Bijan Tehrani
Source of wealth: Online casino
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Modules
Biography
Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani founded and run Stake.com, believed to be the largest crypto-backed online casino in the world.
Stake.com generated $4.7 billion of gross revenue in 2024, despite crypto gambling being unavailable in the United States, United Kingdom and much of Europe.
The founders have reinvested its profits into aggressive marketing, putting Stake's name on Formula 1 cars, English Premier League jerseys, UFC octagons and a new livestreaming service.
During the pandemic, Stake started paying content creators on Twitch to livestream themselves gambling, transforming the business from $100 million in revenue to $2 billion in just two years.
After Twitch banned Stake from advertising on its platform due to a lack of consumer protections, Craven and Tehrani launched their own competing livestream service, Kick.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Bijan Tehrani
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 Bijan Tehrani, linked to Gambling & Casinos and 'Online casino', 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.