Tycoon Ananda Krishnan dies, aged 86

Ananda Krishnan, the elusive billionaire who rose from oil trader to one of Malaysia’s most prolific dealmakers and bankrolled the 1985 Live Aid concert, has died. He was 86.

Krishnan’s investment holding company announced his death in a statement, saying he made “significant contributions to nation building and the corporate world” and his philanthropy had “touched many lives.” He passed away peacefully on Thursday (Nov 28), it said. 

In a decades-long career that ran parallel to Malaysia’s economic rise, Krishnan built a reputation as a savvy, Harvard-trained businessman whose fingerprints were everywhere, but who’d rarely show up in person. After a successful run in petroleum, he made forays into entertainment, power, gambling and more, amassing a fortune estimated at US$3.8 billion as of August 2024, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Underpinning his success was a long friendship with Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s prime minister from 1981 to 2003 and 2018 to 2020. The two men bonded in London in the 1970s. While Mahathir was in power, Ananda won numerous licenses for telecommunications, satellite and broadcasting operations. And he got the nod to turn a racetrack area in downtown Kuala Lumpur into a massive city within a city, crowned by the Petronas Towers – the world’s tallest twin buildings.

He took public companies private, and vice versa. Most notably, he orchestrated a buyout of telecom firm Maxis in 2007 and relisted it to the public two years later. Years later, his empire was bludgeoned after a big bet on India’s mobile market foundered as a result of cut-throat competition and a regulatory probe into alleged phone-licence corruption. The cumulative losses: roughly US$7 billion.

Through his ups and downs, with billions won and lost, Krishnan guarded his privacy and rarely gave interviews.

“I have heard some people say I have a low profile,” he once told a journalist. “Why should somebody be high profile anyway? I am just doing my job. If you say I have a low profile, then by definition it means, I should be high profile. But why?”

He donated to a range of causes over the years, most famously teaming up with Irish rock star Bob Geldof to organise Live Aid in July 1985. The twin concerts in London and Philadelphia drew more than 150,000 spectators and 1.5 billion television viewers, and raised US$70 million for famine victims.

Krishnan had read about how Geldof, in 1984, recruited peers to record the 1984 song Do They Know It’s Christmas/Feed the World to raise money for famine relief. 

“Instead of simply giving money to a charity, I wanted to invest it in someone who could raise large amounts of money,” he told Newsweek shortly the Live Aid shows.

Tatparanandam Ananda Krishnan was born on April 1, 1938, in Kuala Lumpur, the son of a civil servant with Sri Lankan roots. He earned an undergraduate degree in Australia through the Colombo Plan, an organisation formed to promote professional development in South Asia.

It is said he went into oil trading after meeting the former oil minister of Saudi Arabia in an MBA course at Harvard University in the mid-1960s, according to the Business Times of Singapore – a choice Ananda later would describe with ambivalence.

“The oil trading business is a very exciting business. But I can’t tell you that you meet the greatest guys in the world in oil trading,” he told the newspaper in 1994. “Nor is it a business you would wish on your children. It’s a business you want to do for yourself. You make a little bit of money and you say, thank goodness, that’s over. And thank goodness I was there at an exciting time.”

His experience led him to help set up Petronas, Malaysia’s national oil company. He turned a dormant tin mining company called Tanjong into a thriving gambling business that helped propel him to billionaire status by the mid-90s. He founded both Malaysian cell carrier Maxis and Astro Malaysia Holdings, which provides television, broadband, radio and streaming coverage of sports and entertainment. Astro reached two-thirds of Malaysian households as of 2024, according to its website.

Krishnan in 2015 set up the Yu Cai Foundation, named after the Mandarin words that translate to “nurture talent.” BLOOMBERG