He Built Gojek. Then He Tried to Fix Indonesia. Now He Faces 18 Years in Prison.
The man who would become Indonesia's most consequential tech entrepreneur, and later its most scrutinised Gojek founder, did not
The man who would become Indonesia’s most consequential tech entrepreneur, and later its most scrutinised Gojek founder, did not start with code or capital. He started with traffic.
Jakarta in the early 2000s was one of the most congested cities on earth. A journey of a few kilometres could consume an hour. The informal motorcycle taxi, known locally as an ojek, was how millions of people moved through the gridlock. It was also, by every measure, a broken system. Drivers waited in fixed spots for customers who might never come. Drivers and customers negotiated prices street by street. There was no reliability, no safety standard, and no way to plan around it. It was a vast, invisible labour force with no coordination layer between it and the people who needed it most.
Nadiem Makarim noticed this problem not as a policymaker or an investor, but as a daily user. He had returned from McKinsey and had co-founded an online fashion platform before stepping into payments. But the ojek problem stayed with him. In 2010, at 26, he acted on it.
Twenty Drivers and a Phone Line
The early system was almost insultingly simple: customers called a dispatch number, and operators matched them with nearby drivers. There was no app, no algorithm, just coordination through a phone line and a small team working with around 20 drivers. Nadiem Makarim had not set out to build a technology company. In his own words, he conceived Gojek as a social enterprise focused on increasing driver income.
For five years, that is more or less what it remained. A modest, useful, low-tech operation. The leap came in 2015, when Gojek launched its app and the scale of what Makarim had been quietly building became visible. When the official app launched, Go-Send and Go-Food sat alongside Go-Ride as the core of the platform. Within months it had become one of the fastest-growing startups in Southeast Asia. Within a year it had passed a billion-dollar valuation, making it Indonesia’s first unicorn. By 2019, Gojek had become Indonesia’s first decacorn, valued at $10 billion, and had expanded across Southeast Asia, creating millions of jobs.
The scale of what Nadiem Makarim had built from twenty motorcycle drivers and a call centre was, by any measure, extraordinary. It was also, as it turned out, only the first act.
The Moral Obligation
In October 2019, Nadiem Makarim walked into the Presidential Palace and walked out as Indonesia’s Minister of Education and Culture. He resigned from Gojek the same day.
When he received the appointment, Makarim described accepting the challenge as a moral obligation. Education, he said, was the root of all opportunities and problems. This was the only job he would have accepted in government.
The decision surprised many in the business community. The Gojek founder was 35, running one of Asia’s most valuable companies, with investors including Google, Visa, Tencent, and JD.com. The private sector had every incentive to keep him exactly where he was. But Makarim’s motivations, at least as he expressed them, were not commercial. He had built Gojek to prove that Indonesians were capable of more than the world assumed. Now he wanted to do the same thing for an education system serving over 52 million students, three million teachers, and 300,000 schools.
His frustration, as he described it, was with how underrepresented Indonesia was globally, for such a vast country. That frustration fuelled his desire to do something dramatic in the education space.
The flagship initiative of his ministry was the Merdeka Belajar programme, which translates roughly as Freedom to Learn. The reform aimed to move Indonesia’s education system away from rigid standardised learning toward a student-centred approach that emphasised creativity, critical thinking, and individual potential. It abolished the decades-old national examinations for middle school students, introduced project-based learning, and gave schools greater autonomy to adapt curriculum to local needs. Nadiem had famously promised to liberate Indonesian education when he first entered office.
It was, depending on who you asked, either the most ambitious education reform in Indonesia’s modern history or a half-built experiment imposed too quickly on a system too complex to absorb it. Indonesia’s ranking in the 2022 PISA assessments was 71st in reading, 70th in mathematics, and 67th in science, out of 81 countries. Whether the reforms were working was genuinely contested. What was not contested was that Nadiem Makarim had tried something few in his position would have had the appetite to attempt.
By 2024, his ministerial term ended with the change of government. He left office with an education portfolio so sprawling that the incoming administration split it across three separate ministries. He left quietly. The noise came later.
The Arrest
On 7 September 2025, investigators from Indonesia’s Attorney General’s Office arrested the Gojek founder.
Authorities accused him of improper laptop procurement during the pandemic, alleging that the purchase of Google Chromebook laptops and Chrome OS for schools between 2020 and 2022 caused $125.64 million in state losses.
The prosecution’s case rests on several claims. Prosecutors alleged that Makarim had created tender specifications that only fit the Chrome system, effectively positioning Google as the sole controller of Indonesia’s education technology ecosystem. They further alleged a conflict of interest: prosecutors sought to connect Google’s roughly US$787 million investment via Google Asia Pacific in Gojek’s parent company with the Ministry of Education’s later procurement of Chromebooks, arguing that Nadiem failed to resolve a conflict of interest after entering government.
