Lim Kok Thay
Source of wealth: Casinos
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Modules
Biography
Lim Kok Thay is the executive chairman of Genting, a casino and resorts conglomerate with a global footprint. In February 2025, he stepped down as CEO, a role he had held for almost two decades.
In 2022, Lim's troubled cruise operator Genting Hong Kong, which was hit hard by the pandemic, filed a winding up petition. Lim stepped down as chairman.
Lim's assets include Empire Resorts, the parent company of loss-making Resorts World Catskills.
A long-drawn family feud over the empire's wealth and businesses, which include a palm-oil unit, was finally resolved in 2020.
As part of an ongoing S$6.8 billion ($5 billion) expansion, Genting Singapore is revamping its Resorts World Sentosa, which will include two new hotels, a four-storey retail and dining podium, and a waterfront promenade.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Lim Kok Thay
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 Lim Kok Thay, linked to Gambling & Casinos and 'Casinos ', 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 11 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 0.7 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.