He Xiangjian
Source of wealth: Home appliances
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Modules
Biography
Entrepreneur He Xiangjian built Midea Group into one of the world's largest appliance makers.
In 1968, He led a group of 23 residents from the town of Beijiao in Guangdong province to form a lid production workshop that became Midea. It trades in both Shenzhen and Hong Kong.
Midea Group took German robotics firm Kuka private from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2022 and became its sole owner.
He stepped down as chairman of Midea Group in 2012.
His son He Jianfeng is a director of Midea Group and Midea Real Estate Holding.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of He Xiangjian
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 He Xiangjian, linked to Manufacturing and 'Home appliances', 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 233 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 15.4 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.