Luxury watchmaker Jacob & Co has reportedly wiped Instagram posts that tied the brand to Zimbabwean businessman Wicknell Chivayo within hours of confirmation that he and his wife, Lucy Muteke, died in a helicopter crash near Marondera on 30 September 2026. The same house that hosted him in Geneva, engraved a watch with his initials, and let its founder call him a good friend has offered no public word. For a brand built on photographing the men who spend, the silence is the story.
Chivayo, widely reported as 45, was flying from Gandami in Chikomba district toward Harare when the aircraft came down at Kudenga Farm around 5 p.m. Family spokesman Herbert Chivayo confirmed the deaths. Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa said he was in deep shock. Kenya’s President William Ruto, whose daughter’s engagement ceremony Chivayo had attended weeks earlier, called him a friend. Investigators are still examining the wreck. The bodies were badly burned. None of that slowed the digital housekeeping in Geneva and New York.
In July, Chivayo posted from the Jacob & Co headquarters after a private invitation from founder Jacob Arabo. His caption was pure theatre: time is money, and the awkward moment when the owner invites you in and you walk out with watches worth 4.3 million dollars.
The centrepiece was a Billionaire Double Tourbillon priced at about 3.4 million dollars.
The haul also included Bugatti and Caviar pieces. In August he said he had added five more masterpieces and had no intention of stopping. In early September, Arabo announced that Chivayo had received the first Godfather II, valued at about 660,000 dollars, engraved WMC 777, and described him as a good friend and the Godfather of Philanthropy. A watch account later put the visible collection above 10 million dollars. Regional outlets, including Briefly and Nairobi News, then reported that the brand’s own posts of that courtship had vanished. Jacob & Co has not explained the removals. Some users insist a September note from Arabo himself is still up. The brand has not settled the argument.
That pattern is older than Chivayo. Arabo, born Yakov Arabov, built Jacob & Co as the jeweller hip-hop named in songs. The client list ran from Jay-Z and Diddy to athletes and, later, anyone rich enough to fly to Geneva for a factory tour and a caption. In 2006 federal prosecutors in Detroit charged him in the Black Mafia Family case, accusing him of helping conceal drug proceeds through jewellery sales.
He pleaded guilty in 2007 to falsifying records and lying to investigators, admitting a document had described pieces as loaned for a video when they had in fact been sold. The money-laundering counts were dropped. In June 2008 a judge sentenced him to 30 months, a 2 million dollar forfeiture and a 50,000 dollar fine. He told the court he was ashamed. The brand survived. The clients came back.
The method has not changed much. Court the spender in person. Photograph the handover. Let the client do the advertising. When the money or the reputation turns, step back. In 2023 developer Harry Macklowe said Arabo shook hands on a real-estate price and then raised it to 100 million dollars, telling him a rabbi had advised the new figure.
In February 2026, Vadim Lampert, creator of the Godfather pen Jacob & Co has sold in volume, sued in Manhattan, alleging he had been shorted by nearly 3 million dollars in commissions and royalties, and that pens had been handed to favoured clients as throw-ins that crushed his cut. Arabo has also been named, not convicted, in civil claims tied to Diddy’s parties.
None of that stopped the Geneva welcome for a man whose own record included a money-laundering conviction in the mid-2000s and a 2018 arrest over a 5.6 million dollar solar-project advance that a magistrate later struck off for prosecutorial delay.
Chivayo denied corruption. Critics in Zimbabwe called him the face of contracts that flowed to a small circle around the ruling party. He answered with cars, cash and cameras, and with presidents in the frame. Jacob & Co took the wire transfers and the content. When the helicopter burned, the content went first.
The comments have been blunt. One user wrote that they were only flattering him so he would buy more, and that once he became a bad association and could no longer spend, the brand would forget him.
Another said something smelled off: they knew he was bad for business and still took the money. Zimbabweans flooded the brand’s pages asking why a house deletes its most photographed recent buyer the moment he dies. “Since Wicknell won’t be bringing you money, you deleted his photos,” one comment read.
Others asked how a deletion can be called quiet when half the internet noticed. A smaller group said brands rearrange feeds all the time and that disappearance is not a confession. A few posts were openly ugly. The company has answered none of them.
Ruto’s tribute and the Marondera crash reports sit in one timeline. The Geneva invoices and the missing posts sit in another. Jacob & Co sold Chivayo the most expensive version of friendship it offers, the kind that comes engraved and posted. It has not said whether that friendship survived the news cycle.
The watches, if they were on the aircraft or in a safe, cannot speak either. The brand that lived off the photographs has chosen, for now, to live without them.
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