Dietmar Hopp
| Dietmar Hopp | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Hopp in 2019 | |
| Born | April 26, 1940 (age 86) Heidelberg, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Education | University of Karlsruhe (telecommunications engineering, 1966) |
| Occupation | Software engineer, businessman, philanthropist |
| Company | SAP SE |
| Title | Co-founder and former CEO, SAP SE Patron, TSG 1899 Hoffenheim |
| Net worth | US$8.3 billion (2021) |
| Spouse | Anneliese Zeuner |
| Children | 2, including Daniel Hopp |
Dietmar Hopp (born 26 April 1940) is a German software engineer, businessman and philanthropist. He was one of the five founders of SAP SE in 1972, served as the company's chief executive from 1988 to 1998, and afterwards became one of Germany's largest private philanthropists and the financial backer of the football club TSG 1899 Hoffenheim.
Hopp's career traces an unusual arc through postwar German business. He began as a salaried programmer at IBM, left with four colleagues to build enterprise software at a time when the category barely existed, and helped turn SAP into the most valuable technology company in Europe. He then spent his later decades redistributing much of the resulting fortune into medical research, education and sport in the Rhine-Neckar region where he had grown up, becoming in the process one of the most divisive figures in German football.
Early life
Hopp grew up in Hoffenheim, a small village in the Baden-Württemberg region of southern Germany. The family history was marked by the Nazi period in a way that Hopp would later confront publicly. His father, Emil Hopp, was a Truppführer in the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi Party paramilitary organisation, and commanded the destruction of the synagogue in Hoffenheim during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938.
The role his father had played was not addressed publicly until 2009, when Menachem Mayer and Fred Raymes, two Jewish brothers who had been persecuted as children in Hoffenheim and forced into exile, published memoirs describing the destruction of their hometown's synagogue and identifying Emil Hopp's part in it. Dietmar Hopp responded by supporting a film project about the brothers' lives, an act widely noted in Germany as an unusually direct engagement by an industrialist with a family past that he could have left unexamined.
Hopp completed his Abitur and then studied telecommunications engineering in Karlsruhe, graduating in 1966. He joined IBM as a software developer and consultant, entering the computing industry at the point when large organisations were beginning to run their core administrative functions on mainframes.
SAP
Founding
In 1972 Hopp left IBM together with four colleagues, Hans Werner Hector, Klaus Tschira, Claus Wellenreuther and Hasso Plattner, to found the company that became SAP. The founders had identified a gap in the way software was then sold. Enterprise programs were typically written from scratch for each customer, meaning that companies with essentially identical accounting or inventory problems each paid for bespoke development. The SAP founders proposed instead to build standard business application software that could be configured for different customers, and to run it processing data in real time rather than in overnight batches.
The proposition was not obvious in 1972. Standardisation implied that a customer's processes should adapt to the software rather than the reverse, an argument that took years to win. The first product, later known as R/1, was a financial accounting system. R/2, released for mainframes, established the company across German and then European industry. R/3, launched in 1992 and built for client-server architectures, carried SAP into the global market and made enterprise resource planning a recognised software category.
Leadership
Hopp was chief executive of SAP, then SAP AG, from 1988 until 1998. The decade covered the company's transformation from a substantial German software house into a global enterprise vendor, driven principally by R/3 and by the wave of business process reengineering that swept large corporations in the 1990s. SAP's listing and subsequent share price growth during this period created several of Germany's largest private fortunes at once.
He moved to the chairmanship of the supervisory board in 1998 and held that position until 2003, remaining a board member until 2005. He retained approximately 10 per cent of the company's shares after stepping back from the board, and it is that holding, appreciating over subsequent decades, that has underwritten his philanthropy.
In September 2021 Forbes estimated his net worth at 8.3 billion dollars.
Philanthropy
After leaving SAP's board Hopp directed the bulk of his attention and a substantial share of his wealth to the Dietmar Hopp Foundation, which he had established to fund work in the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region. The foundation has spent hundreds of millions of euros, concentrated in four areas: medicine, youth sport, education and social projects.
