Chad Richison
Source of wealth: Payroll processing
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Modules
Biography
Chad Richison is founder and CEO of Paycom, one of the first companies to process payroll completely online.
Richison, a former senior manager at payroll firm ADP, created Paycom in 1998.
He took Paycom public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014 and owns about 12% of its shares.
The company provides payroll and human resource services and joined the S&P 500 in 2020.
Richison founded a nonprofit, the Green Shoe Foundation, which aims to improve people's mental health through counseling and therapy sessions.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Chad Richison
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 Chad Richison, linked to Technology and 'Payroll processing', 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 13 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 0.8 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.