Giuseppe De'Longhi
Source of wealth: Coffee makers
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Modules
Biography
Giuseppe De'Longhi is chairman of De'Longhi SpA, which produces high-end coffee makers and espresso machines.
De'Longhi's son, Fabio, is the CEO of the company, which pulls in over $2 billion in annual revenue and sells products in more than 100 countries.
The company was founded in 1902 in Treviso, Italy as a small industrial manufacturing workshop. A century later, its headquarters remain in Treviso.
The company makes portable heaters, air conditioners, appliances for food preparation, cleaning tools and coffee machines.
In 2015, De'Longhi sold his majority stake in Italian industrial heating company DelClima to Mitsubishi Electric for $551 million.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Giuseppe De'Longhi
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 Giuseppe De'Longhi, linked to Fashion & Retail and 'Coffee makers', 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 44 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 2.8 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.