Prosecutors also argued that the Chromebook decision was technically inappropriate. They claimed that the ministry had already determined in 2018 that Chromebooks required an internet connection for learning, making them unsuitable for Indonesia, where many remote areas continue to face limited internet access.
As prosecutors led Makarim from the office, local media reported him saying: “I did not do anything. God will protect me, the truth will come out.”
His trial opened at the Jakarta Corruption Court on 5 January 2026. On 13 May 2026, prosecutors formally demanded a sentence of 18 years imprisonment, a fine of one billion rupiah, and replacement payments totalling Rp 5.68 trillion. A verdict is expected in June 2026.
The Defence
Nadiem Makarim has denied all wrongdoing, and the defence case is not without substance.
His legal team pointed to witness testimony from resellers and government procurement officials, who placed market prices for the laptops between Rp 5 million and Rp 7 million per unit. The government purchased the Chromebooks at Rp 5.6 million, which fell within the lower end of the market range. The defence argues that any seller would have operated at a loss if they had sold the laptops at Rp 4.3 million per unit, meaning the Chromebooks were not overpriced.
Former Google executives testified that Google’s investment in Gojek’s parent company had no connection to the Chromebook procurement. The defence also argued that Nadiem left Gojek before joining the government and did not personally profit from the laptop programme. His defence attorneys further argued that Google made most of its investment before his ministerial tenure and treated it as routine corporate activity unrelated to the laptop deal. They also stated that Nadiem divested from Gojek’s parent company when he took office.
His lawyer, Ari Yusuf Amir, said the defence was disappointed with prosecutors’ demands and argued that new evidence presented during the trial had been ignored.
The verdict has not yet been delivered. Nadiem Makarim is, under Indonesian law and by any standard of fairness, innocent until proven otherwise. The trial is ongoing. Both the charges and the defence arguments are contested. This article does not assert guilt.
The Question That Outlasts the Trial
Whatever the Jakarta Corruption Court decides, the case has already raised a question that matters well beyond Indonesia.
This case surfaces a broader tension that many high-growth economies in Asia are quietly navigating: what happens when public institutions bring some of the private sector’s most effective builders into systems that operate under entirely different rules? Nadiem Makarim built his reputation at Gojek by moving fast, making bold decisions, and using technology to cut through inefficiency, but public procurement systems do not support those same qualities in the same way. Governments rely on processes, documentation, and consensus. Founders rely on conviction, speed, and a willingness to act before every detail is fully proven.
These are not simply different working styles. They are different epistemologies. And the gap between them has consequences for reformers who enter public life with genuine intent.
What Is Already Settled
Nadiem himself has warned that the case could be “quite devastating” for perceptions of Indonesia’s investment environment. Three former senior Google executives appeared in court to testify over what was, by any commercial standard, a routine procurement decision. Any company that has sold a product or service to the Indonesian government, or is considering doing so, will look at these proceedings and think carefully about their next move.
The deeper uncertainty is whether Indonesia wants its institutions disrupted, repaired, or protected from the very people who claim to know how to fix them. Neither a conviction nor an acquittal will fully settle that question.
Regardless of the verdict, one fact already stands: this Gojek founder built something that permanently changed how hundreds of millions of people across Southeast Asia move through cities, buy food, and access financial services. He then gave that up to attempt something far harder in a system far less forgiving. Whether that decision ends in vindication or ruin, it is not the decision of a person who played it safe.
The trial continues. The verdict is expected in June 2026.
Nadiem Anwar Makarim co-founded Gojek in 2010 and served as Indonesia’s Minister of Education, Culture, Research and Technology from 2019 to 2024. He has denied all charges against him. The trial is ongoing at the Central Jakarta Corruption Court. This article is based on publicly reported court proceedings, statements from both the prosecution and defence, and verified news sources. No finding of guilt is implied or asserted.
Source:
- Reuters — Indonesia Detains Former Minister and Gojek Founder as Suspect in Graft Case (September 2025) —
- Bloomberg — Indonesia Ex-Minister Makarim Faces 18 Years in Jail in Chromebooks Case (May 2026) —
- Associated Press — Founder of Indonesian Ride-Hailing App Gojek Stands Trial Over Chromebooks Procurement (January 2026) —
- Jakarta Globe — Ex-Minister and Gojek Founder Nadiem Faces 18-Year Sentence in Chromebook Procurement Case (May 2026) —
- Antara News — Prosecutors Seek 18 Years for Ex-Minister in Chromebook Graft Case (May 2026) —
