Lakshmi Mittal
Source of wealth: Steel
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Biography
Lakshmi Mittal is executive chairman of $61.3 billion (revenue) ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steel and mining company by output. His son, Aditya, is CEO since 2021.
Hailing from a steel clan, he separated from his siblings to start Mittal Steel then went on to merge the company with France's Arcelor in 2006.
ArcelorMittal reported net income of $3.15 billion in 2025, a 142% rise from $1.3 billion in 2024.
A long-time resident of the U.K., Mittal shifted his base to Switzerland following an exodus of the wealthy hit by the U.K.'s new tax regime.
In May 2026, he agreed to buy Indian Premier League cricket team Rajasthan Royals for $1.65 billion together with Adar Poonawalla, the son of vaccine billionaire Cyrus Poonawalla.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Lakshmi Mittal
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 Lakshmi Mittal, linked to Metals & Mining and 'Steel', 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 212 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 14.0 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.