Modules
Biography
Abel Avellan is the founder and CEO of AST SpaceMobile, which is building satellites that enable broadband connections directly to cell phones.
Avellan was born in Venezuela, where he trained as an engineer. After college, we went to work for Swedish communications giant Ericsson.
Avellan founded his first company, Emerging Markets Communications in 2000, which provided satellite communications to remote places.
He sold Emerging Markets Communications in 2016 for $550 million, and used his share of the proceeds to found AST.
AST SpaceMobile has contracts with Verizon, AT&T and Vodafone to provide connections to customers in areas without tower coverage.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Abel Avellan
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 Abel Avellan, linked to Telecom and 'telecoms', 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 39 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 2.4 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.