David Wertheim
Source of wealth: Coca-Cola Israel
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Modules
Biography
David Wertheim is the son of the late Moshe Wertheim (d. 2016), founder of the Central Bottling Company, Israel's Coca Cola bottler. He owns 63% of the company.
Before he died, Moshe Wertheim gave the bottling business, as well as his shares in Mizrahi Tefahot Bank and Alony Hetz,.to David and his sister Drorit,
In 2018, he purchased his billionaire sister's Alony Hetz shares, sold them because of Israeli anti-monopoly rules, and is controlling shareholder of Mizrahi Tefahot, the country's third-largest bank.
He founded and controls Keshet Media Group, which controls TV channel Keshet 12, CH12 News, and websites Mako.co.il and N12.co.il.
He is the founder and CEO of M. Wertheim (Holdings) Ltd., whose investments include publicly traded Alony Hetz Properties & Investments.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of David Wertheim
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 David Wertheim, linked to Food & Beverage and 'Coca-Cola Israel', 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 28 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 1.8 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.