The medical funding has been the most consequential. Hopp has been a long-term backer of biotechnology in Germany, including substantial early investment in companies working on immunotherapy and vaccine platforms. That position placed him unexpectedly at the centre of public attention in 2020, when the Tübingen vaccine developer CureVac, in which Hopp was the dominant investor, became a candidate developer of a coronavirus vaccine. Hopp stated publicly that any vaccine developed with his backing would be made available worldwide rather than licensed exclusively to any single country, a commitment that received wide coverage after reports that the United States administration had sought exclusive access.
He has also continued to invest personally in smaller companies, generally in the same region and often in health and life sciences.
TSG 1899 Hoffenheim
Hopp is the chief financial backer of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim, the football club of the village where he grew up and for which he played as a teenager.
After a heavy defeat in 1990 he began investing in the club, then playing in the Kreisliga, among the lowest tiers of the German league system. The money moved the club steadily upwards, and by the early 2000s it had reached the Regionalliga, Germany's third division. In 2005 Hopp intensified the investment sharply with the explicit goal of promotion to the Bundesliga. He funded transfers and hired the coach Ralf Rangnick, and Hoffenheim achieved two consecutive promotions, entering the Bundesliga in 2008. It has remained there since.
Hopp also spent approximately 100 million euros building a 30,000-seat stadium, the Rhein-Neckar-Arena near Sinsheim. Estimates of his total investment in the club exceed 350 million euros.
Controversies
Hoffenheim and German football culture
Hopp's involvement with TSG 1899 Hoffenheim made him the most contested individual in German football. The German game operates under the 50+1 rule, which requires that club members retain majority voting control and is intended to prevent clubs becoming the property of individual investors. Hopp's position at Hoffenheim was treated by many supporters as a circumvention of that principle in spirit if not in letter, and in 2015 he was granted an exemption allowing him to take a controlling stake, on the basis of his two decades of continuous funding.
Opposing fans labelled Hoffenheim a plastic club, arguing that its rise from village amateur football to the Bundesliga reflected nothing but one man's money. Hopp became the target of sustained abuse in stadiums across Germany, including banners displaying his image within crosshairs. The matter escalated in early 2020, when a series of matches were disrupted by such banners and several games were halted by referees. The Bundesliga responded with collective punishments against travelling supporters, which in turn drew criticism from fan organisations who argued that collective sanctions were disproportionate.
Hopp's defenders pointed out that his investment had been sustained for thirty years without extraction of profit, that the club had developed a youth academy of national standing, and that the abuse directed at him personally went well beyond legitimate criticism of an ownership model. Critics maintained that the substantive objection was structural rather than personal, and that the exemption granted in 2015 set a precedent that weakened the rule protecting member control.
Family history
The 2009 revelations about Emil Hopp's role in the Kristallnacht destruction of the Hoffenheim synagogue prompted discussion in Germany about the responsibility of prominent families for the conduct of earlier generations. Hopp's decision to support the film about the Mayer brothers was generally received as a constructive response, though some commentators argued that the silence of the preceding decades was itself notable given his public profile in the same village.
Concentration of regional influence
Hopp's philanthropy in the Rhine-Neckar region has been extensive enough that some local commentators have raised questions about the influence a single private donor exercises over regional medical research, sporting infrastructure and education. The criticism is not of misconduct but of dependence, and it is a recurring theme in discussions of large-scale private giving in Germany, where public funding has traditionally played the dominant role in these areas.
Personal life
Hopp is married to Anneliese Zeuner. The couple live in Walldorf, the town in Baden-Württemberg that is also SAP's headquarters. They have two sons, both of whom manage parts of the family's interests. Oliver Hopp, born in April 1972, heads the golf resort Domaine de Terre Blanche in southern France. Daniel Hopp, born in October 1980, is the managing director of the SAP Arena event venue in Mannheim, of the ice hockey team Adler Mannheim and of the golf club St. Leon-Rot, and is involved in the Dietmar Hopp Foundation.
Hopp has retained a reputation for personal modesty inconsistent with the scale of his wealth, continuing to live in the region where he was born and maintaining a low public profile outside the disputes surrounding his football club.
See also
References