Les Wexner
Source of wealth: Retail
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Modules
Biography
Les Wexner founded L Brands, a global retail empire that included Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works, and served as CEO for more than 5 decades.
Wexner announced in 2020 that he would step down and sell a majority stake in Victoria's Secret for $525 million to a private equity firm.
Wexner got his start in 1963, when he used a $5,000 loan from his aunt to open The Limited, which sold only fast-moving items like shirts and pants.
His ex-confidant and financial manager Jeffrey Epstein was accused of sex trafficking. In 2019, Wexner said the late Epstein stole funds from him.
Wexner bought Victoria's Secret for $1 million in 1982, when it was just a small, failing chain of lingerie shops in San Francisco.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Les Wexner
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 Les Wexner, linked to Fashion & Retail and 'Retail', 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 66 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.