Ben Lamm
Source of wealth: biotech
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Modules
Biography
Ben Lamm cofounded Colossal with Harvard geneticist George Church in 2021 to try and bring back the woolly mammoth.
A serial entrepreneur, Lamm previously founded or cofounded five companies, each of which was ultimately acquired. Among them: Hypergiant, purchased by Josh Kushner's VC firm Thrive Capital in 2023.
Colossal has raised $615 million from investors that include TWG Global at a valuation of $10.32 billion.
Lamm believes that governments, which have long budgeted for conservation efforts, will pay Colossal to reintroduce extinct species or to prevent endangered ones from dying off.
Longer term, Lamm sees the potential for biovaults that work like a library of multiple tissue types of once-extinct creatures and critically endangered ones that researchers could rely on.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Ben Lamm
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 Ben Lamm, linked to Technology and 'biotech', 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 27 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 1.7 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.