Ma Bin
Source of wealth: manufacturing
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Modules
Biography
Ma Bin is the founder of Jiangsu Shemar Electric, a manufacturer of power equipment used in transmission substations and distribution systems. He stepped down as chairman in July 2025 and was succeeded by his daughter, Ma Cheng.
Ma, who founded the company in 1996, took it public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2019.
In 2023, Shemar expanded into the U.S. and established its first subsidiary in Memphis, Tennessee.
Today the company's products are used in 100 countries and regions through manufacturers including Hitachi ABB, GE and Siemens.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Ma 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 Ma Bin, linked to Manufacturing and 'manufacturing', 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 14 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 0.9 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.