Gil Shwed
Source of wealth: Software
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Modules
Biography
Gil Shwed, considered the inventor of the modern computer firewall, cofounded Check Point Software Technologies in 1993 with Shlomo Kramer and Marius Nacht.
The company went public on the Nasdaq in 1996.
Shwed owns about 25% of Check Point's stock and serves as its executive chairman.
Check Point, which develops cybersecurity software, counts many of the largest U.S. companies as its clients.
Check Point prevented over 3 billion cyber attacks annually and has secured over 100,000 organizations worldwide.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Gil Shwed
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 Gil Shwed, linked to Technology and 'Software', 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.