquidity conditions and timing interact in ways that even the most sophisticated participants misread. The discipline of separating emotion from capital allocation is not merely a soft-skills talking point. According to one of Africa’s most experienced deal-makers, failing to maintain that separation can, in a single moment, cost you half a billion euros.

Sawiris is still standing. He is still investing, still building, still commenting with unguarded candour on a career that has spanned revolutionary Egypt, the global telecom privatisation boom, the gold supercycle, and every market crisis in between. The €500 million is gone. The lesson, evidently, is not.