Lin Bin
Source of wealth: Smartphones
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Biography
Lin Bin is vice chairman of Xiaomi, one of the world's most well-known smartphone brands.
Lin cofounded the company in 2010 and was president until 2019. Early on he oversaw recruiting, legal, finance, strategic partnerships and overseas expansion.
Prior to Xiaomi, he worked at ADP, a U.S. provider of online human resources management services, Microsoft and Google.
Lin, whose daughters went to college at Tufts University, is a member of the board of advisors at Tufts' school of engineering.
Xiaomi entered the EV market in 2024 with its SU7 sedan and has since gained popularity primarily in China.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Lin Bin
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 Lin Bin, linked to Technology and 'Smartphones', 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 61 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 3.9 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.