Abdullah bin Sulaiman Al Rajhi
Source of wealth: Banking
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Modules
Biography
Abdullah bin Sulaiman Al Rajhi chairs Al Rahji Bank, which was cofounded in 1957 by his father Sulaiman and uncles Mohammed, Abdullah and Saleh.
For more than 35 years, he has held positions at Al Rajhi Bank, trades on the Saudi stock exchange and is one of the world's largest Islamic banks.
Al Rajhi Bank has $282 billion in assets and reports having more than 20.5 million customers.
Abdullah bin Sulaiman also chairs several other family companies, including Al Rajhi Capital and Al Rajhi Holding Group.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Abdullah bin Sulaiman Al Rajhi
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 bin Sulaiman Al Rajhi, linked to Finance & Investments and 'Banking', 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 18 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 1.1 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.