Barney and his older brother Harry left school in their early teens and entered their father's business.

After several days of consideration, Barney agreed to withdraw his offer, and a month later, he owned the French Company.

A group of shareholders from Kimberley Central applied to the Supreme Court of the Cape to stop the merger.

He built, but never lived in, a vast house on the corner of Park Lane and Stanhope Gate in Mayfair, London, which was bought after his death by the banker Sir Edward Sassoon.

Barnato died in 1897; records state that he was lost overboard near the island of Madeira while on a passage home to England.

[9] Especially as a crew member gave evidence at the inquest that Barnato had been walking round the deck with his nephew Solly Joel at the time and as he fell overboard, his last word was "murder!".

[citation needed] The theory regarding the suicide of Barnato has also been tied to one of his heirs, his nephew Woolf Joel (1863 – 14 March 1898),[10] who was shot and killed in his business offices in Johannesburg by a con-man named Karl Frederick Kurtze, who in 1898 went under the name Ludwig von Veltheim.

In his trial for murder, von Veltheim hinted that he was supposed to be orchestrating a plot to kidnap Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal Republic, that Barnato and Joel were backing.

As a result, von Veltheim was able to get an acquittal from a Boer Jury (possibly due to anti-British and anti-Semitic feelings towards the deceased).

It was suggested by Brian Roberts, in his book The Diamond Magnates, that Barnato had been approached by von Veltheim too.

[8] Another beneficiary was his son, Woolf Barnato, who used part of the multimillion-pound fortune he inherited at the age of two to become a racing driver in the 1920s, one of the so-called Bentley Boys.