Alberto Bombassei
Source of wealth: Automotive brakes
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Modules
Biography
Alberto Bombassei chairs Brembo, a global leader in high-performance braking technology.
Brembo's brakes can be found in Ferraris, Corvettes and Harley-Davidsons around the world.
Founded by Alberto's father Emilio, Brembo broke into the big leagues in 1975, when Enzo Ferrari asked Emilio to outfit his race cars.
Alberto became general manager of the company in 1976, managing director in 1984 and was chairman from 1993 to 2021.
He has transferred his shares in the publicly traded company to his children, Luca and Cristina, but maintains control over their 53.5% stake.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Alberto Bombassei
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 Alberto Bombassei, linked to Automotive and 'Automotive brakes', 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 20 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 1.2 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.