For a man who sounds disturbingly like flamboyant Afrikaans entertainer Nataniël, BHP Billiton's brilliant young CE, Marius Kloppers, is being taken very seriously indeed. Recently named the 18th most powerful person in business by Fortune magazine, Kloppers (45) is a South African who has made it big outside the country - arguably, bigger than any other South African.
He is the architect behind what could be the largest deal in history: the merging of BHP Billiton with its rival Rio Tinto in a deal worth about R1 trillion. Kloppers is vigorously pursuing the deal with Rio's shareholders around the world.
And this just months after taking over the top job from American Chip Goodyear - successor to another South African, Brian Gilbertson.
Trying to secure an interview with Kloppers is virtually impossible. The company's communications team says there is "a possibility" that he will speak to the FM next year.
His route to the top took him from SA shores early in his career. He was born in August in 1962 in Cape Town, the younger of two boys. His teenage years were spent in Johannesburg, where he went to school at Helpmekaar Hoërskool in Braamfontein, just across the road from Wits University. It was at Helpmekaar that he met his future wife, Carin, now an artist. They have three children.
After high school Kloppers was in the army for two years and then went on to do a chemical engineering degree at the University of Pretoria. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and did his PhD in materials science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Back in SA he worked briefly at the state-run mining sciences company Mintek and at synthetic fuels giant Sasol.
From there he went to France's prestigious business school, Insead, and got his MBA, with distinction. Next he headed for the Netherlands, where he worked for management consultants McKinsey & Co, but this proved unsatisfying for Kloppers. It wasn't long before he headed back to SA where he caught the eye of legendary mining deal-maker Gilbertson, who was running Gencor - the company that would become Billiton and morph years later into the world's largest mining company, BHP Billiton.
He has been with Billiton for the past 14 years, and has crafted an astonishing career at breakneck speed.
In his early 30s he managed the building of Billiton's vast Hillside aluminium smelters in KwaZulu Natal. It was here that he adopted his daughter Noni from a woman who appealed to Kloppers to care for her as she was not able to.
From Hillside he went on to head the manganese business Samancor and was group executive of Billiton's coal and manganese operations.
He played a central role in the merger of Billiton and BHP; in the new company he held the position of chief marketing officer and group president of nonferrous materials. That made him the youngest executive director on the company's board.
Kloppers' drive and ambition are often commented on. He is described as ruthless, intense and a clever strategic thinker.
In the months after Goodyear announced his resignation there was much speculation over who would get the top job at the company.
It was widely regarded as a two-horse race between Kloppers and the company's former Aussie-rules playing CFO, Chris Lynch.
Australian newspaper The Age commented on Klopper s' legendary intensity, considered a handicap in his bid for CE.
When he ran that group's commodity trading business, Kloppers was said to have "insisted on a clean desk policy" - "... the idea being that the jocks were there to make money for BHP and not to look at photos of their sweethearts or mums", wrote The Age.
"The cleaners would come through at night with orders to remove all offending material - basically, anything to do with life outside of the trading room. Once, on a late-night visit, Kloppers is said to have gone ballistic because the policy was being fl outed."
He is said to be a family man, spending as much time with his family as he can, and eating breakfast and supper with them daily. Weekends are also spent with the family.
Kloppers is a technophile and a vegetarian, and The Times recently cited his favourite book as Hermann Hesse's Nobel-prize winning Glass Bead Game, a work of existentialist fiction that explores education and the life of the mind.
He loves singers Bob Dylan and Carole King, and his favourite movie i s the Andrew Lloyd Webber hit, Evita.
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