J. Joe Ricketts
Source of wealth: TD Ameritrade
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Biography
Online stock trading pioneer Joe Ricketts founded brokerage firm Ameritrade five decades ago in Omaha, Nebraska and took it public in 1997.
His company acquired TD Waterhouse for $2.9 billion in stock and cash in 2006 and renamed itself TD Ameritrade.
In 2019, competitor Charles Schwab announced it would acquire TD Ameritrade in a $26 billion deal.
Ricketts retired from the board of directors of TD Ameritrade in 2011 but remained its largest individual shareholder until it was acquired.
In 2014, he funded the construction of religious silent retreat center, the Cloisters on the Platte, in Nebraska.
His four children are the majority owners of the Chicago Cubs, which won the World Series in 2016 for the first time in 108 years.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of J. Joe Ricketts
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 J. Joe Ricketts, linked to Finance & Investments and 'TD Ameritrade', 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 67 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 4.2 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.