Abdullah Al Othaim
Source of wealth: Grocery stores, malls
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Modules
Biography
Abdullah Saleh Al Othaim chairs the board of Saudi-listed supermarket chain Abdullah Al-Othaim Markets.
The chain has more than 400 stores in Saudi Arabia and some 50 stores in Egypt; 2024 revenue grew to nearly $2.9 billion.
He also chairs Al Othaim Holding Company, a private company that owns and runs shopping malls and restaurants in Saudi Arabia.
Abdullah's father, Sheik Saleh Al Othaim (d. 1979), founded Saleh Al Othaim Trading Establishment in 1956, predecessor of Al-Othaim Markets.
Abdullah Al-Othaim Markets went public in 2008; Abdullah owns a 36% stake.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Abdullah Al Othaim
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Abdullah Al Othaim, linked to Fashion & Retail and 'Grocery stores, malls', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 15 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 1.0 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.