Andrew Karam
Source of wealth: Advertising technology
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Biography
Andrew Karam is a cofounder of AI-powered advertising technology company AppLovin, which went public on the Nasdaq in 2021.
AppLovin generated $5.5 billion of revenue in 2025.
Karam is one of eight billionaires from AppLovin, including cofounder and CEO Adam Foroughi.
Karam owned 4% of AppLovin as of September 2024, when he dropped below the SEC's disclosure threshold.
He left the company three months later to focus on philanthropy and investing.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Andrew Karam
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 Andrew Karam, linked to Technology and 'Advertising technology', 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 26 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 1.6 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.