JoeBen Bevirt
Source of wealth: Electric aviation
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Modules
Biography
JoeBen Bevirt is the founder and CEO of Joby Aviation, which is developing aircraft capable of taking off and landing vertically.
Raised on an off-the-grid commune in California, as a kid Bevirt dreamed of planes that could maneuver like helicopters, and went on to study engineering at the University of California at Davis and Stanford.
He launched Joby in 2009 after first founding Velocity11, which built liquid-handling robots used for testing potential drugs, and the company behind GorillaPod, a flexible camera tripod.
He raised funds from the likes of carmaker Toyota, Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective and Jeff Skoll's Capricorn Investment Group, and took Joby public via SPAC merger in 2021.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of JoeBen Bevirt
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 JoeBen Bevirt, linked to Manufacturing and 'Electric aviation', 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 7 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 0.5 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.