Nadiem Makarim

Nadiem Anwar Makarim (born 4 July 1984) is an Indonesian politician and businessman who was minister of education, culture, research and technology from 2021 until 2024; in 2010 he founded Gojek, Indonesia's first startup valued at over US$10 billion, and in October 2019 he left the company to join President Joko Widodo's cabinet ¹.

Makarim was born in Singapore on 4 July 1984 to Indonesian parents, Nono Anwar Makarim, an activist and lawyer, and Atika Algadri; his maternal grandfather was Hamid Algadri, an Indonesian independence fighter ^{1 2}. He attended high school in Jakarta and graduated from the United World College of South East Asia in Singapore, took an undergraduate degree in international relations at Brown University, and completed an MBA at Harvard Business School ¹.

After Brown, Makarim worked three years as a McKinsey consultant in Jakarta, co-founded Zalora Indonesia in 2011, and served as chief innovation officer at the payment provider Kartuku while building Gojek ¹. Founded in 2010 as a call centre for courier delivery and motorcycle ride-hailing, Gojek became a super-app with more than twenty services and a valuation above US$10 billion, receiving US$1.3 billion in a 2018 funding round ¹. As education minister he signed the February 2021 decree barring schools from mandating religious attire, stating that whether a person wears religious clothing is an individual's right, not a school's decision ¹. In 2025 he was arrested as a suspect in the Chromebook school-laptop procurement case, and on 30 June 2026 an Indonesian court convicted him of corruption, sentenced him to ten years in prison, fined him 1 billion rupiah and ordered 809.6 billion rupiah in restitution; he denied wrongdoing and said he would appeal ¹. No text read for this record names a faith for Makarim himself — the articles are silent, and Wikidata's generic Islam statement is structured data that settles nothing and names no school — so his faith is recorded as unknown ^{1 3 2}.

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