In 1999, a 26-year-old from Welkom in the Free State sold his company for nearly six billion rand.
Most people would have bought a massive house and never worked again. Mark Shuttleworth bought a ticket to space. And then spent the rest of his fortune making the world's computers work better — for everyone on Earth — completely free of charge.
This is his story.
It Started in a Bedroom in Welkom
Mark was born in 1973 in Welkom — a mining town in the Free State. As a teenager in the late 1980s, he became completely obsessed with computers. Not just using them. Understanding them. Taking them apart in his head.
He taught himself to code the way most kids of his generation did — by experimenting, breaking things, and working out why they broke.
Mark Shuttleworth started his first company from his parents' garage in Durban while still at university. Amazon, Apple, Google, and Disney all started in garages too. Coincidence? We don't think so.
The Company That Made the Internet Safe
In 1995, while studying at UCT, Mark started a company called Thawte. You know the little padlock in your browser that means a website is safe? Mark built the technology behind that padlock — better than almost anyone else on the planet — from a garage in Durban.
Thawte specialised in SSL/TLS digital certificates and public key cryptography — the technology that encrypts data sent between your browser and a website. When you see HTTPS in a web address, that security is built on foundations that companies like Thawte helped establish.
In 1999, an American company called VeriSign realised Thawte was so good they had to own it. They paid $575 million. Mark was 26 years old.
Then He Went to Space
What do you do when you've made more money than most people see in a hundred lifetimes, and you're still only 26?
If you're Mark Shuttleworth, you call the Russian Space Agency and ask how much a ticket costs.
In 2002, he paid approximately $20 million and became the first African in space. He spent eight days orbiting Earth at 28,000 kilometres per hour.
While orbiting Earth, Shuttleworth did a live radio call with South African schoolchildren. He wanted young South Africans to hear a voice from space that sounded like theirs — and know that science was for them too.
The ISS orbits at approximately 408 kilometres altitude at 7.66 km per second — completing one full orbit every 92 minutes. During his eight days aboard, Shuttleworth conducted microgravity experiments in genomics and AIDS research.
He Gave His Greatest Work Away for Free
After returning from space, Shuttleworth created the Ubuntu Foundation — named after the Zulu and Xhosa philosophy: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — a person is a person through other people.
He used it to build a free operating system called Ubuntu and give it to anyone in the world who wanted it.
What's an operating system? It's the software that runs your computer — like Windows or macOS. Except Ubuntu is completely free, and anyone in the world can download, use, and even improve it.
Ubuntu now runs on hundreds of millions of computers worldwide — powering systems at Google, Amazon, and NASA, and thousands of schools across Africa. All free. Because a guy from Welkom decided the world's computers should work for everyone.
Ubuntu is a Linux distribution — a version of the open-source Linux kernel created by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Open-source software means the underlying code is publicly available for anyone to inspect, modify, and distribute. Android — which runs most smartphones — is also Linux-based, making it the most widely used operating system kernel in human history.
What His Story Means For You
Mark Shuttleworth didn't grow up in Silicon Valley. He didn't have famous parents or go to a famous school. He grew up in Welkom — and he changed how the internet works, went to space, and gave his greatest invention to the world for free.
His story has one lesson above all others:
Where you come from doesn't determine what you can build.
Ubuntu is still free at ubuntu.com. You can download and use the same operating system that runs NASA's servers — completely free. That's Mark Shuttleworth's gift to you.
Your Turn to Build Something Real
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