Bart van Malderen
Source of wealth: diapers
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Modules
Biography
Bart van Malderen is the founder and CEO of Drylock Technologies, a maker of baby diapers, feminine hygiene products, and incontinence diapers.
Drylock Technologies produces a billion diapers per month from nine factories, and had revenue of 1.2 billion euros in 2022.
Van Malderen has spent a career in diapers and other consumer products, working for 30 years at Belgian diaper producer Ontex, the family business founded by his father in 1979.
Van Malderen sold Ontex in 2002 and left in 2007 with a non-compete agreement. He founded Drylock when the agreement ended in 2012 to sell ultra-thin, cellulose-free diapers.
He is also the biggest shareholder of German diaper webshop Lillydoo.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Bart van Malderen
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 Bart van Malderen, linked to Manufacturing and 'diapers', 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 7 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 0.5 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.