Sir Michael Moritz, one of the UK’s richest men, is applying for a German passport, saying “Britain is an uncomfortable place for Jews today”.
Moritz, the venture capitalist who made his fortune investing early in big technology companies such as Google, PayPal, LinkedIn and WhatsApp, said “antisemitism is always in the air” in the UK.
Antisemitism was an issue in many communities, including California where he spent most of his working life, he said, but Britain was “far more hostile than the US” towards its Jewish community, citing the attack on Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue in October.
“I have cousins who live less than half-a-mile from the Heaton Park synagogue,” Moritz told the BBC. “And while they weren’t members of that particular synagogue, they knew a whole bunch of people who were there.”
Moritz at a Chanukkah party in 1960
© THE FAMILY OF MICHAEL MORITZ
The Welsh businessman said rising antisemitism in the UK also meant there were “kids in northwest London who no longer wear their school blazers” to avoid being identified as attending Jewish schools. “It’s all these anecdotes that strike home more than anything else,” he said.
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Moritz, 71, who already holds both US and UK passports, said applying for a German passport was what he called an “insurance policy” that would allow him the opportunity to flee the US or the UK, contrasting it with some of his ancestors who were unable to do to escape persecution. While it is unusual, some countries, including the UK, allow people to hold multiple passports or citizenships.
“I think it’s [Germany is] the one place in Europe where what happened [nearly] 100 years ago forms a very central part of the educational system, so you have generations that have been reared with that as part of their consciousness,” he told the BBC. “Does that mean it will prevent dreadful things [from] happening in the future? No, but it gives me some mild form of reassurance.”
Moritz, whose grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, has previously written of his feeling of alienation growing up in Wales with a surname like his. “There was no shortage of Evanses and Thomases, but we were the only Moritz,” he wrote in his memoir called Ausländer, the German word for foreigner or outsider. “And to me, that was as if — in the margin, in big black capital letters — it said Jew.”
Moritz’s sister, grandparents, mother and himself in the late 1950s
© THE FAMILY OF MICHAEL MORITZ
Moritz is consistently ranked as the wealthiest person in Wales and among the top 50 in the UK. The fortune of him and his wife, Harriet Heyman, was estimated at £4.43 billion, according to The Sunday Times Rich List in 2025.
With his wife, Harriet Heyman
ELENA ZHUKOVA/PA
Moritz also said the UK was a less attractive place to do business compared with the US and China. He repeated criticisms that boards of directors in the UK sometimes lacked the expertise to nurture new technology in the way that American companies, particularly in Silicon Valley, have achieved.
He also said while AI would help many companies, it could be “deeply disruptive” for white-collar workers. “It’ll be fantastically liberating for creative types who can master all of these incredible tools,” he said.