Such an interview does not happen every day. Actually, the F.A.S. only wanted to talk to Hasso Plattner about Germany's deficits in digitization. But Plattner was angry. "Germany continues to depend on itself, but I don't want to talk about it any longer," he said right at the beginning of the talks. "I just read in the teletext: 72 percent of Germans support the wealth tax. With a two percent wealth tax, I have to leave Germany."

Patrick Bernau

Editor responsible for economy and "value" of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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It was a real Plattner: passionate to the point of quick-temperedness, clear in tone, self-confident in the matter. Plattner is one of the few super-rich in Germany who do not hide, but show their flag. He can afford it. Not many entrepreneurs have had such success as the founders of the software company SAP.

Out of nothing, they created a corporation that became Germany's most valuable. For decades, almost single-handedly, he ensured that Germany was not completely left behind in terms of software and seemed at least a little bit fit for the future. For a long time, there was no younger company in the German stock index Dax than SAP. Such success does not come about without luck, but also not without skill, courage and hard work. At Plattner, it went like this:

The founding of SAP

Together with his boss Dietmar Hopp and three other colleagues, he left his secure job at the large corporation IBM in 1972 to become self-employed. At that time this was not commonplace, the seventies were really not Germany's founding era. Otherwise, only the large drugstores date back to the seventies, but their emergence has to do with the liberalization of drugstores in 1974.

At that time, the five men worked at night and on weekends because they used their clients' mainframes, which were only free at these times. SAP brought innovations to the market: The company software was no longer programmed individually for each company, but practically produced in series. And the company used the new invention of electronic keyboards to finally do without punch cards and instead show answers directly on the screen. "Maybe it was a little megalomaniac," says Plattner's colleague Hopp today. In the end, however, the attempt paid off, also for others: Through better management of the company, their first customer alone saved 60,000 marks a month – a saving that led to price reductions for many companies in competition over time and thus reached the customers.

Plattner knows how to live his life

Plattner enjoyed his success. At the customer fair he played electric guitar, he bought a red Ferrari and a golf club in South Africa. He won the legendary sailing regatta from Sydney to Hobart and founded his own airline so he didn't have to rely on flight schedules. But he missed the annual press conference in January 2003: Between Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro he had fallen into a lull on the Atlantic.