One of UK's richest men wants German citizenship over 'hostility' to Jews

One of UK's richest men wants German citizenship over 'hostility' to Jews 25 minutes ago Share Save Huw Thomas Wales business correspondent Share Save "Britain is an uncomfortable place for Jews today," Cardiff-born billionaire Sir Michael Moritz has said. The Welsh investor said Britain was "far more hostile than the US" towards its Jewish community, citing the attack on Manchester's Heaton Park synagogue in 2025 . Sir Michael, who has written about his family's experience of the Nazis, said "antisemitism is always in the air" and there were modern parallels to the persecution they had faced. He said he was applying for a German passport, what he calls an "insurance policy" that would allow him the opportunity to flee the US or the UK in a way that some of his ancestors were unable to escape persecution. He also argued that the UK was a less attractive place to do business compared with the US and China, and that artificial intelligence could be "deeply disruptive" for white-collar workers. The 71-year-old, who holds both UK and US passports, is the richest Welshman who has ever lived , with a wealth built on investments in companies like Yahoo and Google that made him billions during the dot-com boom of the early 2000s. In a memoir called Ausländer – the German word for foreigner or outsider – Sir Michael charts his family's treatment under the Nazis. His paternal grandparents, Max and Minnie Moritz, were among swathes of relatives killed during the Holocaust. Using public archives he found that two of his relatives, his great-uncle Oskar Moritz and his cousin Mira Marx, were photographed by the Gestapo as they were forced onto buses that transported them to their deaths. Sir Michael's parents had escaped Germany and settled in Cardiff , where he attended the now-closed Howardian High School in Penylan. He said the sense of being an outsider had accompanied him since childhood and recalled opening the phone directory as a teenager and scanning the "M" section, hop...