Bennett Rosenthal
Source of wealth: Finance
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Modules
Biography
Bennett Rosenthal is a cofounder of credit-focused alternative investment firm Ares Management, which manages $596 billion in assets.
Rosenthal arrived at Ares from Merrill Lynch in 1998 and currently serves as a partner and co-chairman of its private equity business.
Since 2016, Rosenthal has been a co-managing owner of Major League Soccer's Los Angeles Football Club, which played its first season in 2018.
LAFC rotates is lead managing owner every four years, and Rosenthal's tenure began in January 2023.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Bennett Rosenthal
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 Bennett Rosenthal, linked to Finance & Investments and 'Finance', 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 16 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 1.0 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.