Modules
Biography
Bertil Hult dropped out of college to start a business in his dormitory's basement in 1965, organizing trips to help students learn English in the UK.
Today his company, EF Education First, run by his three oldest sons, offers educational travel and language training in 111 countries.
* EF sends teens on its language, educational travel, academic, and exchange programs summer courses in such a scale that it makes EF one of the largest buyers of flights across the Atlantic
As the official supplier of language training for the 2016 Olympic games in Rio De Janeiro, EF says it helped teach English to 1 million Brazilians.
Himself severely dyslexic, he donates money to a school that focuses on innovative approaches to educating children with learning disabilities.
He is also the benefactor of the Hult Prize which awards $1 million in seed funding to the winners of a student competition.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Bertil Hult
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 Bertil Hult, linked to Service and 'Education ', 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.