Maky Zanganeh
Source of wealth: Biotech
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Modules
Biography
Maky Zanganeh is co-CEO of Summit Therapeutics, a biotech firm with a promising drug candidate to treat lung cancer. She owns just under 5% of the company's stock.
Zanganeh, an immigrant from Iran, previously served as chief operating officer of drug firm Pharmacyclics, which was acquired by AbbVie for $21 million in 2015.
Zanganeh first came to the U.S. to work for robotic surgery firm Computer Motion in 2002 after running the company's European operations.
Zanganeh runs Summit Therapeutics as co-CEO with Robert (Bob) Duggan, who became a billionaire after investing in and running Pharmacyclics. She and Duggan married in 2024.
She trained as a dentist at university in Strasbourg, France and then obtained an MBA while first working at Computer Motion.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Maky Zanganeh
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 Maky Zanganeh, linked to Healthcare and 'Biotech', 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 7 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 0.5 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.