Herb Simon
Source of wealth: Real estate
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Modules
Biography
In 1960, Herb Simon and his brother Melvin (d. 2009) founded the precursor to Simon Property Group.
Simon Property Group is now one of the world's largest real estate investment trusts, with 229 properties globally, including 194 in the U.S.
Simon was chairman emeritus until he retired in February 2025. His nephew, David, who is Melvin's son, has been CEO since 1995.
Simon also owns an 80% stake in the Indiana Pacers, which he bought with his brother. The team is worth more than $3 billion.
Additionally, Simon owns the WNBA team Indiana Fever, which first played in the 2000 season. The team is worth $370 million.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Herb Simon
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 Herb Simon, linked to Real Estate and 'Real estate', 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 55 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 3.5 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.