Gerald Schwartz
Source of wealth: Finance
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Modules
Biography
Gerald Schwartz is the founder and chairman of Onex, one of Canada's largest private equity firms, which he ran for 39 years before stepping down in May 2023.
He got his start working with buyout legends Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis and George Roberts at Bear Stearns in the 1970s.
The Americans left to start KKR in 1976; Schwartz went home to Canada and cofounded the media company CanWest in 1977.
In 1984 he started Onex, which now has $50 billion in assets under management and offices in London, Toronto and the U.S.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Gerald Schwartz
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 Gerald Schwartz, 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 12 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 0.7 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.