Jim Kavanaugh
Source of wealth: IT provider
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Modules
Biography
Jim Kavanaugh is the CEO of IT provider World Wide Technology.
With David Steward, he started the St. Louis-based company in 1990 by selling computers and printers to telecom companies like AT&T.
Kavanaugh personally fulfilled one of the company's first orders by renting a truck and driving 500 PCs to Omaha.
WWT is now a $20 billion (sales) company that sells software and hardware to customers including Citi, Verizon and the federal government.
Before starting WWT, Kavanaugh was a professional soccer player and was on the 1984 Olympic team.
Kavanaugh was appointed to the board of St. Louis-based Stifel Financial in 2022.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Jim Kavanaugh
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 Jim Kavanaugh, linked to Technology and 'IT provider', 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.