Jack Link
Source of wealth: Jack Link's meat snacks
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Modules
Biography
Jack Link's eponymous meat products company sells 800 million packages of beef jerky, turkey jerky, meat sticks and other goods each year.
Link's great-grandfather emigrated from Germany to Wisconsin in the 1880s, bringing with him his old-world recipes for sausages and smoked meats. His grandfather was butcher and his father raised cattle.
In 1985, with the Link family's meatpacking business bankrupt, Jack Link was inspired to start producing jerky using his great-grandfather's 1880s recipes.
Now Jack Link's is the top-selling jerky brand in America, with $2 billion in estimated annual revenue and 34% of the market.
Jack Link became chairman in 2013 and his son Troy moved into the role of CEO.
The Link family also owns a car dealership, an RV dealership, and ranch and farmland in Minong, Wisconsin, where the company is headquartered.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Jack Link
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 Jack Link, linked to Food & Beverage and 'Jack Link's meat snacks', 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.